A story in the Washington Post today. Trump’s lies could kill many people because scientists are not believed.
In the one month since the first U.S. coronavirus death, America has become a country of uncertainty.
New cases of infection and casualties continue multiplying. New York and Louisiana hospitals are grappling with a flood of patients that threatens to overwhelm their health-care systems. Meanwhile, the president and political conservatives are increasingly agitating to end drastic restrictions meant to buy time and save lives.
Running beneath it all, in a continuous loop through our national psyche, are basic questions leaders are struggling to answer: When can we safely lift these quarantines? How many people could die if we do it too early? Just how dangerous will this pandemic turn out to be? And what exactly should be our next step?
This is why epidemiology exists. Its practitioners use math and scientific principles to understand disease, project its consequences, and figure out ways to survive and overcome it. Their models are not meant to be crystal balls predicting exact numbers or dates. They forecast how diseases will spread under different conditions. And their models allow policymakers to foresee challenges, understand trend lines and make the best decisions for the public good.
But one factor many modelers failed to predict was how politicized their work would become in the era of President Trump, and how that in turn could affect their models.
In recent days, a growing contingent of Trump supporters have pushed the narrative that health experts are part of a deep-state plot to hurt Trump’s reelection efforts by damaging the economy and keeping the United States shut down as long as possible. Trump himself pushed this idea in the early days of the outbreak, calling warnings on coronavirus a kind of “hoax” meant to undermine him.
The notion is deeply troubling, say leading health experts, because what the country does next and how many people die depend largely on what evidence U.S. leaders and the public use to inform their decisions. Epidemiologists worry their research — intended to avert massive deaths in situations exactly like this pandemic — will be dismissed by federal leaders when it is needed most.
see 12 experts Question the COVID-19 panic
Wikipedia has a bio for one of the experts, Wolfgang Wodarg, that is worth reading.
Where is the link?
an internet search of, 12 experts Covid-19 panic, will locate it.
Trump is America’s National Security threat.
It’s a classic case of “kill the messenger.” If something bad happens that makes Trump look bad, or if TRUMP does x and now suffers the repercussions of his constant hypocrisy, then BLAME THE PRESS, BLAME THE DOCTORS, BLAME the TRUTH-TELLERS, or whomever speaks of it or raises the spectre of TRUTH.
Here’s some truth: In my view, one BIG good-thing that CAN come from the crisis is that TRUMP LOSES THE ELECTION. But unlike Trump and his followers, I know the difference between the truth of my political motivations and wishes, and the truth of what occurs on its own or by the actions of others, or even what might actually be truly good or bad regardless of ANYONE’s political motivations and wishes, including mine.
To those who keep on with such over-politicized dribble:
“Are you stupid?” CBK: Yes.
The Ignorance Pandemic
Ignorance by far is
Greater than the virus
Greatest threat of all
Bound to be our fall
Welcome to the worlds of climate science, women’s health, and elementary and secondary education. What took you so long?
yup
Trump like his allies in conservative religion don’t respect women. In an interview with Hannity, Trump remembered the male governor of Washington’s name but, about the governor of Michigan, he said, “we have a big problem with the young, a woman governor.”
Mich. Gov. Whitner, far smarter than Trump, is only about 5 years younger than Boris Johnson, whose botched corona plans have England on Italy’s trajectory.
Distrust of government and its ancillaries, ie. CDC, NIH, etc. began with Reagan’s “The govt. isn’t the solution to our problem, it is the problem.” It continued with Norquist’s “Our goal is to shrink govt. small enough to drown it in a bathtub.” It was underscored by the number of Republicans, many disciples of Ayn Rand, who wanted to starve govt., and they told their constituents that the government was keeping them down and out with regulations and rules. A naive public fed eagerly on their baloney, and it carried over to attacking public education, those govt. schools. Why the private sector would do a much better job they were told and they foolishly accepted it! The country is now reaping what too many sowed.
