Medicynic

This is incompetence.  “In April, 20.5 million Americans lost their jobs and unemployment was at 14.7 percent. As states ease coronavirus restrictions, the spread continues: There are nearly 1.5 million cases and more than 89,000 deaths in the U.S. The Trump administration has been criticized for a delayed response to the outbreak and a lack of organization in providing tests and medical supplies.”

Medicynical Note:  The incompetent president who ran the largest deficit, in good times, in history (almost a trillion dollar a year); The incompetent president who took the excellent economy handed to him by President Obama and ran it into the ground; the incompetent president who missed the warning of a worldwide pandemic; the incompetent president who fired the NSC staff and CDC staff tasked with preparing for a worldwide epidemic;  the incompetent president who ignored the position papers and a planning session for pandemics provided by his predecessor, President Obama; yes this incompetent president, his name is Trump, proudly takes responsibility for nothing and blames everyone……….. but himself. 

“For two months, President Trump repeatedly pitched hydroxychloroquine as a safe and effective treatment for coronavirus, asking would-be patients “What the hell do you have to lose?”

“Growing evidence shows that, for many, the answer is their lives.”

Medicynical note: A stopped clock is right twice a day…….Trump is certainly due. As you recall this is the guy who thought the virus would go away by itself; that it was a hoax; that he didn’t need the pandemic planning team kindly left by President Obama; that he didn’t need the detailed response plan also provided by his predecessor; that his administration could ignore the warning from President Obama that there was a significant risk of a pandemic. He ignored it all.

And now his “game changer” treatment recommendation, unsurprisingly, turns out to be bogus. It doesn’t work and has fatal side effects.

Which brings us to the vaccine which Trump is certain will be ready by the end of the year. Maybe he is right. There are many good people working on it. But almost all think it will take more time.

I would suggest extreme caution in the use of such an early vaccine. First, like the yearly flu vaccines it may not offer complete protection. And given the truncated development time it may have undiscovered side-effects. In addition, any such vaccine has the unprecedented Trumpian track record of inflated false claims, sloppy reasoning, thousands of lies and repeated failures to overcome.

“The Abbott coronavirus test hailed by President Trump and used by the White House failed to detect infected samples in a large number of cases that were caught by a rival firm, a preliminary study says.”

“The speedy Abbott test, which is supposed to determine in five to 13 minutes whether a person has the virus, missed a third of the positive samples found by the diagnostic company Cepheid when both tests used nasopharyngeal swabs, said the study done by a group from New York University. It missed more than 48 percent when both firms’ tests used dry nasal swabs. The former penetrates deeply into the nasal passages, while the latter is less invasive.”

And

“Before a Senate committee last week, National Institutes of Health director Francis Collins testified that the rapid Abbott test had a 15 percent false negative rate, an apparent reference to unpublished data from the Cleveland Clinic”

Medicynical note: Trump strikes out again. First it was a hoax, then going away like a miracle, then the game changer hydroxychloroquin, then drink bleach and then the apparently not accurate enough Abbott quick test. That’s our leader.

“Here’s the tell. The Justice Department’s new position isn’t that Mr. Flynn didn’t lie — that couldn’t be its position, because he did lie, and he admitted in federal court that he lied. Instead, the new filing argues that it was wrong for the F.B.I. to interview him in the first place. Look carefully at who the villain becomes in that narrative: not Mr. Flynn for lying, but the F.B.I. for asking the questions to which he lied in response.”

“And there’s a second tell. If the goal was just to shield Mr. Flynn, Mr. Trump could simply have pardoned him. That would have been a regrettable abuse of the pardon power — but at least it would have left Mr. Trump owning the decision and would have spared the Justice Department of the patent, destructive corruption that its new filing represents. But that didn’t happen — because institutional destruction isn’t collateral damage for Mr. Trump. It’s the very goal.”

Medicynical note: Lying to a federal investigator is a crime. Flynn lied and even apologized in court for doing it.

But then lying is standard procedure for this administration. Barr’s actions are appalling but not surprising.

“And yet, forecasters are projecting even more deaths on the horizon. A leaked document obtained by The New York Timesprojected more than 3,000 people could die each day by the end of May. Another historically conservative model, favored by the Trump administration, just doubled its projected death toll, too.”

“The tail-end of the national epidemic is not materializing.”

Medicynical note: Interesting set of curves explain the status of the coved-19 epidemic in the U.S. it’s not one epidemic. Read the article!

Nancy Messonnier a CDC infectious disease expert stated on February 25: “We are asking the American public to work with us to prepare in the expectation that this could be bad.”

She went on to say: “Ultimately, we expect we will see community spread in this country. It’s not so much a question of if this will happen anymore, but rather more a question of exactly when this will happen and how many people in this country will have severe illness.”

Trump not only ignored the warning but removed her from her spokesperson duties. He refused to believe science.

“President Trump’s motivation in dismissing for the longest time the severity of the virus was not religiosity, it was political — wanting to be re-elected. But his denial of scientific facts was even more shocking. On March 12, in a meeting with the Irish Prime Minister, Trump bragged: “I mean, think of it: the United States, because of what I did and what the administration did with China, we have 32 deaths at this point. Other countries that are smaller countries have many, many deaths. Thirty-two is a lot. Thirty-two is too many. But when you look at the kind of numbers that you’re seeing coming out of other countries, it’s pretty amazing when you think of it.””

Medicynical note: And now even Donald is predicting 100,000 or so deaths in the U.S. and implying that he was heroic somehow. This in the face of his blatant negligence and politization of the event.

And by the way it was not a media hoax or somehow a democratic plot. It’s a real disaster, aggravated by a science denying wanna-be despot.

“With the Postal Service reeling from the financial impactof the coronavirus pandemic, the Trump administration last week set an ultimatum for the agency to hike its package and shipping prices before it receives a $10 billion loan guaranteed under the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES Act).”

Medicynical Note:  The Trump/Bezos vendetta has the potential to affect the jobs of 600,000 voting employees of the postal service.    Add a couple of  voting dependents and relatives for each of these threatened employees and you have almost 2 million Biden voters.  It might even approach 3 million people whose vote is affected by Trump’s animosity towards the vital services offered by the U.S. Postal Service.

Consider, as well, that the average citizen uses any number of on-line merchants for vital goods and medications.  All of their shipping costs…..and prices will be forced up by Trump.  Thats another million or two Biden voters there.  Good work Donald, keep it up, we’re counting on you. 

“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.