Wednesday, March 11, 2020

In Trump Administration Response to a Pandemic, the "Pro-Life" Agenda Is Unmasked: Hasn't Been About a Meaningful Ethic of Life at All

Top headling, Huffington Post, noon, 11 March 2020.



The number of COVID-19 cases reported across the country is expected to grow in coming days as testing efforts expand.


Pandemic, from two Greek roots meaning "all" + "people."

A pandemic affects people everywhere, not only in isolated spots.

A pandemic affects ALL people.


Heather Cox Richardson, "Letters from an American: March 10, 2020":

The trick to the novel coronavirus is that it spreads exponentially. Today we are seeing states—Washington, Colorado, Illinois, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New York-- declare emergencies, based on what, on their face, seem like very few cases: just 76 in New York, for example. But those numbers almost certainly will skyrocket over the next week or two. Private labs in New York began testing for coronavirus on Friday and today Mayor Bill de Blasio told reporters that public officials couldn't keep up. They found 16 new cases between Monday and Tuesday. By declaring emergencies now, and trying to enforce social distancing, governors, business leaders, and universities hope to slow down the spread of the virus. This is important because if we can slow it down, we can help to make sure that hospitals are not overwhelmed all at once with people who need attention.



The coronavirus isn't just spreading rapidly; it has already spread widely. A massively undersupported testing program hasn't even begun to probe the extent to which, in both area and numbers, the United States has been overrun by the 2019 novel coronavirus. That state officials have logged so many cases in 38 states at a point when testing has barely begun shows that the nation is farther up the curve toward a full-bore epidemic than anyone wanted to accept—and  that is information the White House refuses to acknowledge. 
Trump's entire view of the outbreak is focused on how it is affecting the stock markets.



An annual intelligence report that has been postponed without explanation by President Donald Trump’s administration warns that the U.S. remains unprepared for a global pandemic, two senior government officials who have reviewed a draft of the report tell TIME.




UPDATE: The window for containing the coronavirus has passed in some parts of the U.S., @CDCDirector told Congress.




The White House has ordered federal health officials to treat top-level coronavirus meetings as classified, an unusual step that has restricted information and hampered the U.S. government’s response to the contagion, according to four Trump administration officials. 




As the threat of the coronavirus in the US grew and markets reeled amid growing uncertainty, Donald Trump on Tuesday promoted one of his signature policy proposals. "We need the Wall more than ever!" he tweeted.


Trump's most strident supporters, according to Krugman, have been quick to defend his "luridly delusional response to the coronavirus and his conspiracy theorizing about Democrats and the news media" —adding that "denial and the resulting delay are likely to have deadly consequences" in the United States. ...
'The clear and present danger now isn't so much that large numbers of Americans will get sick — that was probably going to happen anyway — but that the epidemic will move so fast that it overloads our hospitals," Krugman warns. "By not instituting widespread testing from the start, the U.S. has ensured that there are now cases all over the country — we have no idea how many — and that the virus will spread rapidly. And even now, there is no hint that the (Trump) Administration is ready for the kinds of public health measures that might limit the pace of that spread."

The sad and shocking reality is that the Trump administration and its cronies in state legislatures and health departments around the country have not wanted widespread testing to take place. And they still do not want widespread testing to take place.

Many Americans have bought the bizarre and silly idea that tests are rare and expensive and shouldn't be doled out readily. This is nonsense. Countries that began testing immediately and aggressively have managed to combat the wide spread of the virus.

For Americans, it's now too late to take that proactive step. And instead of giving us figures that are accurate about where the virus is, how many people have it, who has it, our government is still trying to obfuscate.

And many Americans are willing to play along and pretend, and scoff at those who are concerned about this situation, as if they are gloom and doom alarmists who don’t have the superior knowledge of the Pollyannas. Real Americans know that Americans will always make it through, after all.

Lives are at stake. This is now not how a responsible government operates in a developed country. 

It has to be repeated: this is all happening because of the ostensibly pro-life commitment of the current administration and its supporters. It's a direct outcome of this administration's removal of skilled personnel from CDC and other key government agencies, and of the stacking of the CDC and other government agencies with "pro-life" Christian Trump supporters.

We are now seeing, and will see increasingly in horrible days to come, just whose lives count in the "pro-life" paradise these folks have been building — and whose lives do not count.

Who counts? Above all, those with money and power.

Who doesn't count? Above all, those without money and power.

It's going to become grimly obvious in the days to come what the pro-life scam has really meant all along.
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