OUR PRESIDENT IS NOT CAPABLE OF TELLING THE TRUTH

…Our “Four Pinocchio” US President

Regardless of what the president says, the Google web site the president referred to won’t be operational “any time soon”.

It’s one thing for the president to make up stuff and to take credit for things that he had nothing to do with.  But now he is bull-shitting about Google quickly building a web site that he wanted for the coronavirus issues here in the United States.

There are major discrepancies between what Trump said this week and Google’s version and timing of the new website.

The site will actually be built by Verily, the life sciences division of the Google parent company Alphabet, that focuses on research and development around all health issues.

The president said that 1,700 Google engineers were working on the website and that it would be done “very quickly.”  Deborah Birx, the White House’s coronavirus response coordinator, said they wanted to bring it “across the continent.” Vice President Pence said they would have more information about when the website would be available this last weekend.  We received no update over the weekend.

“I want to thank Google. Google is helping to develop a website. It’s going to be very quickly done, unlike websites of the past, to determine whether a test is warranted and to facilitate testing at a nearby convenient location,” said Trump during a news conference to declare the coronavirus a national emergency.

But in a short statement shared on Twitter an hour and a half after the president’s announcement, Verily said the website was only in “the early stages of development.”  The tool will start in the San Francisco Bay area first with “the hope of expanding more broadly over time.”  (A lot of time.)  That is not “very quickly” and it isn’t “going across the continent,” anytime soon.  Why am I not surprised by this information?

According to the White House’s Deborah Birx, who held up a flow chart to illustrate how the site would work, it will start with a survey that asks people about their symptoms and risk factors.  If it determines they should get a test, it will direct them to the nearest drive-through testing center.  But this concept isn’t expected for many weeks.

Verily spokeswoman Emily Friedman said that the site would work with several locations in the Bay Area while it is being tested and that Verily is working with testing companies Quest Diagnostics and LabCorp on the project. Andrew Conrad, Verily’s CEO, used to be the chief science officer at LabCorp.

As first reported by The Verge, the tool will be built on Verily’s Project Baseline, which collects health data from volunteers. The Verily site wasn’t supposed to be for the general public at first, but the company has changed that plan since the surprise presidential announcement.

For some background on Verify, Verily started inside Google X, and that was Google’s wing for experimental projects. It became its own division and was re-named Verily in 2015. One of its most high-profile projects was an effort to develop glucose-level-sensing contact lenses that the company said it had hoped “could someday lead to a new way for people with diabetes to manage their disease.” The project was shuttered in 2018, after researchers couldn’t find a strong correlation between glucose levels in teardrops and those in blood.

But to make the point about our lying president, he didn’t just lie about the Google/ Verify involvement in the coronavirus issue.  He also claimed to be responsible for opening an Apple Mac factory in Texas that has been running since 2013.

Some things never change.

Copyright G. Ater 2020