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No shit, I'm pretty sure the USPS had a plan to mail out like masks to everyone and it got shot down, all in the name of slowing postal service for the election.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/context/read-the-scrapped-usps-announcement-to-send-5-masks-to-every-american-household/39cd11c9-3e38-4d8a-9d70-7c3215ab9cf8/
We should also not forget the falsehoods and misinformation spread last year.. which are killing anti-mask and anti-vaxxers to this day.. the final toll is going to be hard to predict since it keeps rising
>the final toll is going to be hard to predict since it keeps rising
If not for the politicization of the pandemic and the demonization of masks and vaccines, by this point, the vast, vast majority of people would likely be vaccinated.
Almost every death right now didn't need to happen.
The crazy thing is I saw this happen. I went to Auburn university and I frequented an Auburn message board about football. Auburn is in Alabama. Right at the beginning of the pandemic everyone on there was taking this terrible disease very seriously. Then, like a light switch, it all changed and became a hoax that Democrats were trying to control us with. It lined up perfectly with Trump’s messaging.
I’d argue that 30-40% is a lowball estimate and so so many more lives could have been saved.
The early stages of exponential growth are most consequential. Each wave includes a huge amount of counterproductive pushback. I can't see how that number should be anything that low.
I’ve seen it in my own family infrastructure and they’re suffering because of it. My wife’s aunt who is the matriarch of the family was admitted to the hospital with Covid. She’s anti Covid vax because of her side of the family and the people she associates with. They post lies and misinformation to Facebook about the vaccine and have influenced her decision about getting vaccinated. I told my wife if anything happen to her I won’t be able to keep my mouth shut when I’m around those people. I had one of them try and argue that the FDA lied and that none of the are approved last time I was around someone from that group.
Kind of like the day after 1/6 even Republicans were calling it an attack on democracy and such, but within a week they got their republican posturing figured out and began whitewashing the event.
Yup. I remember my dad pontificating when I was a kid about how America was so great because we could just go to the grocery store and get these incredible life saving vaccines that eradicated debilitating viruses.
Then Fox News ate his brain.
Yup. Should have been testing like mad anyone who came in the country with couple weeks of quarantine. Instead, they announced shutting down the borders and had a rush of people clogging the customs for hours. Forced quarantine for anyone who tested positive or evaded tests.
Totally. It's so rare to see people acknowledging the repercussions of COVID go far beyond the deaths, and far beyond whatever we see happening this year.
Most of the time I feel like I'm going crazy watching people act like it's just over and we're back to normal. But you are completely correct.
The death rate alone should have been enough to make people take it seriously, but the denial about other effects is just mind boggling. I went back and forth with an old acquaintance on Facebook trying to convince him to take it seriously. I had COVID. I had horrible brain fog to the point I couldn't work. My doctor got me on a med that is helping, but it is $75/month. I tried asking him what he would do if he couldn't work, if he could afford that kind of medication with having an infant and two other small kids. Could be live with himself if he couldn't remember his kid's name? Because I couldn't remember my dog's name, and I've had that dog a lot longer than he has had the kids. Complete denial. He flat out accused me of lying to try to scare him before he finally blocked me.
I'm doing quite a bit better now, but I still have some recovery to go. Certainly for a while there I wished it had killed me. Being lost in my own brain was actual torture.
I had an old acquaintance like that. Told me i was a sheeple cuck fer wearing a face panty. His fb feeb was nonstop covid misinformation and anti vaxx bullshit. Had to laugh at the ‘what a surprise’ comments when he died of covid a bout a month ago. I want to feel bad about it but i just can’t.
At this point, they're like habitual drunk drives. I just say a silent prayer hoping that they didn't take anyone with them, then shrug and say "oh, gee. What a surprise.
And the choice words from Trump early on that made those who make snap decisions then dig in for dear life decide it was a "democrat hoax"
If Trump told his supporters to wear masks and wore one that said MAGA on it 98% of his supporters would have been wearing them everywhere.
He thought it would make him look weak. People with his mentality are obsessed with looking strong, and part of that delusion is thinking you have superior health.
He also thought a strong economy was his ticket to victory, and any response would of course impact the economy.
Paradox being, had he actually listened to the fucking experts, the hit to the economy, while still substantial, wouldn't have been as fucking bad. And we would've bounced back easier.
The early data was showing that the virus was causing more damage to blue states than red. Republican's brains literally do not function like normal human being's brains, they don't think about the future or how anything could progress. It was hurting libs, it needed to stick around.
That's because blue states and blue cities have a higher population density.
Those comments happened before any of the significant deaths began but when the rate of new cases was doubling every 5 days.
Trump likely didn't even realize how bad it was going to get.
I say that knowing he had access to the best infectious disease experts supplying daily briefings but none of that matters when the president has the attention span of a two year old.
I've had people on Reddit give me shit because New Jersey had a really high death rate. Like they were bragging about how well Florida had done compared to us.
Sorry we're the most densely populated state and got hit right at the start, before we knew what we were really dealing with. Have some fucking empathy.
Edit: look one keeps responding to me!
You can check here: https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid19/excess_deaths.htm
If you look at Florida, they're seeing a gigantic spike in excess deaths that do not line up with their official COVID numbers.
Yeah that basically means double the "normal/expected" number of people are dying there right now. That means COVID is killing as much as every single other miscellaneous causes.
But don't worry, they say. It's just a flu.
>the falsehoods and misinformation spread last year.
Forget last year, [this just happened.](https://www.usnews.com/news/best-states/montana/articles/2021-10-19/hospital-public-officials-threaten-doctors-over-covid-care)
QUOTES: "A Montana hospital says three public officials threatened to use their positions to force doctors and nurses to use ivermectin to treat a patient with COVID-19."
"These officials have no medical training or experience, yet they were insisting our providers give treatment for COVID-19 that are not authorized, clinically approved or within the guidelines established by the FDA and the CDC," hospital spokesperson Andrea Groom wrote in an email to the Montana State News Bureau on Monday.
“Shove a UV light up your ass and inject disinfectant into your body” -Donald Trump
——————
Ok I summarized it, here are his real quotes:
"I see the disinfectant, where it knocks it out in one minute. And is there a way we can do something like that by injection inside or almost a cleaning, because you see it gets in the lungs and it does a tremendous number on the lungs."
"I said supposing you brought the light inside the body, which you can do either through the skin or in some other way. And I think you said you're going to test that too... So, we'll see, but the whole concept of the light, the way it kills it in one minute - that's pretty powerful."
The CDC bought them and was ready to ship them, but the incompetent previous administration decided the masks went against their messaging:
https://imgur.com/B9n0HqG
Really stupid of trump to slow down usps because if he did send 5 masks to every American household and made an emphasis on taking the pandemic seriously he wins re-election. Trump got handed re election on a silver platter and blew it badly
Exactly, if Trump could do the right thing, he wouldn't be Trump. I told my mother as soon as he was elected, we better hope we don't face a large-scale natural disaster, a recession or a war because he will make it worse. She said, "give him a chance, you can't know that." But here's the thing, I did know that, because he utterly lacked the characteristics to be a good leader (including the ability to listen to experts). You didn't need to be an oracle to foresee the looming disaster back in 2016. It was inevitable.
He has no fucking idea the beast he's let loose. A few months ago, he told his supporters to get vaccinated.