Rick Johnson Well-said, and the propaganda has it’s roots deeply buried in the minds of going-on-three-generations of Americans. CBK
Here in Flor-uh-duh, the same Repugnican citizens who were denying that the virus was a problem and continuing to socialize bought up all the TP. Fortunately, I have copies of Ayn Rand’s fat, overblown, hyperbolic, comicbook novels, which are perfect for this purpose.
Actually, using Ayn Rand’s novels for this purpose, though tempting, is not ideal, ofc. Don’t want to have to call a plumber at this particular time!
Hahahahaha! Excellent Bob. A John Galt wipe! What more could one want?
Looking for some TP “Alt”?
Then try the book about John Galt.
Just pray your pipes won’t soon be plugged
by all those reams of Atlas Shrugged.
Just in case anyone reading this is down to a few squares of real toilet paper, here is something I learned in Vietnam back in 1966, but never actually did.
A little history first: When I was in Vietnam they fed us the same rations they fed the troops in World War II more than twenty years earlier. Each box of C-rations that was stamped 1945 on the side came with twenty-year-old canned food and in every box was a “tiny” packet of toilet paper. There were also five-free cigarettes in another packet inside that WWII box.
When we opened the toilet paper packet, we had a few separate squares of TP folded up and each one was about the size of a square of toilet paper on a roll that you buy at a store today.
Here are the field Instructions we learned from an E-5 Sergeant, designed to make that “tiny” ration of toilet paper last longer:
Take one of those squares and fold it in half. Then fold it in half again. Now, take that smaller square and fold it into a triangle so the point is where the middle of the square would be when it is unfolded. Take a pair of scissors and clip of the tip, but not too much. When you unfold that one square of toilet paper, you want the hole in the exact center, and it should be big enough to fit over your index finger without tearing the rest of the square as you slide it the length of the finger to the last knuckle where the finger meets the rest of the hand.
Now you are ready to clean your butt crack.
Stick your index finger down there and use the fingernail to scrape all the crap off of your butt crack. When finished scraping all that gunk off, you use that square of toilet paper to wipe your finger clean as you move it up the length of the finger removing the crap.
Once the toilet paper is off the finger, you fold the waste inside and then use the four corners of the square to clean under your fingernail. When your finger falls the sniff test, you find some soft dirt or sand and rub off as much of the stink as possible. Then you are ready to go back to fighting the war. In this case, the war to survive the pandemic. When you run out of toilet paper, you start looking for really big leaves.
That sergeant demonstrated every step except the part where you use your finger to clean your butt crack.
!!!!
Lloyd . . . Now you’ve REALLY outdone yourself. . . . CBK
John Galt wiping
Hank’s Rearend
Plugging piping
Up, my friend
Thanks for sharing that, Lloyd
Might come in “handy” some day.
I’ve read that Trump likes his toilet seats plated in gold. Wouldn’t that be very cold?
King Covid
Midas had the Midas Touch
Turning things to gold
Donald has the Covid Touch
Turning things to cold
Don’t forget the Koch fascists & their billion dollar bribery, misinformation & lobbying operation:
https://theintercept.com/2020/03/26/americans-for-prosperity-cdc-coronavirus/
The Koch network also promotes Catholic K-12. The distance between the Koch’s and leadership of the Catholic University of America is razor thin. Notre Dame’s ACE has an event planned for New Orleans, a city that closed its last remaining public school.
Media gives a pass to the US Conference of Catholic Bishops and the state Catholic Conferences while media tar evangelicals and ignore the alliance with the Catholic hierarchy. The Manhattan Declaration (signed by the bishops of 15 major cities) and the 3-24-2020 letter to the Secretary of Health and Human Services co-signed by a secretariat of the USCCB and by the Family Research Council that demands a ban on abortion and condemns Planned Parenthood are two examples of the alliance. Another is the amicus brief signed by evangelical compounds and the USCCB in the Espinosa v. Montana.
Trump’s denial that the virus was a problem, his claim that it was a Democratic hoax, his refusal to invoke the Defense Production Act to force companies to begin immediate production of life-saving medical equipment, his call to “reopen the country by Easter,” his spreading this antiscience nonsense via Fox News and his daily Trump rallies, his threats against those with informed views, etc., etc.–these will add to up hundreds of thousands of American deaths that could have been averted.
