Incompetence may have spread the virus

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Bob Juch
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Re: Incompetence may have spread the virus

#251 Post by Bob Juch » Sat Mar 28, 2020 5:07 am

Daily Kos wrote:On Thursday evening, The New York Times explained how Trump completely blew off an all-but-complete deal to have GM manufacture thousands of desperately needed ventilators while refusing to invoke the Defense Production Act. But on Friday, Trump demanded—demanded—that GM get right on with making ventilators, apparently for free. Only Trump addressed that demand to a Twitter account that wasn’t GM. And he ordered them to use a factory that they sold months ago.

For days, General Motors and Ventec Life Systems had been working on a deal that would use GM’s manufacturing capability to accelerate production of Ventec’s ventilators. Together, the two companies projected they could make as many as 80,000 ventilators over the next two months. The federal government’s contribution to this deal was simple enough: they would agree to buy most of these ventilators, providing GM with an up-front payment to help cover the cost of converting an existing auto plant in Indiana for the task. GM assured officials there was no issue with retooling, and Ventec and GM were reportedly moving at “breakneck speed” to meet the critical medical need.

That was before Trump decided that giving people ventilators was too pricey. With an estimated price tag for the deal at around $1 billion, that would put the ventilators at roughly $13,000 each—which is actually on the low end of what ventilators usually cost.

Trump was prepared to announce the deal on Wednesday, and hinted that he had big news coming during that day’s coronavirus-themed praise session. Instead, the deal—which reportedly included some ace negotiation from Jared Kushner—collapsed. Instead of providing thousands of generators, Trump simply went on Hannity to explain that breathing is overrated. “You go to hospitals who have don’t even have one [ventilator] in a hospital,” said Trump, “and all of a sudden everybody is asking for vast numbers.” How dare they.
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Re: Incompetence may have spread the virus

#252 Post by jarnon » Sat Mar 28, 2020 4:08 pm

NY Times wrote:The Lost Month: How a Failure to Test Blinded the U.S. to Covid-19

WASHINGTON — Early on, the dozen federal officials charged with defending America against the coronavirus gathered day after day in the White House Situation Room, consumed by crises. They grappled with how to evacuate the United States consulate in Wuhan, China, ban Chinese travelers and extract Americans from the Diamond Princess and other cruise ships.

The members of the coronavirus task force typically devoted only five or 10 minutes, often at the end of contentious meetings, to talk about testing, several participants recalled. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, its leaders assured the others, had developed a diagnostic model that would be rolled out quickly as a first step.

But as the deadly virus from China spread with ferocity across the United States between late January and early March, large-scale testing of people who might have been infected did not happen — because of technical flaws, regulatory hurdles, business-as-usual bureaucracies and lack of leadership at multiple levels, according to interviews with more than 50 current and former public health officials, administration officials, senior scientists and company executives.

The result was a lost month, when the world’s richest country — armed with some of the most highly trained scientists and infectious disease specialists — squandered its best chance of containing the virus’s spread. Instead, Americans were left largely blind to the scale of a looming public health catastrophe.

The absence of robust screening until it was “far too late” revealed failures across the government, said Dr. Thomas Frieden, the former C.D.C. director. Jennifer Nuzzo, an epidemiologist at Johns Hopkins, said the Trump administration had “incredibly limited” views of the pathogen’s potential impact. Dr. Margaret Hamburg, the former commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration, said the lapse enabled “exponential growth of cases.”

And Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, a top government scientist involved in the fight against the virus, told members of Congress that the early inability to test was “a failing” of the administration’s response to a deadly, global pandemic. “Why,” he asked later in a magazine interview, “were we not able to mobilize on a broader scale?”

Across the government, they said, three agencies responsible for detecting and combating threats like the coronavirus failed to prepare quickly enough. Even as scientists looked at China and sounded alarms, none of the agencies’ directors conveyed the urgency required to spur a no-holds-barred defense.

Dr. Robert R. Redfield, 68, a former military doctor and prominent AIDS researcher who directs the C.D.C., trusted his veteran scientists to create the world’s most precise test for the coronavirus and share it with state laboratories. When flaws in the test became apparent in February, he promised a quick fix, though it took weeks to settle on a solution.

The C.D.C. also tightly restricted who could get tested and was slow to conduct “community-based surveillance,” a standard screening practice to detect the virus’s reach. Had the United States been able to track its earliest movements and identify hidden hot spots, local quarantines might have confined the disease.

Dr. Stephen Hahn, 60, the commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration, enforced regulations that paradoxically made it tougher for hospitals, private clinics and companies to deploy diagnostic tests in an emergency. Other countries that had mobilized businesses were performing tens of thousands of tests daily, compared with fewer than 100 on average in the United States, frustrating local health officials, lawmakers and desperate Americans.

