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“And the Trump administration has gone further—not only underfunding these efforts but also proposing steep spending cuts year after year to institutions, such as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, that are tasked with handling outbreaks. Congress has resisted these efforts in the bills Trump has ultimately signed, but the president’s requests have nevertheless spoken to his priorities. His budget proposal for fiscal year 2021, released in February when the coronavirus outbreak had already reached the United States, called for the CDC’s overall funding to be slashed by hundreds of millions of dollars. The administration did suggest more resources for certain subsets of the CDC’s work relevant to the current crisis. Each of those increases, however, is less than the Trump administration devoted in its 2021 budget proposal to counter Chinese and Russian propaganda and disinformation, and a small fraction of the additional $459 million the administration wished to pour into offensive hypersonic weapons. (But what’s $459 million when you’re spending billions on them already?)”

Medicynical note: Read the entire piece, it’s a good summary.

Denial is part of some disease processes. But in this case the denial was manifested by our lack of preparation for a inevitable event. The U.S. Government, once a force in world health over the years minimized, to itself, the risk of a serious outbreak. We decimated our resources through ignorance and budget cuts and lost influence in the world over several presidential administrations. Neither party is without blame but the republicans have taken the lead in both congress and the executive branches, in gutting expertise.

I’m unsure whether a democratic administration would have resulted in fewer deaths. But at least if they were running the show their would have been fewer and perhaps more clever falsehoods and certainly more reliance on science.

“There are more than 70 COVID-19 vaccine efforts globally, at least; with so many, it’s reasonable to be optimistic that we will have a vaccine in somekind of record time frame. There are even a few that are posed to break the record: one from a company called Moderna that began trials in humans in March (this is the one that Fauci is referring to in his estimates), one from a group at Oxford that claims it could even have doses available by fall. Yes, it says it might even have some doses by the fall.”

“”The thing to note with the timeline is people often caveat it with a statement, ‘if everything goes perfectly,’ ” says Matthew Watson, an analyst at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security. “I think that’s really important to pay attention to. Things rarely go perfectly.””

Medicynical note: it’s an unprecedented effort but a lot can go wrong.

“In the trial, patients who received remdesivir recovered 31% faster than those who received a placebo, a finding of superiority that could not be attributed to chance, researchers reported. Specifically, half of the patients who were randomly selected to be treated with remdesivir were considered completely recovered within 11 days, and half of those patients took longer. By comparison, it took 15 days or less for half of those who received the placebo to recover.”

“The results also suggested that patients who were given remdesivir were more likely to survive COVID-19 than were those who got the placebo. But the difference in fatality rates — 8% for the group that took the drug versus 11.6% for the placebo group — fell slightly below the cutoff point at which researchers could rule out a statistical fluke.”

Medicynical note: some good but not great news. Remdesivir has activity against the civic-19 virus but the activity is marginal. Comparison of fatalities in the study between those receiving the drug and those getting placebo were not quite statistically significant. The decrease in recovery time was significant. 11 days to recovery vs 15 is progress but not what I would hope to be the ultimate solution.

Use of this drug earlier in the course of the disease may provide more profound benefit. As Dr. Fauci implies this is a start towards an effective treatment.

It should be pointed out that when a very active medication is found it will not take large studies to prove its worth. Remdesivir is a good first step.

When you have a leader who disregards everything.…………but himself. “Every one of these doctors said, ‘How do you know so much about this?’ Maybe I have a natural ability,” Mr. Trump said.

It was a striking boast, even amid a grave health crisis in which Mr. Trump has repeatedly contradicted medical experts in favor of his own judgment. But a disregard for scientific advice has been a defining characteristic of Mr. Trump’s administration.

As the nation confronts one of its worst public health disasters in generations, a moment that demands a leader willing to marshal the full might of the American scientific establishment, the White House is occupied by a president whose administration, critics say, has diminished the conclusions of scientists in formulating policy, who personally harbors a suspicion of expert knowledge, and who often puts his political instincts ahead of the facts.

Medicynical note: imagine the alternate reality of Trump receiving a letter from an immigrant scientist, a Nobel prize winner, warning about a new source of energy for a powerful weapon…….or a series or reports warning of a catastrophic change in climate that will threaten humanity……….or a note from a predecessor warning of the likelihood of a pandemic during his administration.

Think he would make the right decision?

Or would he dismiss the scientist’s letter as being unreliable because it came from a swarthy immigrant Jew with an accent?………or would he dismiss the climate warning as a hoax?………or would he ignore the previous President’s note and fire the staff preparing for the epidemic?

Sadly we don’t have to imagine.

“President Trump on Friday threatened to block an emergency loan to shore up the U.S. Postal Service unless it dramatically raised shipping prices on online retailers, an unprecedented move to seize control of the agency that analysts said could plunge its finances into a deeper hole.”