Will he be held accountable for this? Will he continue to be the Teflon Don II?
He will have been responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands, and sharing in this responsibility will be the clueless folks who handed such power to an amoral, profoundly ignorant, utter moron.
Nothing new here. Trump has followed this line of “reasoning” since he was Trump. God endowed him with superlative powers in which it is absolutely unnecessary to research into truth or even to listen to those who have studied in detail and considered knowledgeable..
The worst people are those who know not they know not but think they know.
God help us.
Democrats and independents that will never vote for Trump should seriously consider staying home in self-quarantine, when the Always Trumpers go to church on Easter Sunday, return to work, to mass shopping, nightclubs, and restaurants.
A few weeks later, there will be fewer Always Trumpers. Then November will come and Trump will have lost a lot of votes to the Grim Reaper.
Except that some of us would be expected to go back to work with all of those “virus is a hoax” Trumpsters.
We teachers already have to use leave if we get sick, even though we’re working from home. Until the middle of this week, we teachers were still having to go into school, even though the kids were home.
“Epidemiologists worry their research — intended to avert massive deaths in situations exactly like this pandemic — will be dismissed by federal leaders when it is needed most.”
This is a major problem. Trumpanzees will believe anything Trump does or says. It is a reason that deaths and illness will become a major tragedy due to not hearing or believing the words of epidemiologists.
………………………………………………………………………
23 March 2020
Dr. Anthony Fauci has admitted that he has to tell President Trump facts four times to get his point across and that he will ‘keep pushing’ to correct any inaccuracies about the coronavirus that are relayed by the White House.
The director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases said in an interview with Science that ‘when you’re dealing with the White House, sometimes you have to say things 1,2,3,4 times, and then it happens. So I’m going to keep pushing.’
He said that he tries to correct Trump but he ‘can’t jump in front of the microphone and push him down.’
He criticized the president for publicly shaking hands with people, saying: ‘I say that to the task force. I say that to the staff. We should not be doing that.’…
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8141443/I-jump-microphone-Fauci-says-trying-correct-Trump.html?ito=email_share_article-top
I see that the very first post on this topic is a critic: “see 12 experts Question the COVID-19 panic.” It came from Eileen Gambrill.
Dr. Eileen Gambrill, Ph.D, is the Hutto Patterson Charitable Foundation Professor in Child and Family Studies at the University of California, Berkeley a licensed psychologist, and committed to evidence-based research. https://vcresearch.berkeley.edu/faculty/eileen-d-gambrill.
Linda promised some internet research. Meanwhile i have spent most of the day doing that.
My first hit was the website ZeroHedge, banned from Twitter, and “described as a libertarian or far-right financial blog, that presents both in-house analysis, and analysis from investment banks, hedge funds, and other investment writers and analysts.”
A fascinating article in the New Republic provides insight into the dark history of this website including its connection to Steve Bannon and Trumpsters. https://newrepublic.com/article/156788/zero-hedge-russian-trojan-horse
In any case the ZeroHedge website includes brief comments from 12 persons. Judging by their academic affiliations, all are credible as experts. Three are rom the US (Yale, Stanford, University of Minnesota), one is from Canada, another from Israel, and the rest are from Europe. Many of the quotes were from interviews and op-eds.
The gist of these brief opinions is that social isolation, lockdowns, and such are not necessary. Moreover theycause economic problems that carry their own risks to health and wellbeing. Almost all of the brief quotes noted that influenza causes more death and that the elderly are most vulnerable to viruses. I found only had only four specific references to the COVID-19 virus. https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/12-experts-question-covid-19-panic
My second search for more information took me to a website called OffGuardian. This website features the same report from 12 experts who question the “panic” over the COVID-19 virus, but the report is in a very different context of publication.
The “about us” section of OffGuardian says: “Comment is free but facts are sacred… OffGuardian was launched in February 2015 and takes its name from the fact its five founders had all been censored on and/or banned from the Guardian’s ‘Comment is Free’ sections. Our remit, as we see it, is to provide a home for the comment – & the facts – you no longer find in the MSM. Our editors & admins are based around the globe, in North America, Britain, and Southern and Eastern Europe.” The “comment policy says: “Cite Sources. If you are alleging facts back them up with data.”