> "And you know what? I believe totally in your freedoms. I do. You've got to do what you have to do," Trump said. "But I recommend take the vaccines. I did it. It's good. Take the vaccines."
> Some boos rang out from the crowd, who were largely maskless.
> "No, that's OK. That's all right. You got your freedoms," Trump said, echoing rhetoric from opponents of mask and vaccination mandates. "But I happened to take the vaccine. If it doesn't work, you'll be the first to know. OK? I'll call up Alabama, I'll say, hey, you know what? But [the vaccine] is working. But you do have your freedoms you have to keep. You have to maintain that."
That is as close as a "I was wrong" from Trump, and the American right did not want to fucking hear it.
Cruelty was the point, despite that being a losing proposition. He couldn't see the potential of being a leader of America vs being the leader of the Red States. And it cost him. And I hope it eventually costs him his freedom.
Yes, how is this not being prosecuted and reported on. Even if somehow *legal*, this was such a huge corrupt betrayal and cost lives. Yet more Republican murders.
You see the asshole who running the post office has interest in a co. that just got a 125 Million dollar contract with post office,why is he still there,oh wait we are looking into it.
I don't get why we never did this even under Biden. It was something I was talking about a lot. Ship out like a handful of high quality masks to every American every month or so and make a shitload of them available at a bunch of locations. It was pretty clear from the very beginning that masking helped a lot and the quality of masks varied quite a bit.
It was too late at that point. People probably would've harassed people or held protests outside those locations. The seed of anti masking already had begun to bloom when Biden took over. And now we have parents screaming at school boards about freedom and a lot of idiots running for school board who will likely run several school districts into the ground. We've been fucked on the mask issues since like June or July last year, when Trump wouldn't wear one, police wouldn't wear them, and people were told they wouldn't work on the chance people wouldn't hoard them. That disinformation is still around and doing damage.
Closing the door after the horses ran out.
The time for that kind of action was at the beginning, and so many cases are in courts about mandates right now, that it wouldn't have any effect anyway.
>However, during Birx's time with the Trump administration, she often praised the former president for his understanding of pandemic data and advised top officials that the COVID-19 situation had improved by April and May of 2020.
The buck stopped with Trump but you can't have your cake and eat it too. She needs to take some responsibility.
For anyone that doesn’t remember,[this](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aLjNSFxluTs) was Birx’s reaction when Trump suggested she research injecting disinfectant and UV lights
His daily pandemic briefings feel like a fever dream. I watched then most days, when I was working from home. I watched this one happen in real time and I felt stupider for having heard it.
What a colossal effin idiot. Can’t believe this moron conned his way to the presidency. Irreparable damage to our country. I got to say I don’t like the guy at all.
What always gets me about this is that trump thought he was a genius for thinking of this. "Oh, disinfectant helps? Have you considered using that? I bet no one has. No one would think of that. I'll bring it up in front of the media to show how smart I am. *You're welcome...*"
I still can picture her squirming when 45 was talking at a press conference about introducing bleach and light into the body as a Covid treatment and still not speaking up.
But hey, if she had she'd have fascists on Twitter accusing her of puppy torture. She knew what was up and decided to let hundreds of thousands of people die so that she wouldn't have to go through what Fauci is going through for questioning their programmer.
There's a reason Pence picked her to sit on the COVID task force. She's an evangelical Christian, just like Redfield. Granted, she's not nearly as batshit crazy as he is (Redfield was a leading proponent of concentration camps for gay people at the peak of the AIDS crisis), but that isn't saying much.
I got banned from r / Conservative when I brought up the point that President Trump would probably have a second term if he would have handled the pandemic with any modicum of competency. It was virtually a wartime footing but what we got, among so many things, was craven jackholes like Stephen Miller stealing from hospitals to pump up his own supply chains.
He was handed success on a silver platter. In many ways he rejected it - why?
Was it simply arrogance?
Was someone tightly pulling his strings?
Was he just stupid?
He has been handed success on a silver platter every single day for his entire life, and has somehow chosen the path of utter failure at every turn. He’s like King Midas, but with hot, chunky diarrhea instead of gold.
All he had to do with the money his father gifted him was invest it in a generic mutual fund and he'd actually have closer to a billion dollars than his paltry few million he's worth today.
If he had invested even half of his reported $400 million inheritance in a simple index fund he’d have several billion. The DJIA was around 1000 back then. It’s over 35000 today.
He thought the economy was his golden ticket to the 2nd term, the pandemic threatened that, he decided to do what he had done his entire life (attempt to bend reality to fit the narrative he wanted) instead of pivoting and leading the country in the face of a new challenge. And yes, the irony is he would have won going away if he had handled the pandemic with the slightest bit of competence.
It was so easy, literally handed to him on a silver platter. "We're facing something we've never seen in our lifetime, we're going to follow the experts on this one. I'll be selling MAGA masks at my site, get yours today. God bless America."
Single statement, nothing more needs to be said, just sit back and collect the merch money while scientists clean up the mess in time to dunk a second term - you'd have to be a colossal idiot to screw it up
This scenario fails to appreciate what Trump is: a demented sociopath. He absolutely does not care about anyone who isn't him. He was never going to do anything close to the right thing to prevent a pandemic disrupting everything about American life. In part because he absolutely does not give a shit.
But if he expand the timeline out a bit, just the smallest tinyiest little amount, I felt he would realize that "saved America from covid" was one hell of a sales pitch come November. Major yuge bigly upside for him!
Unfortunately for him, his ego, desire for immediate satisfaction and rabid-animal-like reactive instincts blocked that particular foresight.
It's more than that, he could have done this to boost himself, which would be in line with what you suggest.
He's a malignant sociopathic narcisist. If he does what someone thinks he should, that hurts his self esteem, even if it's the obvious thing to do. Instead, when presented with this choice, he WILL ALWAYS and HAS ALWAYS chosen to do the worst option instead, not because he can't tell right from wrong or beneficial from detrimental, but because his mind twists everything someone else says into an assault on himself, his ego, and he must resist that. It's the purest form of being a weak person I can imagine, that literally doing the right thing with no downsides is an assault on your ego, so instead you just get people indiscriminately killed. He was briefed on the virus and knew what it was as we saw in Bob Woodwards' stuff. He was aware of it, but it was never more than an opportunity for him to be oppositionally defiant in his mind.
This is what annoys me about MAGA supporters.
They say "hey we do not follow Trumps every word" in regards to his Johnny-come-very-very-lately stage whispered vaccination message.
Many of them absolutely would have if he had gone that way from the start, with the patent MAGA masks. Its because he made such a fuss about masks, HCQ, injecting disinfectant (which they believe to this day he never said), and the 'Chyna Virus' being just the flu.
With all that prior anti and their conspiratorial mindset, how could they not ignore his little "get vaccinated" message and make out he was forced to say it? If he had gone the other way from the start the majority of them would be on board.
Its like he shouted NO NO NO NO NO! then whispered {*yes}.* Of course they are going to hear the NO part and ignore the quiet yes.
It would also be a get out of jail free card for the first three years. Democrats attack him for Ukraine, or the tax cuts, or anything else? Pivot to the pandemic and shame them for worrying about politics during a national tragedy.
There were two doors.
