TBR News May 4, 2020

The Voice of the White House Washington, D.C. May 4, 2020: Working in the White House as a junior staffer is an interesting experience.
When I was younger, I worked as a summer-time job in a clinic for people who had moderate to severe mental problems and the current work closely, at times, echos the earlier one.
I am not an intimate of the President but I have encountered him from time to time and I daily see manifestations of his growing psychological problems.
He insults people, uses foul language, is frantic to see his name mentioned on main-line television and pays absolutely no attention to any advice from his staff that runs counter to his strange ideas.
He lies like a rug to everyone, eats like a hog, makes lewd remarks to female staffers and flies into rages if anyone dares to contradict him.
It is becoming more and more evident to even the least intelligent American voter that Trump is vicious, corrupt and amoral. He has stated often that even if he loses the
election in 2020, he will not leave the White House. I have news for Donald but this is not the place to discuss it. “
Comment for May 4, 2020:” Dealing with Trump, at a high level, is like trying to herd cats or pick up mercury. Not possible. He waffles, lies, erupts and generally behaves like the ero-centric they are. Here is a clear description of the narcissist. “In psychological terms, narcissism doesn’t mean self-love—at least not of a genuine sort. It’s more accurate to say that people with narcissistic personality disorder (NPD) are in love with an idealized, grandiose image of themselves. And they’re in love with this inflated self-image precisely because it allows them to avoid deep feelings of insecurity. But propping up their delusions of grandeur takes a lot of work—and that’s where the dysfunctional attitudes and behaviors come in.
Narcissistic personality disorder involves a pattern of self-centered, arrogant thinking and behavior, a lack of empathy and consideration for other people, and an excessive need for admiration. Others often describe people with NPD as cocky, manipulative, selfish, patronizing, and demanding. This way of thinking and behaving surfaces in every area of the narcissist’s life: from work and friendships to family and love relationships.
People with narcissistic personality disorder are extremely resistant to changing their behavior, even when it’s causing them problems. Their tendency is to turn the blame on to others. What’s more, they are extremely sensitive and react badly to even the slightest criticisms, disagreements, or perceived slights, which they view as personal attacks. For the people in the narcissist’s life, it’s often easier just to go along with their demands to avoid the coldness and rages. However, by understanding more about narcissistic personality disorder, you can spot the narcissists in your life, protect yourself from their power plays, and establish healthier boundaries.
Signs and symptoms of narcissistic personality disorder
Grandiose sense of self-importance
Grandiosity is the defining characteristic of narcissism. More than just arrogance or vanity, grandiosity is an unrealistic sense of superiority. Narcissists believe they are unique or “special” and can only be understood by other special people. What’s more, they are too good for anything average or ordinary. They only want to associate and be associated with other high-status people, places, and things.
Narcissists also believe that they’re better than everyone else and expect recognition as such—even when they’ve done nothing to earn it. They will often exaggerate or outright lie about their achievements and talents. And when they talk about work or relationships, all you’ll hear is how much they contribute, how great they are, and how lucky the people in their lives are to have them. They are the undisputed star and everyone else is at best a bit player.
Lives in a fantasy world that supports their delusions of grandeur
Since reality doesn’t support their grandiose view of themselves, narcissists live in a fantasy world propped up by distortion, self-deception, and magical thinking. They spin self-glorifying fantasies of unlimited success, power, brilliance, attractiveness, and ideal love that make them feel special and in control. These fantasies protect them from feelings of inner emptiness and shame, so facts and opinions that contradict them are ignored or rationalized away. Anything that threatens to burst the fantasy bubble is met with extreme defensiveness and even rage, so those around the narcissist learn to tread carefully around their denial of reality.
Needs constant praise and admiration
A narcissist’s sense of superiority is like a balloon that gradually loses air without a steady stream of applause and recognition to keep it inflated. The occasional compliment is not enough. Narcissists need constant food for their ego, so they surround themselves with people who are willing to cater to their obsessive craving for affirmation. These relationships are very one-sided. It’s all about what the admirer can do for the narcissist, never the other way around. And if there is ever an interruption or diminishment in the admirer’s attention and praise, the narcissist treats it as a betrayal.
Sense of entitlement
Because they consider themselves special, narcissists expect favorable treatment as their due. They truly believe that whatever they want, they should get. They also expect the people around them to automatically comply with their every wish and whim. That is their only value. If you don’t anticipate and meet their every need, then you’re useless. And if you have the nerve to defy their will or “selfishly” ask for something in return, prepare yourself for aggression, outrage, or the cold shoulder.
Exploits others without guilt or shame
Narcissists never develop the ability to identify with the feelings of others—to put themselves in other people’s shoes. In other words, they lack empathy. In many ways, they view the people in their lives as objects—there to serve their needs. As a consequence, they don’t think twice about taking advantage of others to achieve their own ends. Sometimes this interpersonal exploitation is malicious, but often it is simply oblivious. Narcissists simply don’t think about how their behavior affects others. And if you point it out, they still won’t truly get it. The only thing they understand is their own needs.
Frequently demeans, intimidates, bullies, or belittles others
Narcissists feel threatened whenever they encounter someone who appears to have something they lack—especially those who are confident and popular. They’re also threatened by people who don’t kowtow to them or who challenge them in any way. Their defense mechanism is contempt. The only way to neutralize the threat and prop up their own sagging ego is to put those people down. They may do it in a patronizing or dismissive way as if to demonstrate how little the other person means to them. Or they may go on the attack with insults, name-calling, bullying, and threats to force the other person back into line. (helpguide)

The Table of Contents
• This Is Trump’s Fault
• Where did Covid-19 come from? What we know about its origins
• CIA & MI6 put together ‘scientific’ dossier ‘targeting China’s Covid-19 cover-up’ – as West readies to demand Beijing COMPENSATION
• New York-area coronavirus outbreak originated primarily in Europe, not China: report
• Through Creative Accounting, Trump Tries to Cast America’s Death Toll as an Achievement
• Pandemic brings Trump’s war on science to the boil – but who will win?
• Encyclopedia of American Loons
• Anti-vaccine movement: the epidemic of stupid

This Is Trump’s Fault
The president is failing, and Americans are paying for his failures.
April 7, 2020
by David Frum
The Atlantic
“I don’t take responsibility at all,” said President Donald Trump in the Rose Garden on March 13. Those words will probably end up as the epitaph of his presidency, the single sentence that sums it all up.
Trump now fancies himself a “wartime president.” How is his war going? By the end of March, the coronavirus had killed more Americans than the 9/11 attacks. By the first weekend in April, the virus had killed more Americans than any single battle of the Civil War. By Easter, it may have killed more Americans than the Korean War. On the present trajectory, it will kill, by late April, more Americans than Vietnam. Having earlier promised that casualties could be held near zero, Trump now claims he will have done a “very good job” if the toll is held below 200,000 dead.
The United States is on trajectory to suffer more sickness, more dying, and more economic harm from this virus than any other comparably developed country.
That the pandemic occurred is not Trump’s fault. The utter unpreparedness of the United States for a pandemic is Trump’s fault. The loss of stockpiled respirators to breakage because the federal government let maintenance contracts lapse in 2018 is Trump’s fault. The failure to store sufficient protective medical gear in the national arsenal is Trump’s fault. That states are bidding against other states for equipment, paying many multiples of the precrisis price for ventilators, is Trump’s fault. Air travelers summoned home and forced to stand for hours in dense airport crowds alongside infected people? That was Trump’s fault too. Ten weeks of insisting that the coronavirus is a harmless flu that would miraculously go away on its own? Trump’s fault again. The refusal of red-state governors to act promptly, the failure to close Florida and Gulf Coast beaches until late March? That fault is more widely shared, but again, responsibility rests with Trump: He could have stopped it, and he did not.
