Trump Turned to Hannity for Medical Advice, 20,000 Dead So Far (NY Times)

An examination reveals the president was warned about the potential for a pandemic but that internal divisions, lack of planning and his faith in his own instincts led to a halting response.

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WASHINGTON — “Any way you cut it, this is going to be bad,” a senior medical adviser at the Department of Veterans Affairs, Dr. Carter Mecher, wrote on the night of Jan. 28, in an email to a group of public health experts scattered around the government and universities. “The projected size of the outbreak already seems hard to believe.”

A week after the first coronavirus case had been identified in the United States, and six long weeks before President Trump finally took aggressive action to confront the danger the nation was facing — a pandemic that is now forecast to take tens of thousands of American lives — Dr. Mecher was urging the upper ranks of the nation’s public health bureaucracy to wake up and prepare for the possibility of far more drastic action.

“You guys made fun of me screaming to close the schools,” he wrote to the group, which called itself “Red Dawn,” an inside joke based on the 1984 movie about a band of Americans trying to save the country after a foreign invasion. “Now I’m screaming, close the colleges and universities.”

His was hardly a lone voice. Throughout January, as Mr. Trump repeatedly played down the seriousness of the virus and focused on other issues, an array of figures inside his government — from top White House advisers to experts deep in the cabinet departments and intelligence agencies — identified the threat, sounded alarms and made clear the need for aggressive action.

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5 COMMENTS

  1. Maybe Trump’s mocking concern in January and February was based on inside information from those who deployed the virus that there is nothing to worry about it’s genetically modified to not kill children, it targets only Chinese race, and it is only as bad as the flu if it works well we can hit Iran with another the mossad have already cooked up

  2. If and unless, the administration gets round to steering people on how to bolster their own immune systems with zinc and vitamins C and D as base ingredients from which to build and promote their health against the possibility of virus infection America is finished. Without some effort the country will be destroyed completely and irrevocably in the wait for a Virus that may or may not be on stream in 18 months. Otherwise the citizens of America are exposed to a catastrophy beyond imagining with civil disturbances already in the offing. We don’t have to look too far beyond Fauci, Gates, the WHO or Washington to see both the writing on the wall and whose backs are against it.

  3. Fauci, after warning of community spread, which existed at the time, said exactly what you pointed out. Insane.

  4. Guardian: “Prominent US public health adviser Dr Anthony Fauci appeared on Sunday to confirm a bombshell New York Times report which said he and other Trump administration officials recommended the implementation of social distancing to combat the coronavirus in February, but were rebuffed for almost a month.”
    Really? Because here’s Dr. Fauci appearing on the “Today Show” on February 29, stating at the 2:50 mark of the video, “Right now, at this moment, there is no need to change anything that they’re doin on a day-by-day basis. Right now the risk is low…”

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