THE RECORD CLEARLY SHOWS THE PRESIDENT IS GUILTY OF MALFEASANCE: Part VII
…Alex Azar, Secretary of the Health
& Human Services (HHS)
The U.S. is well below the per-capita virus
testing of Germany and South Korea
The single worst mistake that our president is
responsible for occurred during the first month of the coronavirus outbreak.
That was when the president spent his time
downplaying the virus, and when he failed to push the FDA and other federal agencies
to get viral test kits distributed. This
would have allowed the public health officials to get their “eyes” on
the pandemic. As the epidemiologists
like to say: “The key to preventing or mitigating a pandemic is early
detection and response.” It is
that simple.
South Korea proved this. The coronavirus was detected there on the
same day it was detected in the US. By February 16th, the CDC
and the state public-health officials had only tested about 800 people. That’s roughly 2.4 tests per million people in
the US. In contrast, South Korea had
tested about 8,000 people, or 154.7 test per million. By March 17th, the US still had
performed about 125 tests per million people. But by then, South Korea was testing more than
5,000 tests per million people.
Better testing is the key, and it always has
been, because it allows the health officials to understand how the virus is moving. It shows them how to restrict travel and
where to surge sending the medical
supplies. As of early April, South Korea’s per capita
death rate was one-seventh that of the United States. Germany, which also implemented widespread
testing early on, has a death rate that is even lower than South Korea.
And why couldn’t the US manage to develop and
distribute a test in the early days of the epidemic? It’s a story of bureaucratic infighting,
incompetence, and technical snafus. It
started with Robert Redfield, the Director of the CDC,
the agency that was responsible for building the test kits, Redfield was always viewed as one of those, “political guys”.
The basic problem was, that while other nations
used a test kit built and distributed by the
World Health Organization (WHO). The WHO also
encouraged private companies to quickly build and distribute the kits.
But the US under Trump, and with his nationalism
arrogance, he insisted on building our own kits. Unfortunately, the kits were flawed, and it
took weeks for the CDC to fix the problem. There were then further delays by the FDA in
lifting the restrictions for allowing private labs and companies to build and distribute their own test kits.
By that time, the virus had widely spread
throughout the this country. In the
early days, even a few thousand test kits could have made a big difference in
understanding and limiting the spread of the virus.
One must understand that every six days that
the US public heath officials did not do testing, the number of infected Americans doubled. By March, the virus was everywhere across the
US, and millions of kits were needed to track its spread. That need was never filled.
“We twiddled our thumbs as the coronavirus
waltzed in”, said William Hanage, a Harvard epidemiologist in an article in the Washington Post.
“If we had been on top of this thing from early
January. When we first got word of it, we would be living in a different world now”, said
Susan Rice, the Former National Security Advisor
What’s even worse is that it’s not just that
Trump failed to push for aggressive testing, he actively tried to suppress the numbers out of fear it
would tank the stock market. In early
March, when the cruise ship, Grand Princess waited
off the west coast, and 21 passengers and crew had contracted the virus, Trump wanted them to stay on the ship because
they would increase the number of those infected. He was recorded saying: “I like the numbers
being where they are”.
Then in late February, Trump heard a respected
Senior CDC official, Nancy Messonnier while on Air Force One, returning from India. The CDC official was saying
that, “the coronavirus was likely to spread through communities in the United States”. Trump fumed as he watched the
stock market crash.
After he landed, Trump called Alex Azar the HHS
Secretary, and raged that Ms. Messonnier was scaring the stock market.
Trump’s obsession with the market is downright
ghoulish. On March 13th, when
the market spiked up, after a week’s long free fall, the
administration sent out a graph of the one day of the market rise with Trumps scrawled
signature. That was as if Trump was responsible for the market's rise. Obviously, totally bogus.
As usual, when a reporter asked if Trump was
responsible for the testing delays, Trump’s
Response was immediate: “No, I don’t take responsibility at all”. We are aware that Donald Trump never takes responsibility for anything
that’s gone wrong…..never!!!
When the president took the responsibility of
the virus in the US away from HHS Secretary Azar, and gave it to the Vice President, Mike Pence, an opinion writer
wrote the following:
“That switch was like giving the wheel of a great ship over to an 11-year old in the middle of a hurricane.”
Actually, neither the Vice President nor the HHS
Secretary, a former Pharma lobbyist were qualified to take over the responsibility of a national
pandemic.
Trump was once again picking someone that was
more partisan than being properly educated for the job.
Copyright G. Ater 2020
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