The lying about the coronavirus by hosts on Fox News and conservative talk radio is Trump’s fault: They did it to protect him. The false hope of instant cures and nonexistent vaccines is Trump’s fault, because he told those lies to cover up his failure to act in time. The severity of the economic crisis is Trump’s fault; things would have been less bad if he had acted faster instead of sending out his chief economic adviser and his son Eric to assure Americans that the first stock-market dips were buying opportunities. The firing of a Navy captain for speaking truthfully about the virus’s threat to his crew? Trump’s fault. The fact that so many key government jobs were either empty or filled by mediocrities? Trump’s fault. The insertion of Trump’s arrogant and incompetent son-in-law as commander in chief of the national medical supply chain? Trump’s fault.
For three years, Trump has blathered and bluffed and bullied his way through an office for which he is utterly inadequate. But sooner or later, every president must face a supreme test, a test that cannot be evaded by blather and bluff and bullying. That test has overwhelmed Trump.
Trump failed. He is failing. He will continue to fail. And Americans are paying for his failures.
The coronavirus emerged in China in late December. The Trump administration received its first formal notification of the outbreak on January 3. The first confirmed case in the United States was diagnosed in mid-January. Financial markets in the United States suffered the first of a sequence of crashes on February 24. The first person known to have succumbed to COVID-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus, in the United States died on February 29. The 100th died on March 17. By March 20, New York City alone had confirmed 5,600 cases. Not until March 21—the day the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services placed its first large-scale order for N95 masks—did the White House begin marshaling a national supply chain to meet the threat in earnest. “What they’ve done over the last 13 days has been really extraordinary,” Jared Kushner said on April 3, implicitly acknowledging the waste of weeks between January 3 and March 21.
Those were the weeks when testing hardly happened, because there were no kits. Those were the weeks when tracing hardly happened, because there was little testing. Those were the weeks when isolation did not happen, because the president and his administration insisted that the virus was under control. Those were the weeks when supplies were not ordered, because nobody in the White House was home to order them. Those lost weeks placed the United States on the path to the worst outbreak of the coronavirus in the developed world: one-fourth of all confirmed cases anywhere on Earth.
Those lost weeks also put the United States—and thus the world—on the path to an economic collapse steeper than any in recent memory. Statisticians cannot count fast enough to keep pace with the accelerating economic depression. It’s a good guess that the unemployment rate had reached 13 percent by April 3. It may peak at 20 percent, perhaps even higher, and threatens to stay at Great Depression–like levels at least into 2021, maybe longer.
This country—buffered by oceans from the epicenter of the global outbreak, in East Asia; blessed with the most advanced medical technology on Earth; endowed with agencies and personnel devoted to responding to pandemics—could have and should have suffered less than nations nearer to China. Instead, the United States will suffer more than any peer country.
It didn’t have to be this way. If somebody else had been president of the United States in December 2019—Hillary Clinton, Jeb Bush, Mike Pence, really almost anybody else—the United States would still have been afflicted by the coronavirus. But it would have been better prepared, and better able to respond.Through the early weeks of the pandemic, when so much death and suffering could still have been prevented or mitigated, Trump joined passivity to fantasy. In those crucial early days, Trump made two big wagers. He bet that the virus could somehow be prevented from entering the United States by travel restrictions. And he bet that, to the extent that the virus had already entered the United States, it would burn off as the weather warmed.
At a session with state governors on February 10, Trump predicted that the virus would quickly disappear on its own. “Now, the virus that we’re talking about having to do—you know, a lot of people think that goes away in April with the heat—as the heat comes in. Typically, that will go away in April. We’re in great shape though. We have 12 cases—11 cases, and many of them are in good shape now.” On February 14, Trump repeated his assurance that the virus would disappear by itself. He tweeted again on February 24 that he had the virus “very much under control in the USA.” On February 27, he said that the virus would disappear “like a miracle.”
Those two assumptions led him to conclude that not much else needed to be done. Senator Chris Murphy left a White House briefing on February 5, and tweeted:
Just left the Administration briefing on Coronavirus. Bottom line: they aren’t taking this seriously enough. Notably, no request for ANY emergency funding, which is a big mistake. Local health systems need supplies, training, screening staff etc. And they need it now.
Trump and his supporters now say that he was distracted from responding to the crisis by his impeachment. Even if it were true, pleading that the defense of your past egregious misconduct led to your present gross failures is not much of an excuse.
But if Trump and his senior national-security aides were distracted, impeachment was not the only reason, or even the principal reason. The period when the virus gathered momentum in Hubei province was also the period during which the United States seemed on the brink of war with Iran. Through the fall of 2019, tensions escalated between the two countries. The United States blamed an Iranian-linked militia for a December 27 rocket attack on a U.S. base in Iraq, triggering tit-for-tat retaliation that would lead to the U.S. killing General Qassem Soleimani on January 3, open threats of war by the United States on January 6, and the destruction of a civilian airliner over Tehran on January 8.
The preoccupation with Iran may account for why Trump paid so little attention to the virus, despite the many warnings. On January 18, Trump—on a golf excursion in Palm Beach, Florida—cut off his health secretary’s telephoned warning of gathering danger to launch into a lecture about vaping, The Washington Post reported.
Two days later, the first documented U.S. case was confirmed in Washington State.
Yet even at that late hour, Trump continued to think of the coronavirus as something external to the United States. He tweeted on January 22: “China has been working very hard to contain the Coronavirus. The United States greatly appreciates their efforts and transparency. It will all work out well. In particular, on behalf of the American People, I want to thank President Xi!”
Impeachment somehow failed to distract Trump from traveling to Davos, where in a January 22 interview with CNBC’s Squawk Box, he promised: “We have it totally under control. It’s one person coming in from China. We have it under control. It’s going to be just fine.”
Trump would later complain that he had been deceived by the Chinese. “I wish they could have told us earlier about what was going on inside,” he said on March 21. “We didn’t know about it until it started coming out publicly.”
If Trump truly was so trustingly ignorant as late as January 22, the fault was again his own. The Trump administration had cut U.S. public-health staff operating inside China by two-thirds, from 47 in January 2017 to 14 by 2019, an important reason it found itself dependent on less-accurate information from the World Health Organization. In July 2019, the Trump administration defunded the position that embedded an epidemiologist inside China’s own disease-control administration, again obstructing the flow of information to the United States.
Yet even if Trump did not know what was happening, other Americans did. On January 27, former Vice President Joe Biden sounded the alarm about a global pandemic in an op-ed in USA Today. By the end of January, eight cases of the virus had been confirmed in the United States. Hundreds more must have been incubating undetected.
On January 31, the Trump administration at last did something: It announced restrictions on air travel to and from China by non-U.S. persons. This January 31 decision to restrict air travel has become Trump’s most commonly proffered defense of his actions. “We’ve done an incredible job because we closed early,” Trump said on February 27. “We closed those borders very early, against the advice of a lot of professionals, and we turned out to be right. I took a lot of heat for that,” he repeated on March 4. Trump praised himself some more at a Fox News town hall in Scranton, Pennsylvania, the next day. “As soon as I heard that China had a problem, I said, ‘What’s going on with China? How many people are coming in?’ Nobody but me asked that question. And you know better than—again, you know … that I closed the borders very early.”
Because Trump puts so much emphasis on this point, it’s important to stress that none of this is true. Trump did not close the borders early—in fact, he did not truly close them at all.
The World Health Organization declared a global health emergency on January 30, but recommended against travel restrictions. On January 31, the same day the United States announced its restrictions, Italy suspended all flights to and from China. But unlike the American restrictions, which did not take effect until February 2, the Italian ban applied immediately. Australia acted on February 1, halting entries from China by foreign nationals, again ahead of Trump.
And Trump’s actions did little to stop the spread of the virus. The ban applied only to foreign nationals who had been in China during the previous 14 days, and included 11 categories of exceptions. Since the restrictions took effect, nearly 40,000 passengers have entered the United States from China, subjected to inconsistent screenings, The New York Times reported.
At a House hearing on February 5, a few days after the restrictions went into effect, Ron Klain—who led the Obama administration’s efforts against the Ebola outbreak—condemned the Trump policy as a “travel Band-Aid, not a travel ban.”
That same afternoon, Trump’s impeachment trial ended with his acquittal in the Senate. The president, though, turned his energy not to combatting the virus, but to the demands of his own ego.