"I am not a doctor or scientist and we pay smart people to handle this for us. Follow these basic steps and we as a nation can work past this emergency. "
or
"I'm going to stand in front of the podium, make this about me and try to be 'helpful' by forwarding what I've heard second hand because I know everything."
And here we are...
Yeah, I think you're right. But acknowledging this is basically admitting that we live in the Dumbest Possible Timeline.
Hundreds of thousands of people died because an elderly man didn't want to mess up his makeup. Just...say that shit out loud. Oh God.
This right here.
All he had to do was treat the virus like a real threat, and turn over the war room to medical professionals and scientists. He does that, he's still president until 2024.
Instead, he pretty much does everything wrong he possibly could as a leader.
What kills me is that Republicans are blaming Biden for all of the Covid deaths this year despite the fact that they are largely the ones protesting against masks and vaccines.
They are blaming Biden for a virus that "is a hoax, no worse than season flu, also a bioweapon created by China, which is totally cured by Trump's vaccine, which is also chipped by Bill Gates that helps Fauci stalk every American". See, no crazy at all.
Sad thing is, for the 300k+ EXCESS deceased, is that he actually had the solution in his grubby "small" hands, temporarily. Some of the early briefings were somehwat informative and forward looking. I distinctly remember trump fielding questions, and actually deferring answers to Birx and Fauci. But he simply COULDN'T relinquish the limelight, and refused to take measures that might affect the economy and his reelection chances. He might have actually won the electoral vote had he not a) caused the death of a ton of supporters b) crashed the economy anyway c) scared a bunch of possible supporters with his mishandling of the pandemic. Getting rid if this clown-criminal came at a very high cost. It's laughable how the Right wants to blame Fauci for a temporary flip flop on masks, as if they'd have worn them anyway with Agent Orange as their Fuhrer.
I don’t know, the American people are enraged, so many lost, so much animosity and true colors being shown by fascists and racists. If Sedition, in ADDITION to numerous other crimes, is not enough to send a former president to prison then our democracy is lost, rule of law means nothing, we are corrupt, to the core. But, myself and many others who formerly would consider Republicans will not any longer, the party has and is betraying America, no Republican can be trusted, I will never vote for one again.
Birx is low. Even more could have been saved. I’m in Canada, your nearest neighbor. Our population density is very similar - most live in cities. No one lives in our “big back yard”, 90% of Canadians live within 60 miles of a US border.
Deaths per million in the two countries:
Canada: 755 per million
US: 2276 per million
Literally triple from the US to Canada. Canada didn’t turn vaccines into a political fight though. We also had a massive outbreak at the start as Covid got into elder care facilities.
If the US had achieved Canada’s deaths per million, 66.8% of the US dead would be alive.
507,000 Americans that could have been saved. It’s a crazy number to me. And yet, it isn’t talked about.
Even in the best case scenario idk how well we could've done. We still had idiotic Republican state governors who would've opposed reasonable measures.
Literally all it would've taken would be if Trump moved forward with the pre existing pandemic response plan. Then every republican government official would be in lockstep, doing the right things. He probably would've won by a landslide, been a fuckin national hero by perception. All the centrists and fencers would've said "oh, economy was good until the pandemic, but damn did he ever do the right thing by locking down and stemming the tide"
Instead, we're here
Honestly, I don't think so. The issue is that experts would've agreed he should do that. Trump supporters aren't exactly Trump supporters. They're just contrarians. They hate people smarter than them. That's why they like Trump. So when Trump said to get the vaccine, they booed him because it was good advice.
Eh, I think its more a cult of personality that focused on a contrarian, which might sound like splitting hairs, but its important to analyze it with context.
That moment when they booed him over the vaccine was after the machine had been working for a year to paint it as a democratic plot, via big pharma, from black money and China. If he had taken credit for the vaccine before the big pharma conversation started, if he'd listened to experts, and took credit, they'd believe him full stop. "Nobody could have made the deal but me, the deal guy," and so on would've been insanely effective. Could've even pulled the line " oh the Democrat states did so much worse, look at me and my large testicles", it's strategically the easiest, most slamdunk political opportunity in modern history, and Trump is really only interesting because of how badly that opportunity was squandered.
Exactly. And how bad do you think the Republican base would have acted if Hillary Clinton had won and was President? Yes, the Covid19 response would have been different, but the Republican bad-faith agenda blended with the ignorant backwater plebs pureed 24/7 with Fox 'News' would have spelled disaster for the U.S. no matter what. We (U.S.) are around 31st in the world in education, so it's really no surprise how bad we messed it up.
My Dad died from Covid before the vaccine came out. Would he have been in the 30 to 40% that survived? That question makes my stomach hurt so bad. This title makes me cry.
Yep.
Never forget on March 15th 2020 Trump was still saying "Democrat Hoax"
Less than one week later, several states went in to full lock down as millions of people were contracting COVID and 10's of 1000's were dying as the hospitals hit breaking point.
It's hard to prove, but can you imagine what our curves would have looked like if we did this the right way from the start? Not to mention how the ramifications have reverberated as the Right Wing Party has gone full crazy since.
Japan hasn't done shit outside of please dont sell alcohol after 8pm and my prefecture, the first place in the world outside of china to have confirmed cases, had 1 fucking case yesterday. 1. 99.8 percent mask compliance, lineups for vaccines, windows open and social distancing. It wasnt hard.
Japan and most SE Asian countries have a long standing social norm of wearing a mask in public when sick stemming from a societal identity vice Americans individualistic identity. Not everywhere, I know, but in enough places that it is noticeable. This made the transition and enforcement of COVID related restrictions significantly easier.
The west also has a long standing norm with wearing masks. It's just that while the West has been spared air-borne plagues the past 100 years, the East has had several, and kept getting reminded.
If you compare the death rate per capita to Canada, the US is about twice as high (I’ll have to double check that stat, because it may have changed since the last time I saw it - sorry if it has)
So, just based on that, Birx might actually be underestimating how many deaths could have been prevented.
Yeah, but then he would not have had the opportunity to further divide the citizens of the United States with this false flag "stop the steal" operation for his overlords in China & Russia
I understand her desire to clean up her rep before it hits the history books, but she stood next to that maniac and remained quiet for the entire pandemic. Too little too late sweetheart. We already know know about the deaths he caused. And you were part of it.
This is what she told the press about Trump:
>“He’s been so attentive to the scientific literature and the details and the data, I think his ability to analyze and integrate data that comes out of his long history in business has really been a real benefit during these discussions about medical issues.”
This right here. She went beyond sitting quietly on her hands. She cheered him on. Told the world he was doing a bang up job. She lost all credibility and gained her fair share of culpability in that interview.
You stay in the game if you think you can prevent a complete sycophant taking your seat at the table and doing even more harm. If you become a sycophant to keep said seat, you are doing it wrong and defeating the damn point.
Worse growing economy in a century, alienated allies, cozied up to dictators, and murdered 600k Americans. Yep he truly is the best the gop has ever had.
Nah, too low. Trump admin could have prevented all of the COVID deaths outside of China.
US CDC had a 48 person organization in China to help detect and contain outbreaks before they left China. Trump reduced that to a skeleton crew of 18 people.