Alex M. Azar II, who led the Department of Health and Human Services, oversaw the two other agencies and coordinated the government’s public health response to the pandemic. While he grew frustrated as public criticism over the testing issues intensified, he was unable to push either agency to speed up or change course.

Mr. Azar, 52, who chaired the coronavirus task force until late February, when Vice President Mike Pence took charge, had been at odds for months with the White House over other issues. The task force’s chief liaison to the president was Mick Mulvaney, the acting White House chief of staff, who was being forced out by Mr. Trump. Without high-level interest — or demands for action — the testing issue festered.

At the start of that crucial lost month, when his government could have rallied, the president was distracted by impeachment and dismissive of the threat to the public’s health or the nation’s economy. By the end of the month, Mr. Trump claimed the virus was about to dissipate in the United States, saying: “It’s going to disappear. One day — it’s like a miracle — it will disappear.”

By early March, after federal officials finally announced changes to allow more expansive testing, it was too late to escape serious harm.
Now, the United States has more than 100,000 coronavirus cases, the most of any country in the world. Yet even with deaths on the rise, cities shuttered, the economy sputtering and everyday life upended, many Americans who come down with symptoms of Covid-19 still cannot get tested.
In a statement, Judd Deere, a White House spokesman, said that “any suggestion that President Trump did not take the threat of Covid-19 seriously or that the United States was not prepared is false.” He added that at Mr. Trump’s direction, the administration had “expanded testing capacities.”

Dr. Bruce Aylward, a senior adviser at the World Health Organization, led an expert team to China last month to research the mysterious new virus. Testing, he said, was “absolutely vital” for understanding how to defeat a disease — what distinguishes it from others, the spectrum of illness and, most important, its path through populations.

“You want to know whether or not you have it,” Dr. Aylward said. “You want to know whether the people around you have it. Because you know what? Then you could stop it.”

The first time Dr. Robert Redfield heard about the severity of the virus from his Chinese counterparts was around New Year’s Day, when he was on vacation with his family. He spent so much time on the phone that they barely saw him. And what he heard rattled him; in one grim conversation about the virus days later, George F. Gao, the director of the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention, burst into tears.

Dr. Redfield, a longtime AIDS researcher, had never run a government agency before his appointment to lead the C.D.C. in 2018. Until then, his biggest priorities had been fighting the opioid epidemic and the spread of H.I.V. Suddenly, a man who preferred treating patients in Haiti or Africa to being in the public glare was facing a new pandemic threat.

At first, Dr. Redfield’s agency moved quickly.

On Jan. 7, the C.D.C. created an “incident management system” for the coronavirus and advised travelers to Wuhan to take precautions. By Jan. 20, just two weeks after Chinese scientists shared the genetic sequence of the virus, the C.D.C. had developed its own test, as usual, and deployed it to detect the country’s first coronavirus case.

“That’s our prime mission,” Dr. Redfield said later in an interview, “to get eyes on this thing.”

Assessing the virus would prove challenging. It was so new that scientists had little information to work with. China provided limited data, and rebuffed an early attempt by Mr. Azar and Dr. Redfield to send C.D.C. experts there to learn more. That the virus could cause no symptoms and still spread — something not initially known — made it all the more difficult to understand.

To identify the virus, the C.D.C. test used three small genetic sequences to match up with portions of a virus’s genome extracted from a swab. A German-developed test that the W.H.O. was distributing to other countries used just two, potentially making it less precise.

But soon after the F.D.A. cleared the C.D.C. to share its test kits with state health department labs, some discovered a problem. The third sequence, or “probe,” gave inconclusive results. While the C.D.C. explored the cause — contamination or a design issue — it told those state labs to stop testing.

The startling setback stalled the C.D.C.’s efforts to track the virus when it mattered most. By mid-February, the nation was testing only about 100 samples per day, according to the C.D.C.’s website.

Dr. Redfield played down the problem in task force meetings and conversations with Mr. Azar, assuring him it would be fixed quickly, several administration officials said.

With capacity so limited, the C.D.C.’s criteria for who was tested remained extremely narrow for weeks to come: only people who had recently traveled to China or had been in contact with someone who had the virus.

The lack of tests in the states also meant local public health officials could not use another essential epidemiological tool: surveillance testing. To see where the virus might be hiding, nasal swab samples from people screened for the common flu would also be checked for the coronavirus.
The C.D.C. announced a plan on Feb. 14 to perform the screening in five high-risk cities: New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, San Francisco and Seattle. An agency official said it could provide “an early warning signal to trigger a change in our response strategy.” But most of the cities could not carry it out.