The president’s top priority through February 2020 was to exact retribution from truth-tellers in the impeachment fight. On February 7, Trump removed Lieutenant Colonel Alexander Vindman from the National Security Council. On February 12, Trump withdrew his nomination of Jessie Liu as undersecretary of the Treasury for terrorism and financial crimes, apparently to punish her for her role in the prosecution and conviction of the Trump ally Roger Stone. On March 2, Trump withdrew the nomination of Elaine McCusker to the post of Pentagon comptroller; McCusker’s sin was having raised concerns that suspension of aid to Ukraine had been improper. Late on the evening of April 3, Trump fired Intelligence Community Inspector General Michael Atkinson, the official who had forwarded the Ukraine whistleblower complaint to the House and Senate Intelligence Committees, as the law required. As the epigrammist Windsor Mann tweeted that same night: “Trump’s impeachment distracted him from preparing for a pandemic, but the pandemic did not distract him from firing the man he holds responsible for his impeachment.”
Intentionally or not, Trump’s campaign of payback against his perceived enemies in the impeachment battle sent a warning to public-health officials: Keep your mouth shut. If anybody missed the message, the firing of Captain Brett Crozier from the command of an aircraft carrier for speaking honestly about the danger facing his sailors was a reminder. There’s a reason that the surgeon general of the United States seems terrified to answer even the most basic factual questions or that Rear Admiral John Polowczyk sounds like a malfunctioning artificial-intelligence program at press briefings. The president’s lies must not be contradicted. And because the president’s lies change constantly, it’s impossible to predict what might contradict him.
“BEST USA ECONOMY IN HISTORY!” Trump tweeted on February 11. On February 15, Trump shared a video from a Senate GOP account, tweeting: “Our booming economy is drawing Americans off the sidelines and BACK TO WORK at the highest rate in 30 years!”
Denial became the unofficial policy of the administration through the month of February, and as a result, that of the administration’s surrogates and propagandists. “It looks like the coronavirus is being weaponized as yet another element to bring down Donald Trump,” Rush Limbaugh said on his radio program February 24. “Now, I want to tell you the truth about the coronavirus … Yeah, I’m dead right on this. The coronavirus is the common cold, folks.
We have contained this,” Trump’s economic adviser Larry Kudlow told CNBC on February 24. “I won’t say airtight, but pretty close to airtight. We have done a good job in the United States.” Kudlow conceded that there might be “some stumbles” in financial markets, but insisted there would be no “economic tragedy.”
On February 28, then–White House Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney told an audience at the Conservative Political Action Conference, near Washington, D.C.:
The reason you’re … seeing so much attention to [the virus] today is that [the media] think this is gonna be what brings down this president. This is what this is all about. I got a note from a reporter saying, “What are you gonna do today to calm the markets.” I’m like: Really, what I might do today to calm the markets is tell people to turn their televisions off for 24 hours … This is not Ebola, okay? It’s not SARS, it’s not MERS.
That same day, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo scolded a House committee for daring to ask him about the coronavirus. “We agreed that I’d come today to talk about Iran, and the first question today is not about Iran.”
Throughout the crisis, the top priority of the president, and of everyone who works for the president, has been the protection of his ego. Americans have become sadly used to Trump’s blustery self-praise and his insatiable appetite for flattery. During the pandemic, this psychological deformity has mutated into a deadly strategic vulnerability for the United States.
“If we were doing a bad job, we should also be criticized. But we have done an incredible job,” Trump said on February 27. “We’re doing a great job with it,” he told Republican senators on March 10. “I always treated the Chinese Virus very seriously, and have done a very good job from the beginning,” he tweeted on March 18.
For three-quarters of his presidency, Trump has taken credit for the economic expansion that began under President Barack Obama in 2010. That expansion accelerated in 2014, just in time to deliver real prosperity over the past three years. The harm done by Trump’s own initiatives, and especially his trade wars, was masked by that continued growth. The economy Trump inherited became his all-purpose answer to his critics. Did he break laws, corrupt the Treasury, appoint cronies, and tell lies? So what? Unemployment was down, the stock market up.
Suddenly, in 2020, the rooster that had taken credit for the sunrise faced the reality of sunset. He could not bear it.
Underneath all the denial and self-congratulation, Trump seems to have glimpsed the truth. The clearest statement of that knowledge was expressed on February 28. That day, Trump spoke at a rally in South Carolina—his penultimate rally before the pandemic forced him to stop. This was the rally at which Trump accused the Democrats of politicizing the coronavirus as “their new hoax.” That line was so shocking, it has crowded out awareness of everything else Trump said that day. Yet those other statements are, if possible, even more relevant to understanding the trouble he brought upon the country.
Trump does not speak clearly. His patterns of speech betray a man with guilty secrets to hide, and a beclouded mind. Yet we can discern, through the mental fog, that Trump had absorbed some crucial facts. By February 28, somebody in his orbit seemed to already be projecting 35,000 to 40,000 deaths from the coronavirus. Trump remembered the number, but refused to believe it. His remarks are worth revisiting at length:
Now the Democrats are politicizing the coronavirus, you know that, right? Coronavirus, they’re politicizing it. We did one of the great jobs. You say, “How’s President Trump doing?” They go, “Oh, not good, not good.” They have no clue. They don’t have any clue. They can’t even count their votes in Iowa. They can’t even count. No, they can’t. They can’t count their votes.
One of my people came up to me and said, “Mr. President, they tried to beat you on Russia, Russia, Russia.” That didn’t work out too well. They couldn’t do it. They tried the impeachment hoax. That was on a perfect conversation. They tried anything. They tried it over and over. They’d been doing it since you got in. It’s all turning. They lost. It’s all turning. Think of it. Think of it. And this is their new hoax.
But we did something that’s been pretty amazing. We have 15 people [sick] in this massive country, and because of the fact that we went early. We went early; we could have had a lot more than that. We’re doing great. Our country is doing so great. We are so unified. We are so unified. The Republican Party has never ever been unified like it is now. There has never been a movement in the history of our country like we have now. Never been a movement.
So a statistic that we want to talk about—Go ahead: Say USA. It’s okay; USA. So a number that nobody heard of, that I heard of recently and I was shocked to hear it: 35,000 people on average die each year from the flu. Did anyone know that? Thirty-five thousand, that’s a lot of people. It could go to 100,000; it could be 27,000. They say usually a minimum of 27, goes up to 100,000 people a year die.
And so far, we have lost nobody to coronavirus in the United States. Nobody. And it doesn’t mean we won’t and we are totally prepared. It doesn’t mean we won’t, but think of it. You hear 35 and 40,000 people and we’ve lost nobody and you wonder, the press is in hysteria mode.
On February 28, very few Americans had heard of an estimated death toll of 35,000 to 40,000, but Trump had heard it. And his answer to that estimate was: “So far, we have lost nobody.” He conceded, “It doesn’t mean we won’t.” But he returned to his happy talk. “We are totally prepared.” And as always, it was the media’s fault. “You hear 35 and 40,000 people and we’ve lost nobody and you wonder, the press is in hysteria mode.”
By February 28, it was too late to exclude the coronavirus from the United States. It was too late to test and trace, to isolate the first cases and halt their further spread—that opportunity had already been lost. It was too late to refill the stockpiles that the Republican Congresses of the Tea Party years had refused to replenish, despite frantic pleas from the Obama administration. It was too late to produce sufficient ventilators in sufficient time.
But on February 28, it was still not too late to arrange an orderly distribution of medical supplies to the states, not too late to coordinate with U.S. allies, not too late to close the Florida beaches before spring break, not too late to bring passengers home from cruise lines, not too late to ensure that state unemployment-insurance offices were staffed and ready, not too late for local governments to get funds to food banks, not too late to begin social distancing fast and early. Stay-at-home orders could have been put into effect on March 1, not in late March and early April.
So much time had been wasted by the end of February. So many opportunities had been squandered. But even then, the shock could have been limited. Instead, Trump and his inner circle plunged deeper into two weeks of lies and denial, both about the disease and about the economy.