Contributors to the OffGuardian are objecting to what they view as the typical editorial content in the Guardian, a UK newspaper whose main audience, according to the internet, is in greater London, “well-educated, relatively young, predominantly male and liberal.”
I wanted to know what MSM referred to. According to Lynne Murphy, a professor of linguistics at the University of Sussex, MSM stands for Main Stream Media. Evidently the OffGuardian contributors have been banned from propagating what the Guardian may have regarded as “alt facts.” https://off-guardian.org/2020/03/24/12-experts-questioning-the-coronavirus-panic/
At the end of the OffGuardian post (repeating the same information from the previous websites) I found this statement: “If you can find any other examples of noteworthy experts deviating from the mainstream narrative, please post them below. As always, this list have (sic?) been impossible to build without Swiss Propaganda Research. Follow their work and share widely. An indispensable resource.”
So… on another try for more information I went to Swiss Propaganda Research. There I found “A Swiss Doctor on Covid-19.” The doctor is not identified. This website functions as a content aggregator for research and reports related to coronaviruses, influenza, and related topics. Each entry, gathered from varied sources, is dated (beginning on March 14, 2020 and updated today, March 27, 2020). This content is published in nine languages. All we know about the source is: “A Swiss medical doctor provided the following information on the current situation in order to enable our readers to make a realistic risk assessment. (Daily updates below).” https://swprs.org/a-swiss-doctor-on-covid-19/
In this compendium, there were many well-annotated citations of research, graphs, and opinions suggesting that international lockdowns are unnecessary and that varieties of influenza cause more deaths than COVID-19.
If you have followed the daily briefings from Trump’s experts, Dr. Anthony Fauci and Dr. Deborah Birx you have heard them make the same basic point. Serious illnesses and deaths from influenza are greater than what we know about the COVID-19 virus.
I am not a medical expert, but I believe that someone in Trump’s orbit is reading Swiss Propaganda Research and is and capitalizing on that mix of informed research and opinion to make the case that the economic welfare of the nation should be on the front burner, regardless of the mounting evidence of a major health crisis, a pandemic.
The single most compelling example of this possibility is Trump’s recent mention of opening up economic activity soon, very soon, on a county-by-county basis.
The Swiss Doctor‘s entry for March 26, 2020 (1) says “USA: The latest US data of March 25 shows a decreasing number of flu-like illnesses throughout the country, the frequency of which is now well below the multi-year average. That comment is followed by an interactive county-level map of the US with three levels of data coding (in color) to show a decrease in flu-like illnesses. The source of the map is KINSA.
KINSA is a US tech company that manufactures thermometers, some with GPS. It has published an interactive US Health Weather Map, county-by-county with this caveat. “Note: Due to widespread social distancing, school closures, stay-at-home orders, etc. feverish illness levels are dropping in many regions. THIS DOES NOT MEAN THAT COVID-19 CASES ARE DECLINING. In fact, we expect to see reported cases continue to surge in the near term, but it MAY indicate these measures are starting to slow the spread. The See CDC COVID-19 Cases in U.S. for details.” The health weather map is here, along with many other charts, some of these not different from those at CDC website: https://healthweather.us trending.
It is possible that KINSA is among the companies that responed to Trump’s appeals for private solutions to the crisis. That county-by county heath weather map may have attracted his attention, not the entries from Swiss Propaganda Research.
In any case, thanks to Dr. Eileen Gambrill’s crytic post, the first on this blog, I have learned a lot more than I expected to about Trump’s evident rush to put the economy first and possible sources of his mangled view that a county-by-county map can show “where people can be put back to work” a theme he has emphasized. Side note: Similar maps have been constucted to illustrate “charter school deserts.
Thanks for the research. Behind a paywall at Daily Beast, “Fiona Hill: Trump’s Corona Virus Talk Sounds a Lot like Russia’s”.