“Had we had done more testing from the very beginning and caught cases earlier,” said Dr. Nuzzo, of Johns Hopkins, “we would be in a far different place.”

The consequences became clear by the end of February. For the first time, someone with no known exposure to the virus or history of travel tested positive, in the Seattle area, where the U.S.’s first case had been detected more than a month earlier. The virus had probably been spreading there and elsewhere for weeks, researchers later concluded. Without a more complete picture of who had been infected, public health workers could not do “contact tracing” — finding all those with whom any contagious people had interacted and then quarantining them to stop further transmission.

The C.D.C. gave little thought to adopting the test being used by the W.H.O. The C.D.C.’s test was working in its own lab — still processing samples from states — which gave agency officials confidence. Dr. Anne Schuchat, the agency’s principal deputy director, would later say that the C.D.C. did not think “we needed somebody else’s test.”

And the German-designed W.H.O. test had not been through the American regulatory approval process, which would take time.
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Throughout February, Dr. Redfield shuttled between Atlanta, where the C.D.C. is based, and Washington, holding multiple calls every day with Mr. Azar and participating in the coronavirus task force.

Mr. Azar’s take-charge style contrasted with the more deliberative manner of Dr. Redfield, who lacked the kind of commanding television presence that impressed Mr. Trump. He was “a consensus person,” as one colleague described him, who sought to avoid conflict. He relied heavily on some of the C.D.C.’s career scientists, like Dr. Schuchat and Dr. Nancy Messonnier, the director of the agency’s National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases.

Under scrutiny from Congress, Dr. Redfield offered reassurances. Responding on Feb. 24 to a letter from 49 members of Congress about the need for testing in the states, he wrote, “CDC’s aggressive response enables us to identify potential cases early and make sure that they are properly handled.”

Days later, his agency provided a workaround, telling state and local health department labs that they could finally begin testing. Rather than awaiting replacements, they should use their C.D.C. test kits and leave out the problematic third probe.

Meanwhile, the agency’s epidemiologists were growing more concerned as the virus spread in South Korea and Italy. On Feb. 25, Dr. Messonnier gave a briefing with a much blunter warning than usual. “Disruption to everyday life might be severe,” she said.

Mr. Trump, returning from a trip to India, was furious, according to senior administration officials. Later that day, Mr. Azar seemed to be tamping down the level of concern. All Dr. Messonnier had meant, he said at a news conference, was that people should “start thinking about, in their own lives, what that might involve.”

“Might,” Mr. Azar repeated emphatically. “Might involve.”

Dr. Stephen Hahn’s first day as F.D.A. commissioner came just six weeks before Mr. Azar declared a public health emergency on Jan. 31. A radiation oncologist and researcher who helped turn around MD Anderson in Houston, one of the nation’s leading cancer centers, Dr. Hahn had come to Washington to oversee a sprawling federal agency that regulates everything from lifesaving therapies to dog food.

But overnight, his mission — to manage 15,000 employees in a culture defined by precision and caution — was upended. A pathogen that Mr. Trump would later call the “invisible enemy” was hurtling toward the United States. It would fall to the newly arrived Dr. Hahn to help build a huge national capacity for testing by academic and private labs.

Instead, under his leadership, the F.D.A. became a significant roadblock, according to current and former officials as well as researchers and doctors at laboratories around the country.

Private-sector tests were supposed to be the next tier after the C.D.C. fulfilled its obligation to jump-start screening at public labs. In other countries hit hard by the coronavirus, governments acted quickly to speed tests to their populations. In South Korea, for example, regulators in early February summoned executives from 20 medical manufacturers, easing rules as they demanded tests.

But Dr. Hahn took a cautious approach. He was not proactive in reaching out to manufacturers, and instead deferred to his scientists, following the F.D.A.’s often cumbersome methods for approving medical screening.

Even the nation’s public health labs were looking for the F.D.A.’s help. “We are now many weeks into the response with still no diagnostic or surveillance test available outside of C.D.C. for the vast majority of our member laboratories,” Scott Becker, chief executive of the Association of Public Health Laboratories, wrote to Mr. Hahn in late February. “We believe a more expeditious route is needed at this time.”

Ironically, it was Mr. Azar’s emergency declaration that established the rules Dr. Hahn insisted on following. Designed to make it easier for drugmakers to pursue vaccines and other therapies during a crisis, such a declaration lets the F.D.A. speed approvals that could otherwise take a year or more.