On February 28, Eric Trump urged Americans to go “all in” on the weakening stock market.
Kudlow repeated his advice that it was a good time to buy stocks on CNBC on March 6 after another bad week for the financial markets. As late as March 9, Trump was still arguing that the coronavirus would be no worse than the seasonal flu.
So last year 37,000 Americans died from the common Flu. It averages between 27,000 and 70,000 per year. Nothing is shut down, life & the economy go on. At this moment there are 546 confirmed cases of CoronaVirus, with 22 deaths. Think about that!
But the facade of denial was already cracking.
Through early March, financial markets declined and then crashed. Schools closed, then whole cities, and then whole states. The overwhelmed president responded by doing what comes most naturally to him at moments of trouble: He shifted the blame to others.
The lack of testing equipment? On March 13, Trump passed that buck to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Obama administration.
The White House had dissolved the directorate of the National Security Council responsible for planning for and responding to pandemics? Not me, Trump said on March 13. Maybe somebody else in the administration did it, but “I didn’t do it … I don’t know anything about it. You say we did that. I don’t know anything about it.”
Were ventilators desperately scarce? Obtaining medical equipment was the governors’ job, Trump said on a March 16 conference call.
Did Trump delay action until it was far too late? That was the fault of the Chinese government for withholding information, he complained on March 21.
On March 27, Trump attributed his own broken promises about ventilator production to General Motors, now headed by a woman unworthy of even a last name: “Always a mess with Mary B.”
Masks, gowns, and gloves were running short only because hospital staff were stealing them, Trump suggested on March 29.
Was the national emergency medical stockpile catastrophically depleted? Trump’s campaign creatively tried to pin that on mistakes Joe Biden made back in 2009.
At his press conference on April 2, Trump blamed the shortage of lifesaving equipment, and the ensuing panic-buying, on states’ failure to build their own separate stockpile. “They have to work that out. What they should do is they should’ve—long before this pandemic arrived—they should’ve been on the open market just buying. There was no competition; you could have made a great price. The states have to stock up. It’s like one of those things. They waited. They didn’t want to spend the money, because they thought this would never happen.”
Were New Yorkers dying? On April 2, Trump fired off a peevish letter to Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer: “If you spent less time on your ridiculous impeachment hoax, which went haplessly on forever and ended up going nowhere (except increasing my poll numbers), and instead focused on helping the people of New York, then New York would not have been so completely unprepared for the ‘invisible enemy.’”
Trump’s instinct to dodge and blame had devastating consequences for Americans. Every governor and mayor who needed the federal government to take action, every science and medical adviser who hoped to prevent Trump from doing something stupid or crazy, had to reckon with Trump’s psychic needs as their single biggest problem.
As his medical advisers sought to dissuade Trump from proceeding with his musing about reopening the country by Easter, April 12, Deborah Birx—the White House’s coronavirus-response coordinator—appeared on the evangelical CBN network to deliver this abject flattery: “[Trump is] so attentive to the scientific literature & the details & the data. I think his ability to analyze & integrate data that comes out of his long history in business has really been a real benefit.”
Governors got the message too. “If they don’t treat you right, I don’t call,” Trump explained at a White House press briefing on March 27. The federal response has been dogged by suspicions of favoritism for political and personal allies of Trump. The District of Columbia has seen its requests denied, while Florida gets everything it asks for.
The weeks of Trump-administration denial and delay have triggered a desperate scramble among states. The Trump administration is allocating some supplies through the Federal Emergency Management Agency, but has made the deliberate choice to allow large volumes of crucial supplies to continue to be distributed by commercial firms to their clients. That has left state governments bidding against one another, as if the 1787 Constitution had never been signed, and we have no national government.
In his panic, Trump is sacrificing U.S. alliances abroad, attempting to recoup his own failure by turning predator. German and French officials accuse the Trump administration of diverting supplies they had purchased to the United States. On April 3, the North American company 3M publicly rebuked the Trump administration for its attempt to embargo medical exports to Canada, where 3M has operated seven facilities for 70 years.
Around the world, allies are registering that in an emergency, when it matters most, the United States has utterly failed to lead. Perhaps the only political leader in Canada ever to say a good word about Donald Trump, Ontario Premier Doug Ford, expressed disgust at an April 3 press conference. “I just can’t stress how disappointed I am at President Trump … I’m not going to rely on President Trump,” he said. “I’m not going to rely on any prime minister or president from any country ever again.” Ford argued for a future of Canadian self-sufficiency. Trump’s nationalist selfishness is proving almost as contagious as the virus itself—and could ultimately prove as dangerous, too.
As the pandemic kills, as the economic depression tightens its grip, Donald Trump has consistently put his own needs first. Right now, when his only care should be to beat the pandemic, Trump is renegotiating his debts with his bankers and lease payments with Palm Beach County.
He has never tried to be president of the whole United States, but at most 46 percent of it, to the extent that serving even the 46 percent has been consistent with his supreme concerns: stealing, loafing, and whining. Now he is not even serving the 46 percent. The people most victimized by his lies and fantasies are the people who trusted him, the more conservative Americans who harmed themselves to prove their loyalty to Trump. An Arkansas pastor told The Washington Post of congregants “ready to lick the floor” to support the president’s claim that there is nothing to worry about. On March 15, the Trump-loyal governor of Oklahoma tweeted a since-deleted photo of himself and his children at a crowded restaurant buffet. “Eating with my kids and all my fellow Oklahomans at the @CollectiveOKC. It’s packed tonight!” Those who took their cues from Trump and the media who propagandized for him, and all Americans, will suffer for it.
Governments often fail. From Pearl Harbor to the financial crisis of 2008, you can itemize a long list of missed warnings and overlooked dangers that cost lives and inflicted hardship. But in the past, Americans could at least expect public spirit and civic concern from their presidents.
Trump has mouthed the slogan “America first,” but he has never acted on it. It has always been “Trump first.” His business first. His excuses first. His pathetic vanity first.
Trump has taken millions in payments from the Treasury. He has taken millions in payments from U.S. businesses and foreign governments. He has taken millions in payments from the Republican Party and his own inaugural committee. He has taken so much that does not belong to him, that was unethical and even illegal for him to take. But responsibility? No, he will not take that.
Yet responsibility falls upon Trump, whether he takes it or not. No matter how much he deflects and insults and snivels and whines, this American catastrophe is on his hands and on his head.

Where did Covid-19 come from? What we know about its origins
Scientists cast doubt on the Trump-backed theory that the coronavirus escaped from a Chinese lab
May 1, 2020
by Peter Beaumont
The Guardian
Why are the origins of the pandemic so controversial?
How Covid-19 began has become increasingly contentious, with the US and other allies suggesting China has not been transparent about the origins of the outbreak.
Donald Trump, the US president, has given credence to the idea that intelligence exists suggesting the virus may have escaped from a lab in Wuhan, although the US intelligence community has pointedly declined to back this up. The scientific community says there is no current evidence for this claim.
This follows reports that the White House had been pressuring US intelligence community on the claim, recalling the Bush administration’s pressure to “stove pipe” the intelligence before the war in Iraq.
What’s the problem with the Chinese version?
A specific issue is that the official origin story doesn’t add up in terms of the initial epidemiology of the outbreak, not least the incidence of early cases with no apparent connection to the Wuhan seafood market, where Beijing says the outbreak began. If these people were not infected at the market, or via contacts who were infected at the market, critics ask, how do you explain these cases?
The Wuhan labs
Two laboratories in Wuhan studying bat coronaviruses have come under the spotlight. The Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) is a biosecurity level 4 facility – the highest for biocontainment – and the level 2 Wuhan Centre for Disease Control, which is located not far from the fish market, had collected bat coronavirus specimens.
Several theories have been promoted. The first, and wildest, is that scientists at WIV were engaged in experiments with bat coronavirus, involving so-called gene splicing, and the virus then escaped and infected humans. A second version is that sloppy biosecurity among lab staff and in procedures, perhaps in the collection or disposal of animal specimens, released a wild virus.