And

“[Trump] is interposing his own flawed judgment for a very complex, technical enterprise that serves at least a $2 trillion industry,” said Rep. Gerald E. Connolly (D-Va.), who chairs the House subcommittee in charge of postal oversight. “It’s one of the most important services in America. It serves every business and every household and it has a workforce of 630,000 people who put themselves at risk every day on behalf of the American population. And he’s willing to risk it all because he’s got a bugaboo in his mind that Jeff Bezos and Amazon are getting a good deal.”

Medicynical note: As we watch this President come apart on live TV, each day demonstrating his bad judgement and constant lying, we should not let him destroy the postal service…..something that’s right about our country. Trump, in the midst of a nationwide stay at home quarantine, actually wants to raise delivery costs (a form of tax if you will) for citizens and businesses. Sad sack social misfit that he is, he can’t just leave things alone.

“Trump is the worst political leader I have experienced in all of my professional life, which is forty years of working with governments at a high level. I’ve never seen anything like the narcissism of this man, and here we are, a country so rich in expertise, in resources, in capacities, and yet we’re watching a complete failure of a political response—with a massive loss of life—in real time. It’s quite shocking, because Trump not only does not know how to approach this issue but he blocks those who do.”

And

“So, let me be specific. The United States is completely failing at the federal level to control this epidemic. It’s a tragedy. We’re losing tens of thousands of lives unnecessarily because of the shambolic failure of Trump and his team to mobilize the vast resources of our country, both human and material. At the same time, there are poor countries that are doing much, much better at controlling the epidemic. Take a country like Vietnam, which is a low-income country in East Asia, and close to China, but for a variety of reasons they acted very quickly to stop the transmission of the virus, to a much greater extent than we did. They also don’t have the means for mass testing and so on. At least to date, they have been able to keep the epidemic more under control through public-health means, which is identifying potentially sick people, helping them to isolate, tracing their contacts, helping those people to isolate, and so on.”

Medicynical note: Read the article. It’s no secret. He’s a failure making us failures too.

This time it is to continue the fiction that stopping travel from China in January saved thousands of lives.

In fact 40,000 travelers from China returned to the US after the so-called ban. Virtually no precautions were take to protect those travelers or us. His ban did nothing….nada!

So it is surprising…..wait…nothing is surprising with this president. Trump now claims that because he heroically stopped travel from China that travelers went to Italy and that’s why the outbreak in Italy was so bad.

“It is a perplexing claim because, as we have reported before, Italy stopped all flights to and from China on Jan. 31. Although the White House announced its travel restrictions on China the same day, they did not go into effect until Feb. 2.”

Medicynical note: Nice try Donald, if you had asked someone or bothered to check you’d have known that Italy stopped all travel. ALL travel, from China to Italy was stopped two days BEFORE Trump enacted his partial ban.

Amazing.

Trump opines without thinking or vetting his comments.  That’s undoubtedly what happened when he endorsed the use of chloroquin, hydroxychloroquin and azithromycin as wonder drugs for the covid-19 infection.  His comments were based on a headlines generated by a small poorly documented study from France done by an unreliable researcher–a global warming by human activity denier no less.

Trump repeated his endorsement several times since and as is his style he has never admitted that he might be, or as appears to be the case from recent studies,  wrong.  The drugs don’t appear to work.

Thus is it sad to see a government scientist who expressed reservations about the use of chloroquin and hydroxychloroquin being fired.

As reported by Maggie Haggerman of the New York Times: “Dr. Rick Bright was abruptly dismissed this week as the director of the Department of Health and Human Services’ Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority, or BARDA, and as the deputy assistant secretary for preparedness and response.”

In the article Dr. Bright  stated:

We as a culture could barely bring ourselves to give two weeks in social isolation to stop the covid-19 worldwide epidemic. Then under the guise of”freedom,” gun toting idiots paraded around claiming their so-called freedom had preference over controlling an epidemic that killed 40,000 fellow citizens in 5 weeks.

So it’s not at all surprising that, when queried, our citizenry doesn’t give a damn about global warming from human activity, not even ten bucks worth.

“In fact, now more Americans than ever understand that climate change is happening. Seven in 10 believe it is. That’s not to say they all understand the scientific reality that human activity is the cause of climate change—some surveys shows that barely more than half of Americans believe the scientific consensus that human-caused greenhouse gas emissions are to blame. And most won’t do much about it, even if they realize it’s happening and realize our emissions are causing it. One poll conducted in 2018 found that 70 percent of Americans would be unwilling to contribute just $10 a month, the cost of a Netflix subscription, to combat climate change.”

Medicynical note: Just like other dumb animals man is unable to defer pleasure even a little bit to assure future survival. I hate to think what that means for the future of the planet which is well on its way to 10 billion inhabitants.