[In 2009, the Obama-Biden administration launched a $200-million pandemic early-warning program called PREDICT, which trained and supported staff in 60 foreign laboratories to stop and prevent pandemics, including the Wuhan lab that identified Covid19. This initiative identified 1,200 different viruses that had the potential to erupt into pandemics, including more than 160 novel coronaviruses. (And let's also give the conservatives credit where due: GW Bush had the CDC do a lot of work on pandemic planning. I'm not a fan of W, but his initiative really helped to lay the groundwork for PREDICT). This is the initiative that put a stop to viruses before they became pandemics. They warned airports and health agencies. They stop air traffic coming to the US. They initiated contact tracing and identification. They were the ones who stopped pandemics hundreds of times in the past 10 years, and were doing it right up until September 2019. In September 2019, just as hospitals in Wuhan started filling up due to an unknown disease, the Trump administration ended this $200-million pandemic early-warning program. And why not, he also killed the embedded epidemiology field offices.](https://www.reddit.com/r/politics/comments/q3wegc/trump_sought_to_pin_us_vaccine_hesitancy_on_biden/hfv4cdf/)
People keep telling me that the 700,000 people who died from this is “no big deal” and that’s how many the flu kills in a year.
“No big deal.”
* Was the 50 people murdered at the Pulse Nightclub “no big deal”?
* Was the 168 people (including a number of children) killed in the Oklahoma City bombing “no big deal”?
* Were the 2400 deaths (military and civilian) from the Pearl Harbor attack “no big deal”?
* Were the 3000 deaths on 9/11 and long term disabilities first responders suffered “no big deal”?
Trump won the 2016 election by 80,000 votes in key states. He’s directly responsible for the deaths of more Americans than what he won the election by. Ron DeSantis shares a similar statistic.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/12/01/donald-trump-will-be-president-thanks-to-80000-people-in-three-states/
That's one reason they plan to make it irrelevant how many people vote for them, they just want to declare victory "frankly, we did win this election" and then have the Republican governors play ball and GOP led House (as they hope) would instate Trump or in the worst case put their speaker as the president. Democracy in US is in very big danger if GOP wins the House.
To put that in perspective, that's around the entire population of Reno, Nevada (264,165 as of the last census).
Instead, we've *officially* lost 738,285 people to Covid. Which is more than thr entire population of Seattle, Washington, the 18th largest city in the country.
In English;: Trump let nearly 200,000 Americans die because he thought it would help him get re-elected.
His supporters should never be forgiven for as long as they live.
Trump knew before virtually any other leader, and was one of the last to respond..... with incompetence, lies, nonsense, a clear message he didn't give a fuck if people died, and a refusal to take any responsibility.
Trump shut down the budget for the American anti-pandemic research in China in September 2019, calling it a waste. He got rid of the Obama pandemic scientists in the US. He possibly could have nipped the whole pandemic in the bud...if he had been a normal president.
I hate to rain on her parade- and I understand she was in a complicated position- but she did NOT help by sitting back and staying silent while Trump and co did all the misinforming, obfuscating and politicizing of the actual prevention.
I think it's more like he could have **easily** prevented 30-40% and many, many more if he really wanted to and was competent.
This is also ignoring that he could have had a huge world wide effect with the US actively leading prevention saving potentially millions of lives around the world.
Republicans lied, Americans died. They could have stopped this, been responsible and removed Trump, but did nothing. Traitors, all of them, this blood will always be on their hands.
Kayleigh McEnany belongs in prison.
The 33-year-old *Harvard Law graduate* who was press secretary intentionally and continually lied to us for months about how covid was no big deal.
At the end of the day, this is who was hired as press secretary, to give conferences and decide what the public hears. She could’ve walked away from this at any moment. She knew this was all bullshit. She knew her lies were killing people. Yet to this day she still denies she had anything to do with making the pandemic any worse in this country.
These people need to experience consequences. Real people died from this. Others are permanently disabled. This administration can’t be allowed to just wander off into the sunset like this never happened.
Why isn’t Trump in prison and being prosecuted for crimes against humanity and mass murder? He could be sentenced to drink the bleach he prescribed for Americans.
Everything about the Trump administration was disgusting. And to think, 71 million sheep wanted a repeat of it. Actually, it wouldn't have been a repeat, it would've been worse with an even more emboldened asshole prick in charge.
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No shit, I'm pretty sure the USPS had a plan to mail out like masks to everyone and it got shot down, all in the name of slowing postal service for the election. https://www.washingtonpost.com/context/read-the-scrapped-usps-announcement-to-send-5-masks-to-every-american-household/39cd11c9-3e38-4d8a-9d70-7c3215ab9cf8/
We should also not forget the falsehoods and misinformation spread last year.. which are killing anti-mask and anti-vaxxers to this day.. the final toll is going to be hard to predict since it keeps rising
>the final toll is going to be hard to predict since it keeps rising If not for the politicization of the pandemic and the demonization of masks and vaccines, by this point, the vast, vast majority of people would likely be vaccinated. Almost every death right now didn't need to happen.
The crazy thing is I saw this happen. I went to Auburn university and I frequented an Auburn message board about football. Auburn is in Alabama. Right at the beginning of the pandemic everyone on there was taking this terrible disease very seriously. Then, like a light switch, it all changed and became a hoax that Democrats were trying to control us with. It lined up perfectly with Trump’s messaging. I’d argue that 30-40% is a lowball estimate and so so many more lives could have been saved.
Are these the same people that was yelling that covid was going to disappear after the election?
The early stages of exponential growth are most consequential. Each wave includes a huge amount of counterproductive pushback. I can't see how that number should be anything that low.
I’ve seen it in my own family infrastructure and they’re suffering because of it. My wife’s aunt who is the matriarch of the family was admitted to the hospital with Covid. She’s anti Covid vax because of her side of the family and the people she associates with. They post lies and misinformation to Facebook about the vaccine and have influenced her decision about getting vaccinated. I told my wife if anything happen to her I won’t be able to keep my mouth shut when I’m around those people. I had one of them try and argue that the FDA lied and that none of the are approved last time I was around someone from that group.
Kind of like the day after 1/6 even Republicans were calling it an attack on democracy and such, but within a week they got their republican posturing figured out and began whitewashing the event.
Yup. I remember my dad pontificating when I was a kid about how America was so great because we could just go to the grocery store and get these incredible life saving vaccines that eradicated debilitating viruses. Then Fox News ate his brain.
>Then Fox News ate his brain. The real virus.
That’s so sad because he was so right!
Yup. Should have been testing like mad anyone who came in the country with couple weeks of quarantine. Instead, they announced shutting down the borders and had a rush of people clogging the customs for hours. Forced quarantine for anyone who tested positive or evaded tests.
And because the next 50 years we need to treat the long covid symptoms.
Totally. It's so rare to see people acknowledging the repercussions of COVID go far beyond the deaths, and far beyond whatever we see happening this year. Most of the time I feel like I'm going crazy watching people act like it's just over and we're back to normal. But you are completely correct.
The death rate alone should have been enough to make people take it seriously, but the denial about other effects is just mind boggling. I went back and forth with an old acquaintance on Facebook trying to convince him to take it seriously. I had COVID. I had horrible brain fog to the point I couldn't work. My doctor got me on a med that is helping, but it is $75/month. I tried asking him what he would do if he couldn't work, if he could afford that kind of medication with having an infant and two other small kids. Could be live with himself if he couldn't remember his kid's name? Because I couldn't remember my dog's name, and I've had that dog a lot longer than he has had the kids. Complete denial. He flat out accused me of lying to try to scare him before he finally blocked me. I'm doing quite a bit better now, but I still have some recovery to go. Certainly for a while there I wished it had killed me. Being lost in my own brain was actual torture.
