Did we need Fauci to tell us that? Trump went on record to the press, several times, claiming that COVID would fade away in a few months. He was wrong, of course, and winter 2020-21 was one of the deadliest periods.
Dumbass literally tried to make it happen when he demanded testing slow down.
“When you do testing to that extent, you’re going to find more people, you’re going to find more cases,” Trump said. “So I said to my people, ‘Slow the testing down, please.’ They test and they test.”
Don’t forget that was after he and Bolton disbanded the acclaimed National Security Council global health unit for pandemic response and proposed budget cuts for the CDC in 2018.
You know what is insane to me? Trump, one of the shittiest human beings ever produced, could’ve been a okay to good president. All he needed was telling people it’s okay to wear a mask and the vaccine is cool. He instantly had all the weirdo conservatives on his side and everyone else would’ve been like: well even a broken clock is right twice a day.
Trump, one of the shittiest human beings ever produced, could’ve been a okay to good president.
I have said before and I will say again: We all are very lucky that Trump is too stupid to be able to get out of his own way. Had Trump just said “Look, it’s going to be OK. Like I always say, I only take on the best people, and the best people are going to guide us through the pandemic” and just listened to people who actually knew what the fuck they were talking about, he could have easily won the 2020 election in a landslide that would have been up there with the Regan/Mondale landslide in the 1980s, and Biden would have been a footnote at most.
But Trump had to let his ego take control, as it does literally every time, which means that he always must take the absolutely worst possible option available in any given situation, and he has mastered the art of snatching defeat from the jaws of victory.
W as well. On 9/12/2001 the world was falling over itself to (at least act like it) support the US. A normal person would have been able to take that support on a silver platter and make something of it.
Instead he decided1 that he wanted to invade a country totally unrelated to the attacks.
1 Of course we now know W had the intellectual capacity of a child and it was likely his sidekick that pushed the Iraq narrative.
In many ways Trump is just like Hillary Clinton squared. He’s more entertaining but they both cannot help but just constantly listen to the most incompetent advisor they can find.
He could have been an okay President…if he was an entirely different person. Even if he did what you said he still hijacked ppe from states, answered softball questions like ‘what would you tell the American people who are scared?’ by telling the reporter he was nasty. The question and reply are probably off but should be similar enough. Pretty sure he was upset Faucci was getting more attention for awhile since Trump can never be wrong and Faucci wanted to tell the truth. I don’t think it’s possible for Trump to have come off as even okay is all.
He was told that a vaccine would be produced by Easter of 2020. He then repeated that to the press. A vaccine was produced by Easter of 2020. In fact, the RNA Moderna was ready before Easter. It just took 9 months for it to be approved as safe.
For a “red tape cutter” he sure dragged his feet on getting the vaccine to market. Of course, he was also the most “close down the border” president in the history of the USA, and even then he was still letting planes fly straight from China up until people called him on it in April of 2020. This just shows that there will never be a situation which we can truly shutdown the border, so we should just plan that viruses will cross and we will have to deal with them.
Yup, we had the vaccine the whole time. Problem was testing it.
There’s one part of that article that I really want to highlight, because this needs to get actual political traction. You can make a set of vaccines that cover a broad set of viruses that are pre-tested to be safe. If one virus breaks out, you take out vax that covers its family off the shelf and tweak it to this particular virus. Then you just need effectiveness testing, which only takes a few months.
According to Florian Krammer, a vaccine scientist at Mount Sinai, you could do all of this at a cost of about $20 million to $30 million per vaccine and, ideally, would do so for between 50 and 100 different viruses — enough, he says, to functionally cover all the phylogenies that could give rise to pandemic strains in the future. (“It’s extremely unlikely that there is something out there that doesn’t belong to one of the known families, that would have been flying under the radar,” he says. “I wouldn’t be worried about that.”) In total, he estimates, the research and clinical trials necessary to do this would cost between $1 billion and $3 billion. So far this year, the U.S. government has spent more than $4 trillion on pandemic relief. Functionally, it’s a drop in the bucket, though Krammer predicts our attention, and the funding, will move on once this pandemic is behind us, leaving us no more prepared for the next one. When he compares the cost of such a project to the Pentagon’s F-35 — you could build vaccines for five potential pandemics for the cost of a single plane, and vaccines for all of them for a fraction of the cost of that fighter-jet program as a whole — he isn’t signaling confidence it will happen, but the opposite.
This would do a whole lot more good for humanity than the F-35 program, and ought to have been put into a congressional spending bill years ago.
“[He thought] it’s just going to go away because he so desperately wanted it to disappear the way flu disappears as you enter the end of the winter and the beginning of the spring,” Fauci said.
I wish his motor skills sucked as bad as his critical thinking.
Trumpists in general are strong believers in magical thinking.