Trump is attractive to Koch-like groups of the wealthy who brandish the false “libertarian” label and, to religious groups like evangelicals, the Catholic hierarchy and the backers of Epoch Times (a media empire).
Thank you Laura Chapman!!
I’m so hot under the collar I can’t read past the 1st of “12 Experts” without venting.
Dr Sucharit Bhakdi: “[The government’s anti-COVID19 measures] are grotesque, absurd and very dangerous […] The life expectancy of millions is being shortened. The horrifying impact on the world economy threatens the existence of countless people. The consequences on medical care are profound. Already services to patients in need are reduced, operations cancelled, practices empty, hospital personnel dwindling. ”
The only relevant govt measure I’ve heard is advice to cancel elective med procedures so as to free up med personnel, PPE & ventilators needed to handle the crush of covid-19 patients in ICUs– which is a “thing,” not a scare cooked up by MSM. Is he trying to say doctors’ practices & hospitals are laying off staff because govt-imposed social distancing keeps potential “consumers” away? All consumers need to hear is that there’s an unusually-infectious untreatable new virus spread by proximity droplets.
Bhakdi also says “We are afraid that 1 million infections with the new virus will lead to 30 deaths per day over the next 100 days. But we do not realise that 20, 30, 40 or 100 patients positive for normal coronaviruses are already dying every day.”
Am I not understanding? Does he suggest that adding 30 deaths/day to ave 50/day from normal cv is no biggie?
Trumpian Rhapsody, with Apologies to the Late, Great Freddie Mercury | Bob Shepherd
Is this the real life?
Is this just fantasy?
Caught in my web of lies,
There’s no escape from me.
Don’t open your eyes,
Don’t doubt my lies. Please see. . . .
A poor little rich boy, I’m just so needy.
Very dumb, very slow,
Little, next to nothing, know.
Everything I do blows. Nothing really matters
But me,
But me.
Mama, I dye my hair like yours.
And I comb it ‘cross my head,
Want approval though you’re dead.
Wanted you to say, “You’re the greatest, son,”
Though you are gone, that drives me to this day.
Mama, ooo, ooo, ooo, oo,
You and Daddy made me cry, so
I’m needy yesterday, today, tomorrow.
Carry on, carry on. Nothing really matters.
I figured that,my time had come,
Ran through my last dime,
Thought I’d probably do some time.
But then Putin came, and rescued me,
Left that history all behind, and that’s the truth.
Mama, ooo ooo ooo, orange makeup shines.
People wish I’d never been born at all.
I see a little silhouetto of a man,
Scaramucci, Scaramucci, will you do the Fandango?
I need enlightening.
I’m very, very frightening.
(Galileo) Galileo.
Oh who was Galileo?
I don’t know.
Trump is Magnifico!
Poor little rich boy. Everybody loves me.
Kids into cages. A misbegotten family
Demon seed I’ve spawned to
Carry on my monstrosity.
Vlad has the pee tape. He will never let me go!
MyGodMammon! He will not let you go! (Let me go!)
MyGodMammon! Vlad don’t let that show! (Let me go!)
MyGodMammon! He will not let you go! (Let me go!)
Got you by the ___ oh!
No, no, no, no, no, no, no
Handler mia, handler mia (handler mia, let me go!)
Comrade Vlad has a devil put aside for me, for me, for me!
So I think I can screw the whole country and still be idolized.
Cause my Trumpeteers cannot tell the bitter truth from lies.
O-baby, blame it on Obama, baby.
Just gotta be
Reelected you see
This year.
(Ooooooh, oooh yeah, oooh yeah)
No one really matters.
Anyone can see.
No one really matters
No one really matters.
But me.
For more on the breathtakingly vile and clownish Jabba the Trump/IQ45 Maladministration, go here: https://bobshepherdonline.wordpress.com/category/trump-don-the-con/
I think Freddie Mercury* would have loved it, Bob!
And, sadly, he brings to mind many people living with HIV/AIDS. How will this affect them?
Elton John, his close friend, says in his autobiography, *Me, that Freddie died a year before the antiviral drugs came on the market that would have kept him alive.
Thoughts & prayers to everyone…stay healthy.