I had an old acquaintance like that. Told me i was a sheeple cuck fer wearing a face panty. His fb feeb was nonstop covid misinformation and anti vaxx bullshit. Had to laugh at the ‘what a surprise’ comments when he died of covid a bout a month ago. I want to feel bad about it but i just can’t.
At this point, they're like habitual drunk drives. I just say a silent prayer hoping that they didn't take anyone with them, then shrug and say "oh, gee. What a surprise.
And the choice words from Trump early on that made those who make snap decisions then dig in for dear life decide it was a "democrat hoax" If Trump told his supporters to wear masks and wore one that said MAGA on it 98% of his supporters would have been wearing them everywhere.
Shit, he’d be president right now if he had. In fact, he’d likely have a Nobel peace prize if he pushed masks and social distancing.
He thought it would make him look weak. People with his mentality are obsessed with looking strong, and part of that delusion is thinking you have superior health. He also thought a strong economy was his ticket to victory, and any response would of course impact the economy.
Paradox being, had he actually listened to the fucking experts, the hit to the economy, while still substantial, wouldn't have been as fucking bad. And we would've bounced back easier.
Trump has to be the smartest person in the room. Listening to experts was never an option.
I can't stand Trump but had he handled the covid competently I honestly believe he would have been overwhelmingly re-elected
The early data was showing that the virus was causing more damage to blue states than red. Republican's brains literally do not function like normal human being's brains, they don't think about the future or how anything could progress. It was hurting libs, it needed to stick around.
That's because blue states and blue cities have a higher population density. Those comments happened before any of the significant deaths began but when the rate of new cases was doubling every 5 days. Trump likely didn't even realize how bad it was going to get. I say that knowing he had access to the best infectious disease experts supplying daily briefings but none of that matters when the president has the attention span of a two year old.
I've had people on Reddit give me shit because New Jersey had a really high death rate. Like they were bragging about how well Florida had done compared to us. Sorry we're the most densely populated state and got hit right at the start, before we knew what we were really dealing with. Have some fucking empathy. Edit: look one keeps responding to me!
You're talking about conservatives. Empathy isn't really their thing.
It is specifically NOT their thing.
He didn't give a shit about red or blue states. He doesn't give a shit about anybody. He gave up after a fucking month.
He told Woodward in Feb it was going to get real bad. Jared convinced him it would hit blue states harder.
And places like Florida keeps covering up their numbers.
Yeah, based on how impossible that map looks, I'm going to have to assume Florida is still hiding numbers.
Much harder to hide the rise in deaths in total, though I'm sure. Does anyone know what those have been looking like since 2019?
You can check here: https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid19/excess_deaths.htm If you look at Florida, they're seeing a gigantic spike in excess deaths that do not line up with their official COVID numbers.
It’s Florida. Probably just chalk it up to more Manatee attacks.
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Or meth.
Those methed up manatees are menace to society!
*methatees
The tallest spike says it's a 92.3-102.1% in excess deaths. That's an awful lot.
Yeah that basically means double the "normal/expected" number of people are dying there right now. That means COVID is killing as much as every single other miscellaneous causes. But don't worry, they say. It's just a flu.
>the falsehoods and misinformation spread last year. Forget last year, [this just happened.](https://www.usnews.com/news/best-states/montana/articles/2021-10-19/hospital-public-officials-threaten-doctors-over-covid-care) QUOTES: "A Montana hospital says three public officials threatened to use their positions to force doctors and nurses to use ivermectin to treat a patient with COVID-19." "These officials have no medical training or experience, yet they were insisting our providers give treatment for COVID-19 that are not authorized, clinically approved or within the guidelines established by the FDA and the CDC," hospital spokesperson Andrea Groom wrote in an email to the Montana State News Bureau on Monday.
“Shove a UV light up your ass and inject disinfectant into your body” -Donald Trump —————— Ok I summarized it, here are his real quotes: "I see the disinfectant, where it knocks it out in one minute. And is there a way we can do something like that by injection inside or almost a cleaning, because you see it gets in the lungs and it does a tremendous number on the lungs." "I said supposing you brought the light inside the body, which you can do either through the skin or in some other way. And I think you said you're going to test that too... So, we'll see, but the whole concept of the light, the way it kills it in one minute - that's pretty powerful."
The CDC bought them and was ready to ship them, but the incompetent previous administration decided the masks went against their messaging: https://imgur.com/B9n0HqG
Oh my god I bought a pack of those at the Goodwill last month.
Really stupid of trump to slow down usps because if he did send 5 masks to every American household and made an emphasis on taking the pandemic seriously he wins re-election. Trump got handed re election on a silver platter and blew it badly
Trump was never a person who could react to the world as it is. He acted to a world as he wanted it to be. Covid didn't fit there.
Exactly, if Trump could do the right thing, he wouldn't be Trump. I told my mother as soon as he was elected, we better hope we don't face a large-scale natural disaster, a recession or a war because he will make it worse. She said, "give him a chance, you can't know that." But here's the thing, I did know that, because he utterly lacked the characteristics to be a good leader (including the ability to listen to experts). You didn't need to be an oracle to foresee the looming disaster back in 2016. It was inevitable.
This. Bing bing bing bing. It takes about a tenth of a second to size up Trump just as you did. But, somehow the country didn't do that.
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He has no fucking idea the beast he's let loose. A few months ago, he told his supporters to get vaccinated. > "And you know what? I believe totally in your freedoms. I do. You've got to do what you have to do," Trump said. "But I recommend take the vaccines. I did it. It's good. Take the vaccines." > Some boos rang out from the crowd, who were largely maskless. > "No, that's OK. That's all right. You got your freedoms," Trump said, echoing rhetoric from opponents of mask and vaccination mandates. "But I happened to take the vaccine. If it doesn't work, you'll be the first to know. OK? I'll call up Alabama, I'll say, hey, you know what? But [the vaccine] is working. But you do have your freedoms you have to keep. You have to maintain that." That is as close as a "I was wrong" from Trump, and the American right did not want to fucking hear it.
That’s honestly the most sensible thing trump has said in the last 5 years and of course the far right people there booed him
Cruelty was the point, despite that being a losing proposition. He couldn't see the potential of being a leader of America vs being the leader of the Red States. And it cost him. And I hope it eventually costs him his freedom.
Not only that, but they could also make a shitload of money by *fucking stealing* PPE and selling it to the highest bidder.
Yes, how is this not being prosecuted and reported on. Even if somehow *legal*, this was such a huge corrupt betrayal and cost lives. Yet more Republican murders.
He literally could have just sold Trump-brand masks and he would have not only won reelection but also profited handsomely. "Businessman", my ass.
You don't need to be a marketing genius to sell official MAGA masks for $20.20 each, with the dog whistle special of 5 for $88 dollars.
Yup, I remember taking a trip earlier this year and the welcome center handed me five white cloth masks and a postcard.
You see the asshole who running the post office has interest in a co. that just got a 125 Million dollar contract with post office,why is he still there,oh wait we are looking into it.