But the emergency announcement created a new barrier for hospitals and laboratories that wanted to create their own tests to diagnose the coronavirus. Usually, they faced minimal federal regulation. But once Mr. Azar took action, they were subject to an F.D.A. process called an “emergency use authorization.”

Even though researchers around the country quickly began creating tests that could diagnose Covid-19, many said they were hindered by the F.D.A.’s approval process. The new tests sat unused at labs around the country.

Stanford was one of them. Researchers at the world-renowned university had a working test by February, based on protocols published by the W.H.O. The organization had already delivered more than 250,000 of the German-designed tests to 70 laboratories around the world, and doctors at the Stanford lab wanted to be prepared for a pandemic.

“Even if it didn’t come, it would be better to be ready than not to be ready,” said Dr. Benjamin Pinsky, the lab’s medical director.

But in the face of what he called “relatively tight” rules at the F.D.A., Dr. Pinsky and his colleagues decided against even trying to win permission. The Stanford clinical lab would not begin testing coronavirus samples until early March, when Dr. Hahn finally relaxed the rules.

Executives at bioMérieux, a French diagnostics company, had a similar experience. The company makes a countertop testing system, BioFire, that is routinely used to check for the flu and other respiratory illnesses in 1,700 hospitals around the country. It can provide results in about 45 minutes.
“A lot of us said, you know, your typical E.U.A. is just much too demanding,” said Dr. Mark Miller, the company’s chief medical officer, referring to the emergency approval. “It’s going to take much too much time. And can’t you do something to shorten that?”

Officials at the F.D.A. tried to be responsive, Dr. Miller said. But rather than throw out the rules, the agency only modified the regulatory requirements, still requiring weeks of discussions and negotiations.

After conversations with the F.D.A. in mid-February, the company received emergency approval for its BioFire test on March 24. (The company also began talking to the F.D.A. in January about another type of test, but decided not to pursue it in the United States for now.) Dr. Miller said that while he was ultimately satisfied with the F.D.A.’s actions, the overall response by the government was too slow, especially when it came to logistical questions like getting enough testing supplies to those who needed them.

“You’ve got other countries — and I’m sorry, unfortunately, the U.S. is one of those — where they’ve been slow, disorganized,” he said. “There are still not enough tests available there to test everybody who needs it.”

In an emailed statement, Dr. Hahn maintained that his agency had moved as quickly as it safely could to ensure that tests would be accurate. “Since the early days of this pandemic,” he said, “the F.D.A.’s doors have always been and still remain open to test developers.”

Alex Azar had sounded confident at the end of January. At a news conference in the hulking H.H.S. headquarters in Washington, he said he had the government’s response to the new coronavirus under control, pointing out high-ranking jobs he had held in the department during the 2003 SARS outbreak and other infectious threats.

“I know this playbook well,” he told reporters.

A Yale-trained lawyer who once served as the top attorney at the health department, Mr. Azar had spent a decade as a top executive at Eli Lilly, one of the world’s largest drug companies. But he caught Mr. Trump’s attention in part because of other credentials: After law school, Mr. Azar was a clerk for some of the nation’s most conservative judges, including Justice Antonin Scalia of the Supreme Court. And for two years, he worked as Ken Starr’s deputy on the Clinton Whitewater investigation.

As Mr. Trump’s second health secretary, confirmed at the beginning of 2018, Mr. Azar has been quick to compliment the president and focus on the issues he cares about: lowering drug prices and fighting opioid addiction. On Feb. 6 — even as the W.H.O. announced that there were more than 28,000 coronavirus cases around the globe — Mr. Azar was in the second row in the White House’s East Room, demonstrating his loyalty to the president as Mr. Trump claimed vindication from his impeachment acquittal the day before and lashed out at “evil” lawmakers and the F.B.I.’s “top scum.”

As public attention on the virus threat intensified in January and February, Mr. Azar grew increasingly frustrated about the harsh spotlight on his department and the leaders of agencies who reported to him, according to people familiar with the response to the virus inside the agencies.
Described as a prickly boss by some administration officials, Mr. Azar has had a longstanding feud with Seema Verma, the Medicare and Medicaid chief, who recently became a regular presence at Mr. Trump’s televised briefings on the pandemic. Mr. Azar did not include Dr. Hahn on the virus task force he led, though some of the F.D.A. commissioner’s aides participated in H.H.S. meetings on the subject.

And tensions grew between the secretary and Dr. Redfield as the testing issue persisted. Mr. Azar and Dr. Redfield have been on the phone as often as a half-dozen times a day. But throughout February, as the C.D.C. test faltered, Mr. Azar became convinced that Dr. Redfield’s agency was providing him with inaccurate information about testing that the secretary repeated publicly, according to several administration officials.