Is there any evidence the virus was engineered?
The scientific consensus rejecting the virus being engineered is almost unanimous. In a letter to Nature in March, a team in California led by microbiology professor Kristian Andersen said “the genetic data irrefutably shows that [Covid-19] is not derived from any previously used virus backbone” – in other words spliced sections of another known virus.
Far more likely, they suggested, was that the virus emerged naturally and became stronger through natural selection. “We propose two scenarios that can plausibly explain the origin of Sars-CoV-2: natural selection in an animal host before zoonotic [animal to human] transfer; and natural selection in humans following zoonotic transfer.”
Peter Ben Embarek, an expert at the World Health Organization in animal to human transmission of diseases, and other specialists also explained to the Guardian that if there had been any manipulation of the virus you would expect to see evidence in both the gene sequences and also distortion in the data of the family tree of mutations – a so-called “reticulation” effect.
In a statement to the Guardian, James Le Duc, the head of the Galveston National Laboratory in the US, the biggest active biocontainment facility on a US academic campus, also poured cold water on the suggestion.
“There is convincing evidence that the new virus was not the result of intentional genetic engineering and that it almost certainly originated from nature, given its high similarity to other known bat-associated coronaviruses,” he said.
What about an accidental escape of a wild sample because of poor lab safety practices?
The accidental release of a wild sample has been the focus of most attention, although the “evidence” offered is at best highly circumstantial.The Washington Post has reported concerns in 2018 over security and management weakness from US embassy officials who visited the WIV several times, although the paper also conceded there was no conclusive proof the lab was the source of the outbreak.
Le Duc, however, paints a different picture of the WIV. “I have visited and toured the new BSL4 laboratory in Wuhan, prior to it starting operations in 2017- … It is of comparable quality and safety measures as any currently in operation in the US or Europe.”
He also described encounters with Shi Zhengli, the Chinese virologist at the WIV who has led research into bat coronaviruses, and discovered the link between bats and the Sars virus that caused disease worldwide in 2003, describing her as “fully engaged, very open and transparent about her work, and eager to collaborate”.
Maureen Miller, an epidemiologist who worked with Shi as part of a US-funded viral research programme, echoed Le Duc’s assessment. She said she believed the lab escape theory was an “absolute conspiracy theory” and referred to Shi as “brilliant”.
Problems with the timeline and map of the spread of the virus
While the experts who spoke to the Guardian made clear that understanding of the origins of the virus remained provisional, they added that the current state of knowledge of the initial spread also created problems for the lab escape theory.
When Peter Forster, a geneticist at Cambridge, compared sequences of the virus genome collected early in the Chines outbreak – and later globally – he identified three dominant strains.
Early in the outbreak, two strains appear to have been in circulation at roughly at the same time – strain A and strain B – with a C variant later developing from strain B.
But in a surprise finding, the version with the closest genetic similarity to bat coronavirus was not the one most prevalent early on in the central Chinese city of Wuhan but instead associated with a scattering of early cases in the southern Guangdong province.
Between 24 December 2019 and 17 January 2020, Forster explains, just three out of 23 cases in Wuhan were type A, while the rest were type B. In patients in Guangdong province, however, five out of nine were found to have type A of the virus.
“The very small numbers notwithstanding,” said Forster, “the early genome frequencies until 17 January do not favour Wuhan as an origin over other parts of China, for example five of nine Guangdong/Shenzhen patients who had A types.”
In other words, it still remains far from certain that Wuhan was even necessarily where the virus first emerged.
If there is no evidence of engineering and the origin is still so disputed, why are we still talking about the Wuhan labs theory?
The pandemic has exacerbated existing geopolitical struggles, prompting a disinformation war that has drawn in the US, China, Russia and others.
Journalists and scientists have been targeted by people with an apparent interest in pushing circumstantial evidence related to the virus’s origins, perhaps as part of this campaign and to distract from the fact that few governments have had a fault-free response.
What does this mean now?
The current state of knowledge about coronavirus and its origin suggest the most likely explanation remains the most prosaic. Like other coronaviruses before, it simply spread to humans via a natural event, the starting point for many in the scientific community including the World Health Organization.
Further testing in China in the months ahead may eventually establish the source of the outbreak. But for now it is too early.

CIA & MI6 put together ‘scientific’ dossier ‘targeting China’s Covid-19 cover-up’ – as West readies to demand Beijing COMPENSATION
May 3, 2020
RT
The West’s wish to pin the blame on China (and probably the bill too) for the Covid-19 pandemic has been reportedly incarnated in a 15-page dossier compiled by intelligence agencies, which has now leaked, according to reports.
The document, described by the Australian newspaper the Sunday Telegraph, was prepared by “concerned Western governments.” The publication mentions that the Five Eyes intelligence agencies are investigating China, pointing to the United States, Australia, New Zealand, Canada and the UK.
The authors of the research found some pretty strange ways to paint China’s response to the outbreak in a negative and even sinister way. For instance, despite a presumed requirement for brevity in such a short paper it refers to a study which claimed the killer coronavirus had been created in a lab.
The scientific community’s consensus says otherwise, while US intelligence is on the record agreeing with this position. The study itself has been withdrawn because there was no direct proof to support the theory, as its author Botao Xiao acknowledged. But the ‘China dossier’ found a warm spot for a mention, it appears.
A large portion of the document is apparently dedicated to the Wuhan Institute of Virology and one of its top researchers, Shi Zhengli, who has a long and distinguished career of studying SARS-like coronaviruses and bats as their natural reservoirs. It seems the dossier is not interested in the database of bat-related viruses she helped create but rather in the claim that the Covid-19 pandemic started as a leak from her lab.
The dossier points to the so-called gain-of-function research that Dr. Shi was involved in. Such studies are aimed at identifying possible mutations in infectious agents that may occur naturally and makes them much more dangerous to humans. Creating stems with such mutations in the lab allows to prepare for a possible outbreak, though whether such research is worth the risk of accidental release or even bioterrorism attacks has been subject to much debate.
In the contents of the dossier however the implications seem clear: what if China lost control of one of its dangerous samples and then did everything it could to cover it up? The alleged obfuscation seems to be the main focus of the damning document. It claims Beijing was engaged in “suppression and destruction of evidence” including by disinfecting the food market believed to be the ground zero of the Covid-19 pandemic. China is also accused of hypocrisy because it imposed a ban on internal travel from the Hubei province while arguing against a ban on international flights.
“Millions of people leave Wuhan after the outbreak and before Beijing locks down the city on January 23,” the newspaper cited the document as saying. “Thousands fly overseas. Throughout February, Beijing presses the US, Italy, India, Australia, Southeast Asian neighbours and others not to protect themselves via travel restrictions, even as the PRC imposes severe restrictions at home.”
The leaked dossier is yet to be made public for independent scrutiny. But the dramatic tone of the quotes in the Telegraph and the far-fetched implications indicate that it is along the lines of infamous intelligence assessments and media leaks by anonymous officials, which have been the staple of Western foreign policy for decades. Remember how Saddam Hussein secretly obtained yellowcake uranium and was ready to strike Europe with his missiles in 45 minutes? Or the Russian bots that swayed the 2016 election with memes? If true, we can expect many ‘revelations’ in months to come.

New York-area coronavirus outbreak originated primarily in Europe, not China: report

by Dom Calicchio
Fox News
Two separate studies show that the coronavirus outbreak in the New York City area – by far the most deadly in the US – originated from Europe, not China, according to a report.
Researchers conducting one of the studies have detected seven separate lineages of viruses that have arrived in the New York City area and they expect to find more, The New York Times reported Wednesday.
The two studies are being conducted by the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai and the New York University School of Medicine.
Despite examining different examples of the outbreak, researchers from both teams reached largely the same conclusions about its origins, the Times reported.
“The majority is clearly European,” Dr. Harm van Bakel, a geneticist and co-author of the Icahn School’s study, told the newspaper.
Travelers likely carrying the virus had already been arriving in New York from Europe before Jan. 31, when President Trump limited entry by foreign nationals who’d been in China and March 11, when the president announced plans to block travelers from most parts of Europe, the Times reported.