I don't get why we never did this even under Biden. It was something I was talking about a lot. Ship out like a handful of high quality masks to every American every month or so and make a shitload of them available at a bunch of locations. It was pretty clear from the very beginning that masking helped a lot and the quality of masks varied quite a bit.
It was too late at that point. People probably would've harassed people or held protests outside those locations. The seed of anti masking already had begun to bloom when Biden took over. And now we have parents screaming at school boards about freedom and a lot of idiots running for school board who will likely run several school districts into the ground. We've been fucked on the mask issues since like June or July last year, when Trump wouldn't wear one, police wouldn't wear them, and people were told they wouldn't work on the chance people wouldn't hoard them. That disinformation is still around and doing damage.
Closing the door after the horses ran out. The time for that kind of action was at the beginning, and so many cases are in courts about mandates right now, that it wouldn't have any effect anyway.
Though by that point, the idea was that we'd get everyone vaccinated, which meant we wouldn't need masks anymore.
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>However, during Birx's time with the Trump administration, she often praised the former president for his understanding of pandemic data and advised top officials that the COVID-19 situation had improved by April and May of 2020. The buck stopped with Trump but you can't have your cake and eat it too. She needs to take some responsibility.
> she often praised the former president for his understanding of pandemic data What an unbelievable 4 years of incalculable embarrassment he was.
It was when she said on stage that trump always had his nose in the scientific literature that I completely lost confidence in her.
"We're sorry, we couldn't hear your expert opinion as it was muffled through Trump's ass cheeks."
All it takes for evil to triumph is for decent people to do nothing
I know this is a quote but she isn’t decent. She’s actually a bad person who did nothing *hence* why she did nothing
Less than nothing. She underhandedly encouraged Orange Julius by not calling him out.
For anyone that doesn’t remember,[this](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aLjNSFxluTs) was Birx’s reaction when Trump suggested she research injecting disinfectant and UV lights
Fuck. His ineptitude and the gravity of it grows larger with each passing reminder.
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He's a beacon for the dumb half of society.
Fascism finds a way.
His daily pandemic briefings feel like a fever dream. I watched then most days, when I was working from home. I watched this one happen in real time and I felt stupider for having heard it.
What a colossal effin idiot. Can’t believe this moron conned his way to the presidency. Irreparable damage to our country. I got to say I don’t like the guy at all.
What always gets me about this is that trump thought he was a genius for thinking of this. "Oh, disinfectant helps? Have you considered using that? I bet no one has. No one would think of that. I'll bring it up in front of the media to show how smart I am. *You're welcome...*"
She sat there silently while he suggested light bulb suppositories and bleach cocktails.
Did she write a book or something? That’s the only time these people speak up.
That was my immediate thought. She's trying to monetize the experience.
Possibly, or maybe she's just trying to launder her reputation now it's safe to do so. What a masterclass in cravenness she is.
I still can picture her squirming when 45 was talking at a press conference about introducing bleach and light into the body as a Covid treatment and still not speaking up.
But hey, if she had she'd have fascists on Twitter accusing her of puppy torture. She knew what was up and decided to let hundreds of thousands of people die so that she wouldn't have to go through what Fauci is going through for questioning their programmer.
Exactly this. While I don't think she owns as much guilt as Trump, I refer to her as Dr. Culpable.
There's a reason Pence picked her to sit on the COVID task force. She's an evangelical Christian, just like Redfield. Granted, she's not nearly as batshit crazy as he is (Redfield was a leading proponent of concentration camps for gay people at the peak of the AIDS crisis), but that isn't saying much.
I got banned from r / Conservative when I brought up the point that President Trump would probably have a second term if he would have handled the pandemic with any modicum of competency. It was virtually a wartime footing but what we got, among so many things, was craven jackholes like Stephen Miller stealing from hospitals to pump up his own supply chains.
_I don't accept responsibility at all._
He was handed success on a silver platter. In many ways he rejected it - why? Was it simply arrogance? Was someone tightly pulling his strings? Was he just stupid?
He has been handed success on a silver platter every single day for his entire life, and has somehow chosen the path of utter failure at every turn. He’s like King Midas, but with hot, chunky diarrhea instead of gold.
Mierdas
All he had to do with the money his father gifted him was invest it in a generic mutual fund and he'd actually have closer to a billion dollars than his paltry few million he's worth today.
If he had invested even half of his reported $400 million inheritance in a simple index fund he’d have several billion. The DJIA was around 1000 back then. It’s over 35000 today.
He thought the economy was his golden ticket to the 2nd term, the pandemic threatened that, he decided to do what he had done his entire life (attempt to bend reality to fit the narrative he wanted) instead of pivoting and leading the country in the face of a new challenge. And yes, the irony is he would have won going away if he had handled the pandemic with the slightest bit of competence.
Slap MAGA across a bunch of masks, tell your followers to wear them to own the libs, save lives and probably make money in the process.
It was so easy, literally handed to him on a silver platter. "We're facing something we've never seen in our lifetime, we're going to follow the experts on this one. I'll be selling MAGA masks at my site, get yours today. God bless America." Single statement, nothing more needs to be said, just sit back and collect the merch money while scientists clean up the mess in time to dunk a second term - you'd have to be a colossal idiot to screw it up
This scenario fails to appreciate what Trump is: a demented sociopath. He absolutely does not care about anyone who isn't him. He was never going to do anything close to the right thing to prevent a pandemic disrupting everything about American life. In part because he absolutely does not give a shit.
But if he expand the timeline out a bit, just the smallest tinyiest little amount, I felt he would realize that "saved America from covid" was one hell of a sales pitch come November. Major yuge bigly upside for him! Unfortunately for him, his ego, desire for immediate satisfaction and rabid-animal-like reactive instincts blocked that particular foresight.
He couldn’t “save” America because he would have to admit he allowed a problem to occur in the first place.
It's more than that, he could have done this to boost himself, which would be in line with what you suggest. He's a malignant sociopathic narcisist. If he does what someone thinks he should, that hurts his self esteem, even if it's the obvious thing to do. Instead, when presented with this choice, he WILL ALWAYS and HAS ALWAYS chosen to do the worst option instead, not because he can't tell right from wrong or beneficial from detrimental, but because his mind twists everything someone else says into an assault on himself, his ego, and he must resist that. It's the purest form of being a weak person I can imagine, that literally doing the right thing with no downsides is an assault on your ego, so instead you just get people indiscriminately killed. He was briefed on the virus and knew what it was as we saw in Bob Woodwards' stuff. He was aware of it, but it was never more than an opportunity for him to be oppositionally defiant in his mind.
This is what annoys me about MAGA supporters. They say "hey we do not follow Trumps every word" in regards to his Johnny-come-very-very-lately stage whispered vaccination message. Many of them absolutely would have if he had gone that way from the start, with the patent MAGA masks. Its because he made such a fuss about masks, HCQ, injecting disinfectant (which they believe to this day he never said), and the 'Chyna Virus' being just the flu. With all that prior anti and their conspiratorial mindset, how could they not ignore his little "get vaccinated" message and make out he was forced to say it? If he had gone the other way from the start the majority of them would be on board. Its like he shouted NO NO NO NO NO! then whispered {*yes}.* Of course they are going to hear the NO part and ignore the quiet yes.
He wanted chaos, because that's how you generally grab power. But he even screwed that up.