In one instance, Mr. Azar appeared on Sunday morning news programs and said that more than 3,600 people had been tested for the virus. In fact, the real number was much smaller because many patients were tested multiple times, an error the C.D.C. had to correct in congressional testimony that week. One health department official said Mr. Azar was repeatedly assured that the C.D.C.’s test would be widely available within a week or 10 days, only to be given the same promise a week later.

Asked about criticism of his agency’s response to the pandemic, Dr. Redfield said: “I’m personally not focused on whether they’re pointing fingers here or there. We’re focused on doing all we can to get through this outbreak as quickly as possible and keep America safe.”

For all Mr. Azar’s complaints, however, he continued to defer to the scientists at the two agencies, according to several administration officials. Mr. Azar’s allies said he was told by Dr. Redfield and Dr. Fauci that the C.D.C. had the resources it needed, that there was no reason to believe the virus was spreading through the country from person to person and that it was important to test only people who met certain criteria.

But even in the face of a crescendo of complaints from doctors and health care researchers around the country, Mr. Azar failed to push those under him to do the one thing that could have helped: broader testing.

In a statement, Caitlin Oakley, Mr. Azar’s spokeswoman, said that the secretary had “empowered and followed the guidance of world-renowned U.S. scientists” on the testing issue. “Any insinuation that Secretary Azar did not respond with needed urgency to the response or testing efforts,” she said, “are just plain wrong and disproven by the facts.”

By Feb. 26, Dr. Fauci was concerned that the stalled testing had become an urgent issue that needed to be addressed. He called Brian Harrison, Mr. Azar’s chief of staff, and asked him to gather the group of officials overseeing screening efforts.

Around noon on Feb. 27, Dr. Hahn, Dr. Redfield and top aides from the F.D.A. and H.H.S. dialed in to a conference call. Mr. Harrison began with an ultimatum: No one leaves until we resolve the lag in testing. We don’t have answers and we need them, one senior administration official recalled him saying. Get it done.

By the end of the day, the group agreed that the F.D.A. should loosen regulations so that hospitals and independent labs could move forward quickly with their own tests.

But the evening before, Mr. Azar had been effectively removed as the leader of the task force when Mr. Trump abruptly put Mr. Pence in charge, a decision so last-minute that even the top health officials in the White House learned of it while watching the announcement.

Previous presidents have moved quickly to confront disease threats from inside the White House by installing a “czar” to manage the effort.
During an outbreak of the Ebola virus in 2014, President Barack Obama tapped Ron Klain, his vice president’s former chief of staff, to direct the response from the West Wing. Mr. Obama later created an office of global health security inside the National Security Council to coordinate future crises.

“If you look historically in the United States when it is challenged with something like this — whether it’s H.I.V. crises, whether it’s pandemic, whether it’s whatever — man, they pull out all the stops across the system and they make it work,” said Dr. Aylward, the W.H.O. epidemiologist.

But faced with the coronavirus, Mr. Trump chose not to have the White House lead the planning until nearly two months after it began. Mr. Obama’s global health office had been disbanded a year earlier. And until Mr. Pence took charge, the task force lacked a single White House official with the power to compel action.

Since then, testing has ramped up quickly, with nearly 100 labs at hospitals and elsewhere performing it. On Friday, the health care giant Abbott said it had received emergency approval for a portable test that could detect the virus in five minutes.

The president boasted on Tuesday that the United States had “created a new system that now we are doing unbelievably big numbers” of tests for the virus. The U.S., he said, had done more testing for the coronavirus in the last eight days than South Korea had done in eight weeks.

Yet hospitals and clinics across the country still must deny tests to those with milder symptoms, trying to save them for the most serious cases, and they often wait a week for results. In tacit acknowledgment of the shortage, Mr. Trump asked South Korea’s president on Monday to send as many test kits as possible from the 100,000 produced there daily, more than the country needs.

Public health experts reacted positively to the increased capacity. But having the ability to diagnose the disease three months after it was first disclosed by China does little to address why the United States was unable to do so sooner, when it might have helped reduce the toll of the pandemic.

“Testing is the crack that split apart the rest of the response, when it should have tied everything together,” said Dr. Nahid Bhadelia, the medical director of the Special Pathogens Unit at Boston University School of Medicine.