On March 19, the newspaper reported that travelers arriving from Europe – where outbreaks in Italy and Spain were severe – were being asked at New York’s John F. Kennedy International Airport only if they had been to China or Iran, not if they had visited the hardest-hit nations in Europe.
“People were just oblivious,” Dr. Adriana Heguy of the NYU research team told the Times.
Researchers need to track the history of the virus so they will be able to develop vaccines and modify them as the virus mutates into other forms, the report said.
As of late Wednesday, the novel coronavirus, also known as COVID-19, had infected 1.5 million people worldwide and killed nearly 88,000 people.
In the US, the virus had infected more than 420,000 people and killed more than 14,300.
In New York City, the virus had infected nearly 82,000 people (more than 19 percent of all US cases) and killed more than 6,200 (nearly 44 percent of all US deaths).

Through Creative Accounting, Trump Tries to Cast America’s Death Toll as an Achievement
May 2 ,2020
by Robert Mackey
The Intercept
In a week where the number of Americans killed by Covid-19 passed 66,000, Donald Trump assured us that this death toll, looked at from the right angle, is really proof of how great he is at his job.
Asked on Thursday to account for his son-in-law and adviser Jared Kushner’s description of the federal government’s chaotic response to the coronavirus pandemic as “a great success story” that “needs to be told,” the president said that he agreed. “We’ve solved every problem,” he claimed. “We solved it quickly.”
“I don’t think anybody has done a better job — with testing, with ventilators, with all of the things that we’ve done,” Trump added. “And our death totals, our numbers per million people, are really very, very strong. We’re very proud of the job we’ve done.”
Trump’s strange boast about the “very, very strong” death toll puzzled many viewers, but it helps to know that, for weeks, the president and his senior medical adviser, Dr. Deborah Birx, have been urging Americans to consider that, on a per capita basis, the U.S. mortality rate is lower than that of several of the worst-hit countries in Western Europe.
On April 10, for instance, Trump asserted that “we’ve kept our fatality rate very, very low compared to other countries.” Later in the same briefing, Birx said that he was right. “As the President noted, our mortality in the United States is significantly less than many of the other countries when you correct them for our population.”
“The United States has achieved a significant lower mortality rate than almost all other countries,” Trump said at another briefing six days later.
“While we mourn the tragic loss of life — and you can’t mourn it any stronger than we’re mourning it,” Trump said at the start of a briefing on April 18, “the United States has produced dramatically better health outcomes than any other country, with the possible exception of Germany — and I think we’re as good or better.”
Birx then presented a bar chart comparing the death toll in the U.S., expressed as a share of population, to the far higher rates of death in six European nations: Belgium, Spain, Italy, France, the United Kingdom and the Netherlands. After she did so, Trump interrupted her presentation to point to the far lower reported mortality rate of another country on the chart, China, and suggested that the authorities there must have lied about their death toll to produce that statistic.
But that chart also included evidence that it is profoundly misleading to cast the U.S. response as a success by comparing it to just those six countries. That’s because the data also showed that Germany, whose success Trump had downplayed, had a far lower mortality rate than the U.S.
As the data presented by Birx showed, as of mid-April, Americans were more than twice as likely as Germans to have died from Covid-19. While the U.S. had recorded 11.24 deaths per 100,000 people then, Germany, which had a high rate of infection, had kept deaths down to 5.25 per 100,000.
Today, Americans are faring even worse in comparison to Germans. According to updated mortality rates compiled on May 2 by Johns Hopkins researchers for the 10 countries with the most confirmed cases of Covid-19, the U.S. now has 20.29 deaths per 100,000, compared to 8.21 in Germany.
Expressed in Trump’s preferred metric of deaths per million, for every 203 Americans lost to Covid-19 so far, just 82 Germans have perished. What this means is that if the federal government in Washington had been as successful at keeping its citizens alive as the one in Berlin, the death toll in the U.S. would not be, as it is today, more than 66,000, but less than 27,000.
In other words, Trump and Birx have been engaged in a kind of statistical sleight-of-hand, one that seems designed to distract attention from the fact that tens of thousands of Americans would still be alive today had their government managed the crisis as well as the German one.
At no point in the April 18 briefing did either Trump or Birx explain why Americans should be satisfied with being less likely to die of Covid-19 than citizens of Britain or France, but in so much more danger than Germans.
There are also other ways in which it is misleading to compare deaths in the U.S. so far to those of the six European nations with the worst mortality rates. To start with, by focusing just on other hard-hit countries, Trump distracts attention from the fact that there are dozens of other countries, in Europe and other parts of the world, that have far lower mortality rates than the U.S. — like Greece, Austria, Denmark, Portugal, Canada and Japan.
Most notably, South Korea, which was so successful at suppressing the outbreak through early action and widespread testing that it has recorded just 250 deaths — a mortality rate of 0.48 per 100,000 — was also not included in the ranking presented by Birx. If the U.S. had matched South Korea, just over 1,500 Americans would have died to date.
Despite this, Trump has continued to incorrectly refer to that chart from the April 18 briefing as proof that the United States is “right at the top” of world rankings. Speaking to the press on Thursday during an Oval Office meeting with New Jersey’s governor, Phil Murphy, Trump asked Birx to get out the chart, falsely claiming that it showed “we’re the leader of the world, we’re really the leader, in this case, the leader of the world. And we’ve done better, if you look at our deaths, if you look at mortality rates…. I’m going to get a chart, because it’s maybe the most impressive thing — right? — how we’ve done.”
Then there is the fact that all six of the most affected European countries are much more densely populated than the U.S., and population density appears to make it harder to stop the spread of the virus.
That Germany and South Korea are also densely populated indicates that there are other factors at play, but the first wave of outbreaks in Europe and the U.S. have been most intense in major cities and their surrounding metropolitan areas.
Even the least densely populated of the six European nations that have been hit the hardest by the outbreak, Spain, is more densely settled than it might seem. Alasdair Rae, a professor of urban studies and planning at the University of Sheffield, noted in 2018 that Spain’s population density of 93 people per square kilometer is misleading, since only about 13 percent of the country’s territory is actually lived in. Barcelona, along with Madrid, has been one of the two Spanish cities most affected by the pandemic. As Rae pointed out, “more than 53,000 people inhabit a single square kilometer area in Barcelona,” making it the most densely populated square kilometer in Europe.
As a series of visualization of population density created this week by Rae shows, the worst affected areas of Europe — northern Italy, Belgium, the Netherlands, northern France and southern England — are among the continent’s most tightly packed regions.
The U.S. by contrast, has a much higher rural population than Western Europe. For that reason, it might be more appropriate to compare the mortality rates of those European nations to that of the seven badly hit northeastern American states that have formed an interstate compact to collaborate on the phased reopening of their economies.
Those states — New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Pennsylvania and Delaware — have recorded 35,718 deaths out of a combined population of about 53.6 million. That mortality rate of 66.6 per 100,000 for the region exceeds the current figure for every European country except Belgium, which, unlike the U.S., includes in its count a large number of deaths in nursing homes that are suspected of being virus-related, but have not been confirmed by testing.
While Belgium’s coronavirus emergency task force has come under some political pressure for including so many suspected cases — nearly half the nation’s total deaths — health officials have refused to change their method, describing surveillance of the disease as more important than negative publicity.
One Belgian government minister, Denis Ducarme, noticed and was not happy about the chart of national mortality rates displayed by Birx and Trump last month to bolster their argument that the U.S. was doing relatively well in handling the pandemic. “Our method of counting is the most exhaustive possible,” Ducarme wrote on Twitter. “When @realDonaldTrump makes a macabre ranking, by pointing the finger at Belgium to give the impression that all is well in the U.S.A. I find it disgraceful, the basest of politics.”
Updated: Sunday, May 3, 11:01 a.m. PDT
This article was updated with the latest mortality rate data, as of May 2, for 10 nations, including the United States and Germany.

Pandemic brings Trump’s war on science to the boil – but who will win?
