COVID Chronicles: Pointing The Finger in All The Wrong Places
We continue our COVID Chronicles series. In this episode, I explore the inaction of politics and health policy in rapid response to the COVID-19 pandemic, and their action in finding someone else to blame.
Finger-pointing is about as old as Adam and Eve. We all want to have someone or something else to blame when either we do something wrong, or there’s when something occurs that we can’t accept.
So it is with the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic response, particularly in the United States.
Placing Blame
While stupid people were wasting time blaming Trump for the the sun setting in the west (there’s enough we actually could blame him for), CDC Director Dr Robert Redfield was busy not doing his job. Not only did he refuse to seal the US borders when his counterparts in other countries were sealing their borders, he compounded the “felony” by refusing to allow the CDC to take direct national control of the detection, containment and treatment efforts for SARS-CoV-2.
Instead, he simply preached “wear a cloth mask and you’ll be safe”, totally ignoring the science that had already shown that neither cloth masks nor standard “procedure” or “surgical” type masks (the disposable type) offer any significant protection against inhaling live virus.
It’s this near-criminal inaction by Dr Redfield, and his subsequent practical “silent treatment” to President Trump, that directly caused several things, almost simultaneously.
First, the CDC administration’s inaction on the White House Coronavirus Task Force discussions and recommendations, appeared to force the administration to turn elsewhere for recommendations to combat the virus. Dr Deborah Birx and Dr Anthony Fauci, advising the Task Force in varied capacities, started exhibiting some strange behavior, in that they occasionally didn’t agree with each other.
Scrambling for Answers
As the scope and nature of the SARS-CoV-2 virus became more widely known, it was imperative that medical science and research act quickly to get ahead of this thing. Obviously there will be disagreements about certain issues related to the virus, but Birx and Fauci rapidly became the Redfield “surrogates” of sorts, since Redfield basically shut down communication with President Trump (primarily, according to CDC insiders, because he was afraid he’d get fired).
Trump appeared to be scrambling for experts to advise him – cohesively – on what to tell the public. So what happened here becomes extremely important when combating liberal – and extremist conservative – narratives about Trump’s actions and statements during this time, which are a mixture of fact and fancy. But I’ll deal more specifically with this later.
Second, the hamstringing of the CDC teams by Redfield, caused the states to devise their own strategies for testing, treatment, and containment. Unfortunately, this turned out to be a total disaster, since the various state secretaries of health were coming up with action plans that absolutely were not standardized across the whole country (or the whole state in some cases), while protecting their own, and often injecting their own politics into the efforts.
Haphazard Responses
Many states, realizing that the CDC was only directing people to wear masks, came up what became a horribly haphazard process of what could be called “rolling lock-downs” and mandatory mask use in all public places and places of employment. Some states didn’t enforce lock-downs, while others came up with their own systems, including a “color” system in my state, for lock-downs, based presumably on the amount of cases reported in any particular area or county (but in hindsight it initially had more to do with population).
Several states, most infamously New York and Pennsylvania, forced sequestration of the sick into nursing homes that prior to the action, had no infection at all. In Pennsylvania, Secretary of Health Dr Rachel Levine’s mother was not-so-secretly moved out of a nursing home where afterward, Democrat governor Tom Wolf, moved people known to have been infected with SARS-CoV-2 back into nursing homes, according to Pennsylvania’s interim policy. (Author’s note: the link reflects an updated version of an original article).
A number of states were accused of counting positive tests (instances), not people (cases). There are a wide number of reports of people being told they resulted a positive test, when they weren’t even tested.
Death Certificates
Some states were reported to be requiring were requiring healthcare providers to place “COVID-19” on death certificates of patients who fit certain profiles. The arguments are multifaceted, but certainly the fact that hospitals receive a larger reimbursement for treating a patient diagnosed with COVID19 is a large factor. To date, this practice appears to be continuing.
The problem with such practices is that it makes it much more difficult to get an accurate picture of actual COVID-19 deaths, if some are being over-reported and others being under-reported. This only fuels the extreme right-wing conspiracy-theory nutjobs into thinking that the under-reporting of COVID19 cases and deaths is somehow a conspiracy by the left to take down Trump.
Side note to you MAGA fascists: Trump doesn’t need the left to “take him down.” He’ll do that all by himself.
State of Panic & Conspiracy Nutjobs
Obviously all of this is happening because of Dr Robert Redfield’s deliberate inaction. Certainly the yellow journalists in the modern media aren’t going to report any of this, because they want to continue pushing an anti-Trump narrative, as well do the Democrat National Committee’s bidding in continuing a campaign of fear-mongering to keep the population in a constant state of panic, in order to make a need for draconian measures – including unrestricted mail-in voting which is inherently ripe for fraud – seem necessary and permanent.
On the other half of this coin however, is the effective hamstringing of appropriate and unified directives and measures from the White House and the CDC to combat this growing health crisis. While this pandemic couldn’t have come at a worse time for Trump, there’s no evidence to suggest what the right-wing extremists are claiming, including the psychotic claim that the virus “isn’t real” and is a ploy by the left to bring down Trump’s administration.
Never mind the fact that these same psychopaths join the psychopath currently in the White House to claim that the Chinese “manufactured” the virus to kill millions of people. So it is real, or is it fake?
The Finger of Blame
Based on how everything actually occurred so far (not the radical liberal nor the extremist conservative attempts to re-write history), it’s clear that the finger of blame for why all other countries of the world are doing relatively OK with the virus so far while the US appears to be floundering at this stage needs to be pointed squarely at ONE person: CDC Director Robert Redfield. Time will tell if the politicians and policy-makers in the states will step up to the task and create a unified response, or if we’ll have to start pointing other fingers at Trump, or at the Democrats, and/or those in the various state governments.
Stay tuned, it looks to be a really wild ride.