“It seeps into every other aspect of our response, touches all of us,” she said. “The delay of the testing has impacted the response across the board.
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Re: Incompetence may have spread the virus

#253 Post by Beebs52 » Sat Mar 28, 2020 4:15 pm

Dude. Who the fuck is going to read this.
Well, then

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Re: Incompetence may have spread the virus

#254 Post by jarnon » Sat Mar 28, 2020 4:21 pm

Beebs52 wrote:
Sat Mar 28, 2020 4:15 pm
Dude. Who the fuck is going to read this.
I admit I didn't read every word, but it's quite informative. Errors, some by brilliant medical experts, led to a month delay in testing that could have saved many lives.
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Re: Incompetence may have spread the virus

#255 Post by Bob Juch » Sat Mar 28, 2020 4:43 pm

Beebs52 wrote:
Sat Mar 28, 2020 4:15 pm
Dude. Who the fuck is going to read this.
I did, but on the NY Times website.
I may not have gone where I intended to go, but I think I have ended up where I needed to be.
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Re: Incompetence may have spread the virus

#256 Post by Beebs52 » Sat Mar 28, 2020 5:14 pm

Bob Juch wrote:
Sat Mar 28, 2020 4:43 pm
Beebs52 wrote:
Sat Mar 28, 2020 4:15 pm
Dude. Who the fuck is going to read this.
I did, but on the NY Times website.
My condolences
Well, then

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Re: Incompetence may have spread the virus

#257 Post by Bob78164 » Sun Mar 29, 2020 2:38 am

Beebs52 wrote:
Sat Mar 28, 2020 4:15 pm
Dude. Who the fuck is going to read this.
Anyone who actually wants to know what the fuck happened to put us in this position. --Bob
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Re: Incompetence may have spread the virus

#258 Post by silverscreenselect » Sun Mar 29, 2020 8:13 am

Bob78164 wrote:
Sun Mar 29, 2020 2:38 am
Beebs52 wrote:
Sat Mar 28, 2020 4:15 pm
Dude. Who the fuck is going to read this.
Anyone who actually wants to know what the fuck happened to put us in this position. --Bob
Also in the Times, the far right's campaign to vilify Anthony Fauci:
An analysis by The New York Times found over 70 accounts on Twitter that have promoted the hashtag #FauciFraud, with some tweeting as frequently as 795 times a day. The anti-Fauci sentiment is being reinforced by posts from Tom Fitton, the president of Judicial Watch, a conservative group; Bill Mitchell, host of the far-right online talk show “YourVoice America”; and other outspoken Trump supporters such as Shiva Ayyadurai, who has falsely claimed to be the inventor of email. One anti-Fauci tweet on Tuesday said, “Sorry liberals but we don’t trust Dr. Anthony Fauci.”

“There seems to be a concerted effort on the part of Trump supporters to spread misinformation about the virus aggressively,” said Carl Bergstrom, a professor of biology at the University of Washington who has studied misinformation. Adding that Dr. Fauci is bearing the brunt of the attacks, Mr. Bergstrom said: “There is this sense that experts are untrustworthy, and have agendas that aren’t aligned with the people. It’s very concerning because the experts in this are being discounted out of hand.”

The Trump administration has previously shown a distaste for relying on scientific expertise, such as when dealing with climate change. But misinformation campaigns during a pandemic carry a unique danger because they may sow distrust in public health officials when accurate information and advice are crucial, said Whitney Phillips, an assistant professor at Syracuse University who teaches digital ethics. “What this case will show is that conspiracy theories can kill,” she said.

Anti-Fauci posts spiked [after the hand in face incident], according to Zignal Labs. Much of the increase was prompted by a March 21 article in The American Thinker, a conservative blog, which published the seven-year-old email that Dr. Fauci had written to an aide of Mrs. Clinton. In the email, Dr. Fauci praised Mrs. Clinton for her stamina during the 2013 Benghazi hearings. The American Thinker falsely claimed that the email was evidence that he was part of a secret group who opposed Mr. Trump. One anti-Fauci tweet last Sunday read: “Dr. Fauci is in love w/ crooked @HillaryClinton. More reasons not to trust him.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/28/tech ... 1abcb797db

There are far too many people who want to discount what the medical and scientific experts have to say, because they don't like it, so they accuse these experts as being fake news, politically motivated, deep state or whatever. Ironically, the measures they do latch onto are those that they can embrace politically. Banning Chinese from entering the country or banning New Yorkers from leaving the State suits a lot of right wingers just fine. Ironically, the governor of Florida did more damage by allowing people from many states to congregate for Spring Break and then go home than he's going to prevent by stationing highway patrol cars at state lines to turn New York cars around.
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Re: Incompetence may have spread the virus

#259 Post by silverscreenselect » Sun Mar 29, 2020 8:42 am

flockofseagulls104 wrote:
Thu Mar 19, 2020 2:16 pm
And you want to elect someone who can't walk and walk at the same time.
You are off-the-scale laughable.
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Re: Incompetence may have spread the virus