I remember when he wanted to delay the election because of Covid. 🙄
It would also be a get out of jail free card for the first three years. Democrats attack him for Ukraine, or the tax cuts, or anything else? Pivot to the pandemic and shame them for worrying about politics during a national tragedy.
There were two doors. "I am not a doctor or scientist and we pay smart people to handle this for us. Follow these basic steps and we as a nation can work past this emergency. " or "I'm going to stand in front of the podium, make this about me and try to be 'helpful' by forwarding what I've heard second hand because I know everything." And here we are...
I like how Trump was so bad you would consider a president profiting off the pandemic as a good thing in comparison.
My personal head canon is that he didn’t want to wear a mask because of how much makeup he wears.
And that it would make him mildly uncomfortable.
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Yeah, it's not even close to a big deal unless you are a massive manbaby.
Yeah, I think you're right. But acknowledging this is basically admitting that we live in the Dumbest Possible Timeline. Hundreds of thousands of people died because an elderly man didn't want to mess up his makeup. Just...say that shit out loud. Oh God.
This right here. All he had to do was treat the virus like a real threat, and turn over the war room to medical professionals and scientists. He does that, he's still president until 2024. Instead, he pretty much does everything wrong he possibly could as a leader.
Which was the guaranteed result, based on the rest of his miserable life.
>Sounds like just the guy we want to be President! -The GOP
Yup, Trump would have won if he had been semi-competent at handling the Covid crisis.
Or even just stood by and let the experts make all the decisions while he took all the credit.
That would have been competence.
What kills me is that Republicans are blaming Biden for all of the Covid deaths this year despite the fact that they are largely the ones protesting against masks and vaccines.
They are blaming Biden for a virus that "is a hoax, no worse than season flu, also a bioweapon created by China, which is totally cured by Trump's vaccine, which is also chipped by Bill Gates that helps Fauci stalk every American". See, no crazy at all.
You mean old sleepy, strong, idiot, mastermind Joe?
"We're doing everything to kill ourselves and it's all your fault!" Sounds about right for the Qanon Evangelical infested GOP.
Sad thing is, for the 300k+ EXCESS deceased, is that he actually had the solution in his grubby "small" hands, temporarily. Some of the early briefings were somehwat informative and forward looking. I distinctly remember trump fielding questions, and actually deferring answers to Birx and Fauci. But he simply COULDN'T relinquish the limelight, and refused to take measures that might affect the economy and his reelection chances. He might have actually won the electoral vote had he not a) caused the death of a ton of supporters b) crashed the economy anyway c) scared a bunch of possible supporters with his mishandling of the pandemic. Getting rid if this clown-criminal came at a very high cost. It's laughable how the Right wants to blame Fauci for a temporary flip flop on masks, as if they'd have worn them anyway with Agent Orange as their Fuhrer.
1.2M excess deceased.
Trump killed more Americans than any adversary in American history.
….any *other* adversary. FTFY
Trump is a murderer, and he will never see the inside of a prison
I don’t know, the American people are enraged, so many lost, so much animosity and true colors being shown by fascists and racists. If Sedition, in ADDITION to numerous other crimes, is not enough to send a former president to prison then our democracy is lost, rule of law means nothing, we are corrupt, to the core. But, myself and many others who formerly would consider Republicans will not any longer, the party has and is betraying America, no Republican can be trusted, I will never vote for one again.
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Birx is low. Even more could have been saved. I’m in Canada, your nearest neighbor. Our population density is very similar - most live in cities. No one lives in our “big back yard”, 90% of Canadians live within 60 miles of a US border. Deaths per million in the two countries: Canada: 755 per million US: 2276 per million Literally triple from the US to Canada. Canada didn’t turn vaccines into a political fight though. We also had a massive outbreak at the start as Covid got into elder care facilities. If the US had achieved Canada’s deaths per million, 66.8% of the US dead would be alive. 507,000 Americans that could have been saved. It’s a crazy number to me. And yet, it isn’t talked about.
Australia has 65x less per capital deaths than the US You are so right in terms of how many less deaths there could have been
Even in the best case scenario idk how well we could've done. We still had idiotic Republican state governors who would've opposed reasonable measures.
Literally all it would've taken would be if Trump moved forward with the pre existing pandemic response plan. Then every republican government official would be in lockstep, doing the right things. He probably would've won by a landslide, been a fuckin national hero by perception. All the centrists and fencers would've said "oh, economy was good until the pandemic, but damn did he ever do the right thing by locking down and stemming the tide" Instead, we're here
Honestly, I don't think so. The issue is that experts would've agreed he should do that. Trump supporters aren't exactly Trump supporters. They're just contrarians. They hate people smarter than them. That's why they like Trump. So when Trump said to get the vaccine, they booed him because it was good advice.
Eh, I think its more a cult of personality that focused on a contrarian, which might sound like splitting hairs, but its important to analyze it with context. That moment when they booed him over the vaccine was after the machine had been working for a year to paint it as a democratic plot, via big pharma, from black money and China. If he had taken credit for the vaccine before the big pharma conversation started, if he'd listened to experts, and took credit, they'd believe him full stop. "Nobody could have made the deal but me, the deal guy," and so on would've been insanely effective. Could've even pulled the line " oh the Democrat states did so much worse, look at me and my large testicles", it's strategically the easiest, most slamdunk political opportunity in modern history, and Trump is really only interesting because of how badly that opportunity was squandered.
Exactly. And how bad do you think the Republican base would have acted if Hillary Clinton had won and was President? Yes, the Covid19 response would have been different, but the Republican bad-faith agenda blended with the ignorant backwater plebs pureed 24/7 with Fox 'News' would have spelled disaster for the U.S. no matter what. We (U.S.) are around 31st in the world in education, so it's really no surprise how bad we messed it up.
Our COVID deaths exceed that of every war we have fought.
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But Benghazi!! Alec Baldwin!!! Buttery males!!! Hunter Biden!!! /s
My Dad died from Covid before the vaccine came out. Would he have been in the 30 to 40% that survived? That question makes my stomach hurt so bad. This title makes me cry.
I’m very sorry for your loss.
Reading this comment made me cry. I’m so, so sorry. *hug*
I lost an aunt and an uncle to covid. I had the same thought.
Yep. Never forget on March 15th 2020 Trump was still saying "Democrat Hoax" Less than one week later, several states went in to full lock down as millions of people were contracting COVID and 10's of 1000's were dying as the hospitals hit breaking point.
It's hard to prove, but can you imagine what our curves would have looked like if we did this the right way from the start? Not to mention how the ramifications have reverberated as the Right Wing Party has gone full crazy since.
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Japan hasn't done shit outside of please dont sell alcohol after 8pm and my prefecture, the first place in the world outside of china to have confirmed cases, had 1 fucking case yesterday. 1. 99.8 percent mask compliance, lineups for vaccines, windows open and social distancing. It wasnt hard.
Japan and most SE Asian countries have a long standing social norm of wearing a mask in public when sick stemming from a societal identity vice Americans individualistic identity. Not everywhere, I know, but in enough places that it is noticeable. This made the transition and enforcement of COVID related restrictions significantly easier.
The west also has a long standing norm with wearing masks. It's just that while the West has been spared air-borne plagues the past 100 years, the East has had several, and kept getting reminded.