Three years of hostility to evidence-based policy have led to a crisis in which the president’s ill-informed, self-serving ‘hunches’ have deadly consequences
May 3, 2020
by Ed Pilkington
The Guardian
The look on her face will be remembered as one of the defining images of the coronavirus crisis. As Dr Deborah Birx, coordinator of the White House response to the pandemic, sat listening to Donald Trump musing about disinfectant as a treatment for Covid-19, her eyes blinked, her mouth tightened, and she appeared to be in pain.
As a cellular immunologist, Birx’s anguish was all too understandable. But she is not only a scientist, she is a diplomat, and since Trump made his contentious remarks last week she has declined to criticize his flight of fancy.
Other leading scientists have felt less obliged to be circumspect. “Trump’s constant antics are a danger to the American people,” said John Holdren, a Harvard environmental scientist who was Barack Obama’s White House science adviser through both his presidential terms.
Holdren told the Guardian the current approach to science and expertise within the Trump administration is a “shame on many levels. Trump’s talking nonsense risks misleading the public, and it distracts top scientists who spend emotional energy neutralizing the damage he causes when they should be tackling the virus.”
Three months into the pandemic, with the number of confirmed cases passing 1 million, the tension that has been simmering for months between Trump and the scientific world is at boiling point. His improvisation about injecting disinfectant encapsulated the sense of demoralization – of despair, almost – that many American scientists now feel about the drift from evidence-based leadership.
“They are doing everything they can to undermine science at a time when it is critically important, as are facts. We have come to an extreme level,” said Gina McCarthy, who led the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) until Trump’s accession in 2017.
Science is so assailed at present that the situation raises a startling question: are we losing the fight for reason in the pandemic? McCarthy, who now heads the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), said she frets America may prove incapable of withstanding the anti-science assault unleashed by Trump.
“I have been worried that people wouldn’t notice the attack happening. These things are difficult to explain – they are not soundbites – and our country has for a long time taken for granted the fact that we make science-based decisions. That is simply not true any more.”
Science has played no role in virtually all the top appointments Trump has made.
The accusation that in three short years Trump has succeeded in severing historic ties between the US government and science-based decision making is one of the more chilling charges leveled at his presidency. Science has after all been at the core of the American experiment, ever since Franklin Roosevelt created the White House Office of Scientific R&D in 1941.
Not only was scientific endeavor instrumental in winning the second world war – through the atomic bomb and innovations such as radar and communications technology – it was also central to America’s postwar economic success. In recent times, Obama inherited that legacy and ran with it, promising on his first day in office in 2009 that “we will restore science to its rightful place”.
In his first set of presidential appointments, Obama brought into his administration five science Nobel prizewinners and 25 members of the National Academies of Science, Engineering and Medicine. They became known as the “dream team”.
By contrast, Holdren said, “Trump is the exact opposite. Science has played no role in virtually all the top appointments he has made.”
The roll call of officials Trump has entrusted with protecting Americans from Covid-19 tells its own story. With no Nobel laureates in sight, Trump relied initially on Alex Azar, secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), who is a lawyer and former drug company boss; followed by Mike Pence, a career politician and evangelical Christian; and most recently Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law, whose expertise lies in real estate.
Trump’s top team have in turn promoted individuals in their own mold. As Reuters has reported, Azar gave the job of coordinating the fight against coronavirus within HHS, to an individual whose job immediately before joining the Trump administration was as a dog breeder running a small business called Dallas Labradoodles.
The clash between science and the White House is the culmination of a long confrontation. As Jeffrey Sachs, a globally renowned economist at Columbia University, told the Guardian: “The Republican party has been on an aggressive anti-science campaign for decades, mainly because scientists are in favor of environmental regulations while the Republicans are the party of polluters.”
In Trump Republicans have found a leader who regards his own innate abilities to divine the truth as superior to evidence-based science. In one of the most telling moments of his daily White House coronavirus briefings, Trump was asked what metrics he would use to decide when Americans could emerge from lockdown.
He raised his right hand, placed his index finger against his temple, and said: “The metrics right here. That’s my metrics.”
That faith in his own instincts over and above fact has been a characteristic for years. Trump is famous for believing that exercise is misguided, because people are born with a finite amount of energy in them, like batteries.
Until he entered presidential politics, he was opposed to vaccinating children, claiming falsely that vaccines cause autism.
Given these tendencies, when Trump snatched unexpected victory in 2016 the scientific community braced itself for what they knew would be an uncomfortable ride.
The attack began in the very first week of Trump’s presidency. Scientists, including public health experts, were barred from communicating with the public about their work and new restrictions were imposed on the EPA.
Since then the Union of Concerned Scientists has recorded no fewer than 139 major attacks from the Trump administration on scientific integrity. For the Union’s Michael Halpern, the mindset was summed up by Sharpiegate in September 2019 when the White House redrew the path of Hurricane Dorian to include Alabama so that the president would not have to admit he made a mistake.
To the shock and dismay of the science community, the national weather agency was forced to play along.
“Sharpiegate was the harbinger of what’s happened with the pandemic,” Halpern said.
When the nation is dealing with a hurricane that threatens the lives of thousands it is serious enough, but a pandemic threatening millions of Americans is on another level. The sidelining of expert advice that has been a trademark of this presidency has burst into full view, with Trump’s belief in his own intellectual prejudices pitted directly – often in front of TV cameras – against the evidence-based advice of his own bewildered officials.
“Many scientists were dreading that the president would be faced by a test just like coronavirus,” Halpern said. “It has had immediate and catastrophic consequences.”
All the major mistakes that have been made by the Trump administration in handling the pandemic can be ascribed to this failure to listen to, and trust, scientific advice. Trump was slow to mobilise the federal government because he failed to heed scientific warnings; instead he chose to follow his “hunch” that a “miracle” would happen and the virus would disappear.
His obsession with the anti-malarial drug chloroquine as a potential “game changer” in treating Covid-19 caused havoc in the US and around the world, with recent studies suggesting the drug has no beneficial qualities and plenty of side-effects.
In contrast to other countries like South Korea where public health agencies have spearheaded successful efforts to contain Covid-19, in the US the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has been sidelined. Its last press conference was in March.
The assault on science does not end with the White House. Trump’s vocal disdain for evidence-based thinking has emboldened an army of quacks, pseudoscience groups and conspiracy theorists who have stepped up their proselytizing online and in protests across the country.
The president’s remarks about injecting disinfectant not only led to some people poisoning themselves by drinking cleaning fluid, it also encouraged peddlers of industrial bleach to reinforce their claims that they had a “miracle cure” for coronavirus.
Del Bigtree, a leading anti-vaxxer who produced the film Vaxxed based on the views of the disgraced British former physician Andrew Wakefield, told the Guardian that viewership of his online show the HighWire has increased “exponentially” during the pandemic.
If there is a silver lining in the current browbeaten state of American science, it lies paradoxically in the pandemic itself. The crisis has not only brought the confrontation to a head, it also offers a possible way out of it.
All the scientists consulted by the Guardian agreed that the cause of evidence-based leadership would emerge from the current crisis stronger.
Naomi Oreskes, an historian of science at Harvard, pointed out that Americans remain generally favorable to the scientific mission. A recent Pew survey found that 73% of Americans thought that science had a positive impact on society.
“The impression that anti-science sentiment is on the rise is false – it’s what the merchants of doubt try to stoke because they want us to think that, to distrust science,” Oreskes said.
McCarthy believes that Covid-19 has handed science an unexpected gift. “People are beginning to see the costs when you don’t tell the truth and you sideline those who do.”
McCarthy predicts that a final collision is coming between the merchants of untruths led by Trump and a majority of the American people demanding real facts and real science.
“It will be the people against polluters, experts against those winging it, scientists against the peddlers of misinformation. The question is, who is going to win?”