#260 Post by silverscreenselect » Sun Mar 29, 2020 12:03 pm

The American Enterprise Institute (a conservative think tank) has just published a 13-page plan (20 pages with notes) on how to fight the coronavirus. It divides the strategy into four phases:

Phase 1: Slow the Spread of the Virus
Phase 2: Reopen the Country, State by State, with Precautions
Phase 3: Establish Protection then Lift Restrictions
Phase 4: Rebuild Readiness for the Next Pandemic

Needless to say, we are in Phase 1. The three goals of Phase 1 are to maintain physical distancing, increase testing and establish an infrastructure for national sharing of all testing results, and increase hospital capacity to deal with the instance. They recommend the issuing of stay at home orders in a state when: "when case counts are doubling every three to five days (based on the current New York experience) or when state and local officials recommend it based on the local context (for example, growth on track to overwhelm the health system’s capacity)." Based on the results we are seeing, that would include the majority of the country by now. Even without issuing a stay-at-home advisory, their recommendations for physical distancing include closing of all public gathering places, working at home when possible and limiting travel, and canceling or postponing of meetings. They also recommend people wearing masks in public but noted that this may not be feasible until there are enough supplies for health care and other essential workers.

To move from Phase I to Phase II, a state would need all of the following: hospitals able to treat all patients without crisis standards of care; the ability to test all patients with COVID-19 symptoms, the ability to conduct active monitoring of all confirmed cases and their contacts, and a sustained reduction of cases for at least 14 days. We aren't there in any state yet, so the idea of easing restrictions in two weeks (let alone now as some states are doing) is counterproductive. Further, a vaccine is months away at best, and widespread production of one even farther away.

I'm sure that others in the scientific and medical community may have somewhat different suggestions, but the basic components of a coordinated national plan to fight the virus would include a number of these measures. What's disheartening is that we never see or hear anything from Trump and his apologists and enablers other than vague mentions about discussions they are having. Trump's 15-day study period is up this week, and we should see something approaching a comprehensive plan, rather than scattershot travel restrictions from state to state.

Here is the link to the website with an executive summary: https://www.aei.org/research-products/r ... reopening/

And here is the link to the PDF of the actual plan: https://www.aei.org/wp-content/uploads/ ... ring-1.pdf
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Re: Incompetence may have spread the virus

#261 Post by Bob78164 » Sun Mar 29, 2020 3:29 pm

flockofseagulls104 wrote:
Thu Feb 27, 2020 11:15 pm
There's 60 people out of 350 million in this country that have this thing and you people are once again hysterical with political rage.
Lest we forget -- here's a post that hasn't aged particularly well. --Bob
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Re: Incompetence may have spread the virus

#262 Post by jarnon » Sun Mar 29, 2020 3:59 pm

Another New York Times story about how we got into this mess. This one starts many years ago.
NY Times wrote:The U.S. Tried to Build a New Fleet of Ventilators. The Mission Failed.

Thirteen years ago, a group of U.S. public health officials came up with a plan to address what they regarded as one of the medical system’s crucial vulnerabilities: a shortage of ventilators.

The breathing-assistance machines tended to be bulky, expensive and limited in number. The plan was to build a large fleet of inexpensive portable devices to deploy in a flu pandemic or another crisis.

Money was budgeted. A federal contract was signed. Work got underway.

And then things suddenly veered off course. A multibillion-dollar maker of medical devices bought the small California company that had been hired to design the new machines. The project ultimately produced zero ventilators.

That failure delayed the development of an affordable ventilator by at least half a decade, depriving hospitals, states and the federal government of the ability to stock up. The federal government started over with another company in 2014, whose ventilator was approved only last year and whose products have not yet been delivered.

Today, with the coronavirus ravaging America’s health care system, the nation’s emergency-response stockpile is still waiting on its first shipment. The scarcity of ventilators has become an emergency, forcing doctors to make life-or-death decisions about who gets to breathe and who does not.

The stalled efforts to create a new class of cheap, easy-to-use ventilators highlight the perils of outsourcing projects with critical public-health implications to private companies; their focus on maximizing profits is not always consistent with the government’s goal of preparing for a future crisis.

“We definitely saw the problem,” said Dr. Thomas R. Frieden, who ran the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention from 2009 to 2017. “We innovated to try and get a solution. We made really good progress, but it doesn’t appear to have resulted in the volume that we needed.”
The project — code-named Aura — came in the wake of a parade of near-miss pandemics: SARS, MERS, bird flu and swine flu.