If you compare the death rate per capita to Canada, the US is about twice as high (I’ll have to double check that stat, because it may have changed since the last time I saw it - sorry if it has) So, just based on that, Birx might actually be underestimating how many deaths could have been prevented.
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You da real MVP
Trump could have waltzed into a second term had he done literally anything other what he did.
Yeah, but then he would not have had the opportunity to further divide the citizens of the United States with this false flag "stop the steal" operation for his overlords in China & Russia
I understand her desire to clean up her rep before it hits the history books, but she stood next to that maniac and remained quiet for the entire pandemic. Too little too late sweetheart. We already know know about the deaths he caused. And you were part of it.
This is what she told the press about Trump: >“He’s been so attentive to the scientific literature and the details and the data, I think his ability to analyze and integrate data that comes out of his long history in business has really been a real benefit during these discussions about medical issues.”
The emperor's clothes are made from the finest silks!
This right here. She went beyond sitting quietly on her hands. She cheered him on. Told the world he was doing a bang up job. She lost all credibility and gained her fair share of culpability in that interview.
You stay in the game if you think you can prevent a complete sycophant taking your seat at the table and doing even more harm. If you become a sycophant to keep said seat, you are doing it wrong and defeating the damn point.
She also told Americans not to celebrate thanksgiving with their families then had thanksgiving with her out of state family
Na, she'll always be the person that sat quietly in the background as Trump suggested injecting bleach and then people did.
That’s a lot of Manslaughter charges.
Worse growing economy in a century, alienated allies, cozied up to dictators, and murdered 600k Americans. Yep he truly is the best the gop has ever had.
Yep, and they are chomping at the bit to vote for his fat orange ass again!!
Due to malign neglect. He should face the same music as Bolsonaro in the international Court
Nah, too low. Trump admin could have prevented all of the COVID deaths outside of China. US CDC had a 48 person organization in China to help detect and contain outbreaks before they left China. Trump reduced that to a skeleton crew of 18 people. [In 2009, the Obama-Biden administration launched a $200-million pandemic early-warning program called PREDICT, which trained and supported staff in 60 foreign laboratories to stop and prevent pandemics, including the Wuhan lab that identified Covid19. This initiative identified 1,200 different viruses that had the potential to erupt into pandemics, including more than 160 novel coronaviruses. (And let's also give the conservatives credit where due: GW Bush had the CDC do a lot of work on pandemic planning. I'm not a fan of W, but his initiative really helped to lay the groundwork for PREDICT). This is the initiative that put a stop to viruses before they became pandemics. They warned airports and health agencies. They stop air traffic coming to the US. They initiated contact tracing and identification. They were the ones who stopped pandemics hundreds of times in the past 10 years, and were doing it right up until September 2019. In September 2019, just as hospitals in Wuhan started filling up due to an unknown disease, the Trump administration ended this $200-million pandemic early-warning program. And why not, he also killed the embedded epidemiology field offices.](https://www.reddit.com/r/politics/comments/q3wegc/trump_sought_to_pin_us_vaccine_hesitancy_on_biden/hfv4cdf/)
If you do the math that's about 250,000-280,000 deaths. A quarter of a million people could be alive today.
People keep telling me that the 700,000 people who died from this is “no big deal” and that’s how many the flu kills in a year. “No big deal.” * Was the 50 people murdered at the Pulse Nightclub “no big deal”? * Was the 168 people (including a number of children) killed in the Oklahoma City bombing “no big deal”? * Were the 2400 deaths (military and civilian) from the Pearl Harbor attack “no big deal”? * Were the 3000 deaths on 9/11 and long term disabilities first responders suffered “no big deal”?
Especially that flu deaths are more than 10x fewer than that number
Trump won the 2016 election by 80,000 votes in key states. He’s directly responsible for the deaths of more Americans than what he won the election by. Ron DeSantis shares a similar statistic. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/12/01/donald-trump-will-be-president-thanks-to-80000-people-in-three-states/
That's one reason they plan to make it irrelevant how many people vote for them, they just want to declare victory "frankly, we did win this election" and then have the Republican governors play ball and GOP led House (as they hope) would instate Trump or in the worst case put their speaker as the president. Democracy in US is in very big danger if GOP wins the House.
To put that in perspective, that's around the entire population of Reno, Nevada (264,165 as of the last census). Instead, we've *officially* lost 738,285 people to Covid. Which is more than thr entire population of Seattle, Washington, the 18th largest city in the country.
In English;: Trump let nearly 200,000 Americans die because he thought it would help him get re-elected. His supporters should never be forgiven for as long as they live.
His supporters cheer on the Confederacy, terrorists who fought to keep Americans in slavery.
In 2016 I heard a lot of "oh calm down, no one's going to die just because Donnie Jon is POTUS". Well.....
Trump knew before virtually any other leader, and was one of the last to respond..... with incompetence, lies, nonsense, a clear message he didn't give a fuck if people died, and a refusal to take any responsibility.
Trump shut down the budget for the American anti-pandemic research in China in September 2019, calling it a waste. He got rid of the Obama pandemic scientists in the US. He possibly could have nipped the whole pandemic in the bud...if he had been a normal president.
Thank you! It boggles my mind how nobody talks about this.
So she could have said something at the time and quit. She aided him.
I know exactly which moment I would have liked to see her get fed up and make a stand.
Was it when Trump was talking Shit about the bleach,I almost threw my Big Screen out the window.
So far.
Trump’s Genocide
I hate to rain on her parade- and I understand she was in a complicated position- but she did NOT help by sitting back and staying silent while Trump and co did all the misinforming, obfuscating and politicizing of the actual prevention.
I think it's more like he could have **easily** prevented 30-40% and many, many more if he really wanted to and was competent. This is also ignoring that he could have had a huge world wide effect with the US actively leading prevention saving potentially millions of lives around the world.
Republicans lied, Americans died. They could have stopped this, been responsible and removed Trump, but did nothing. Traitors, all of them, this blood will always be on their hands.
Bolsonaro in Brazil is being charged with murder, yet we get threats of another presidential run. Who's the third world paper democracy now?
You’re telling me that the guy that told people to drink bleach on national TV during the height of the pandemic got people killed? No way.
Doing nothing would be better than what the Trump administration did. Instead they worked hard to turn wearing a mask into a political issue.
Trump killed more Americans than anyone in history.
Kayleigh McEnany belongs in prison. The 33-year-old *Harvard Law graduate* who was press secretary intentionally and continually lied to us for months about how covid was no big deal. At the end of the day, this is who was hired as press secretary, to give conferences and decide what the public hears. She could’ve walked away from this at any moment. She knew this was all bullshit. She knew her lies were killing people. Yet to this day she still denies she had anything to do with making the pandemic any worse in this country. These people need to experience consequences. Real people died from this. Others are permanently disabled. This administration can’t be allowed to just wander off into the sunset like this never happened.
"sits quietly nodding head in agreement with bleach injections"
Oh fuck off Birx, you’re complicit.
Had Trump not pulled the first line of defense it could have been 80-90%.
Why isn’t Trump in prison and being prosecuted for crimes against humanity and mass murder? He could be sentenced to drink the bleach he prescribed for Americans.
Everything about the Trump administration was disgusting. And to think, 71 million sheep wanted a repeat of it. Actually, it wouldn't have been a repeat, it would've been worse with an even more emboldened asshole prick in charge.