Encyclopedia of American Loons
Dennis Terry

Dennis Terry is pastor of Greenwell Springs Baptist Church and a dominionist. He is most famous for introducing then-presidential candidate Rick Santorum (and Family Research Council president Tony Perkins) at an event in Baton Rouge in 2012 with a rousing speech in which he laid out his political views and sympathies. It is the stuff you’d expect – he opens by saying how he’s tired of being told he’s not allowed to state his beliefs and pray in public and then goes on to state his beliefs and pray in public without being stopped, before he starts railing against liberals, non-Christians, abortion rights, “sexual perversion,” same-sex marriage and secular government – all those who ostensibly prevented him from doing what he just did. According to Terry, America “was founded as a Christian nation” (it was not) and those that disagree with him should “get out! We don’t worship Buddha, we don’t worship Mohammad, we don’t worship Allah!” (non-Christians should, in other words, certainly not be allowed to state their beliefs and pray in public). Terry otherwise has a long history of attacking the gay community, and in his 2012 speech he claimed for instance that the economy could only recover when we “put God back” in government and got rid of things like marriage equality – no, these are hardly surprising views given this kind of source, but that doesn’t make them any less loony. At the end of the speech, Terry also asked God to “have favor upon Rick Santorum” and to “do a mighty work” in President Obama’s life, a claim that probably merits some attention.
At least the speech generated some media coverage, forcing Santorum to distance himself from Terry. Terry himself responded to criticisms by trying to play the victim, claiming that “people are misquoting” what he said (they were not) and “twisted and edited” his words, which they didn’t – in fact, most outlets covering the story showed the video of Terry’s speech in its entirety, which might be why Terry and his crew subsequently made an effort to scrub the Internet of the video. He also said that all he meant was that “I love America”. If that was all he meant to do, his inability to fulfill his intention is so striking as to merit professional help. But it was of course not all he meant to say.
Diagnosis: Unrepentant liar for Jesus and deranged fundie extremist. And as the audience in the video shows, his wanton hate and lies are rather widely cheered and accepted. We all know this, of course, but again: that a crazy and hateful view is common doesn’t make it any less crazy and hateful.

Sue Myrick

For a long time – 1995 to 2013 – Congress was plagued by Sue Myrick, representing North Carolina’s 9th congressional district. Myrick was the kind of representative who was concerned that Muslim terrorists – Hezbollah, in particular – may be learning Spanish and disguising themselves as illegal immigrants in order to get into the US. Her main piece of evidence for the claim was that some imprisoned gang members in the Southwest have tattoos in Farsi, since terrorists are best poised to achieve their goals if they tattoo their intent on their bodies and then join criminal gangs. You may be excused for speculating about what she really thought was the evidence (if terrorists with Middle Eastern bacground were stopped at the border they may just say “Well, I’m Mexican or Spanish,” Myrick pointed out, and no one would ostensibly be able to tell). She also sent a letter to the Department of Homeland Security demanding it investigate the extent of Hezbollah’s presence along the U.S.-Mexico border.
Myrick has also claimed (with e.g. Paul Broun and Trent Franks) that the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR), tried to plant terrorist “spies” within key national security committees to shape legislative policy in its favor, citing the book Muslim Mafia: Inside the Secret Underworld that’s Conspiring to Islamize Americaby insane green-ink conspiracy theorists Dave Gaubatz & Paul Sperry (with a foreword by Myrick, no less). Myrick has also, with regard to domestic security threats, remarked: “Look at who runs all the convenience stores across the country.”
She is also a climate change denialist, which is par for the course among solid wingnuts like Myrick, we guess, but no less lunatic for that.
On the positive side, Myrick did introduce a resolution in Congress encouraging states to outlaw rebirthing therapy.
Diagnosis: Wingnut idiot. Hopefully neutralized, but we have little hope that those who replace her are much better. Worth mentioning nonetheless.

Anti-vaccine movement: the epidemic of stupid
April 15, 2019
Diggit Magazine
Social networking platforms have contributed to a specific form of the epidemic of stupid: the anti-vaccine movement. These networking platforms are revolutionary inventions, creating a community beyond our traditional borders, that allows information to be passed along, with many people listening, engaging, and building relationships. The essence of serviceability provided by these platforms is abused and used to spread misleading information about vaccines. Anti-vaccine movements are not new, but due to social networking platforms this information can be spread on a larger scale. In turn, this contributes to the comeback of outdated diseases like measles in Europe and the USA.
The anti-vaccine movement and the comeback of a ‘Dark Ages disease’
Measles has made a comeback, not only in the USA but also in Europe. Some experts blame this on widespread misinformation about vaccinations. These misleading sources are spread via social media platforms, but also via product platforms like Bol.com whose algorithms seem to promote anti-vaccination books.
Anti-vaccine advocates attempt, for example, to convince people that vaccines against measles can cause autism. Following this claim, many parents have made the decision to not vaccinate their child in fear of the child developing autism. This conspiracy theory, therefor, can have serious and devastating effects.
In 2019, there have been 372 outbreaks of measles in 2018 and already 206 cases since 28th February 2019 in the USA, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). In Europe, too, the amount of measles cases has tripled, according to a news report of Science on 12th February 2019. That translates as 83,000 reported cases of measles by the World Health Organization (WHO) in Europe.
The rather bizarre but also strangely ironic note in this, is that both reports have found one common leading issue that contributes to this problem: measles has made a comeback because of anti-vaccine sentiments. This means that there are an increasing amount of parents who judge that it is best to not vaccinate their child because there is a ‘unknown percentage’ of risk for a child to develop autism due to this vaccine. Instead of vaccinating a child these parents would rather let the child suffer from – and possibly die from – measles. What is more, measles is a highly contagious, infectious disease. Merely being in a room that somebody who has measles has left hours before, could already result in an infection.
The other thing that seems to be contagious is the misleading information spread by anti-vaccine movements. This has caused such an immense problem that the WHO has called the anti-vaccine movement a major threat to public health. They have labeled this epidemic ‘vaccine hesitance’. As the cause is complex, the WHO argues that the problem cannot be entirely blamed on anti-vaccine movements alone. Nevertheless, particularly Western countries increase in measles cases had been used as proof and warning that this might be due to the spread of misleading information.
In another report, Katrina Kretsinger, a lead measles expert, has said that ‘the root cause of the measles outbreaks […] is a failure to adequately vaccinate’. This would explain the 30% increase in the spread of measles around the globe.
What is really the difference?
Most news reports see that the increase of measles cases is due to the fact that anti-vaccine movements have spread misleading information on social media platforms, which makes concerned parents to adopt the drastic measure of not vaccinating their child. According to the New York Times ‘flu vaccination rates and infant immunization levels have largely remained stable in recent years’. However, the link that was used by the New York Times to prove that vaccines remain stable is from 2017, whereas the aforementioned increase of measles cases happened in 2018 and 2019.
The New York Times claims that the anti-vaccine movement has been around since the 18th century, hence, ‘fears and resistance to vaccination are not new’.
The report acknowledges the link between anti-vaxxers and the increase in measles cases, but does not address to what extent social networking platforms have contributed to this influential relationship, even though many others have found compelling evidence of a connection between the two phenomena.
That is to say, the outbreak of measles in recent cases has been blamed upon anti-vaxxers being able to spread misleading information on social networking platforms. Therefore, what follows offers a discussion on how social networking platforms influence and contribute to the measles epidemic.
Social networking platforms in connection to anti-vaxxers
None other than the ‘preciously-alluring’ platform kings of the internet – Facebook, YouTube, Pinterest, and Amazon – play the leading roles in this epidemic. However, instead of blaming these platforms themselves, we need to consider the usage of them. The internet is a great space for movements such as for the anti-vaxxers. This is due to the fact that the internet offers a space in which anyone can spread any type of information. This offers members of anti-vaccine movements to read and spread misleading information that is not scientifically supported.
If one types ‘vaccine’ into the Facebook search engine, the first results that show up are anti-vaccination content.
Pages such as ‘Stop Mandatory Vaccination’ have 129K likes. According to the WELT, clicking ‘like’ on any of these pages, will immediately redirect you to many other pages that promote anti-vaccination. Particularly in the USA this has inspired discussions that force Facebook to take preventive measures against this dynamic.