Federal officials decided to re-evaluate their strategy for the next public health emergency. They considered vaccines, antiviral drugs, protective gear and ventilators, the last line of defense for patients suffering respiratory failure. The federal government’s Strategic National Stockpile had full-service ventilators in its warehouses, but not in the quantities that would be needed to combat a major pandemic.

In 2006, the Department of Health and Human Services established a new division, the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority, with a mandate to prepare medical responses to chemical, biological and nuclear attacks, as well as infectious diseases.

In its first year in operation, the research agency considered how to expand the number of ventilators. It estimated that an additional 70,000 machines would be required in a moderate influenza pandemic.

The ventilators in the national stockpile were not ideal. In addition to being big and expensive, they required a lot of training to use. The research agency convened a panel of experts in November 2007 to devise a set of requirements for a new generation of mobile, easy-to-use ventilators.
In 2008, the government requested proposals from companies that were interested in designing and building the ventilators.

The goal was for the machines to be approved by regulators for mass development by 2010 or 2011, according to budget documents that the Department of Health and Human Services submitted to Congress in 2008. After that, the government would buy as many as 40,000 new ventilators and add them to the national stockpile.

The ventilators were to cost less than $3,000 each. The lower the price, the more machines the government would be able to buy.

Companies submitted bids for the Project Aura job. The research agency opted not to go with a large, established device maker. Instead it chose Newport Medical Instruments, a small outfit in Costa Mesa, Calif.

Newport, which was owned by a Japanese medical device company, only made ventilators. Being a small, nimble company, Newport executives said, would help it efficiently fulfill the government’s needs.

Ventilators at the time typically went for about $10,000 each, and getting the price down to $3,000 would be tough. But Newport’s executives bet they would be able to make up for any losses by selling the ventilators around the world.

“It would be very prestigious to be recognized as a supplier to the federal government,” said Richard Crawford, who was Newport’s head of research and development at the time. “We thought the international market would be strong, and there is where Newport would have a good profit on the product.”

Federal officials were pleased. In addition to replenishing the national stockpile, “we also thought they’d be so attractive that the commercial market would want to buy them, too,” said Nicole Lurie, who was then the assistant secretary for preparedness and response inside the Department of Health and Human Services. With luck, the new generation of ventilators would become ubiquitous, helping hospitals nationwide better prepare for a crisis.

The contract was officially awarded a few months after the H1N1 outbreak, which the C.D.C. estimated infected 60 million and killed 12,000 in the United States, began to taper off in 2010. The contract called for Newport to receive $6.1 million upfront, with the expectation that the government would pay millions more as it bought thousands of machines to fortify the stockpile.

Project Aura was Newport’s first job for the federal government. Things moved quickly and smoothly, employees and federal officials said in interviews.

Every three months, officials with the biomedical research agency would visit Newport’s headquarters. Mr. Crawford submitted monthly reports detailing the company’s spending and progress.

The federal officials “would check everything,” he said. “If we said we were buying equipment, they would want to know what it was used for. There were scheduled visits, scheduled requirements and deliverables each month.”

In 2011, Newport shipped three working prototypes from the company’s California plant to Washington for federal officials to review.
Dr. Frieden, who ran the C.D.C. at the time, got a demonstration in a small conference room attached to his office. “I got all excited,” he said. “It was a multiyear effort that had resulted in something that was going to be really useful.”

In April 2012, a senior Health and Human Services official testified before Congress that the program was “on schedule to file for market approval in September 2013.” After that, the machines would go into production.

Then everything changed.

The medical device industry was undergoing rapid consolidation, with one company after another merging with or acquiring other makers. Manufacturers wanted to pitch themselves as one-stop shops for hospitals, which were getting bigger, and that meant offering a broader suite of products. In May 2012, Covidien, a large medical device manufacturer, agreed to buy Newport for just over $100 million.

Covidien — a publicly traded company with sales of $12 billion that year — already sold traditional ventilators, but that was only a small part of its multifaceted businesses. In 2012 alone, Covidien bought five other medical device companies, in addition to Newport.

Newport executives and government officials working on the ventilator contract said they immediately noticed a change when Covidien took over. Developing inexpensive portable ventilators no longer seemed like a top priority.

Newport applied in June 2012 for clearance from the Food and Drug Administration to market the device, but two former federal officials said Covidien had demanded additional funding and a higher sales price for the ventilators. The government gave the company an additional $1.4 million, a drop in the bucket for a company Covidien’s size.

Government officials and executives at rival ventilator companies said they suspected that Covidien had acquired Newport to prevent it from building a cheaper product that would undermine Covidien’s profits from its existing ventilator business.

Some Newport executives who worked on the project were reassigned to other roles. Others decided to leave the company.

“Up until the time the company sold, I was really happy and excited about the project,” said Hong-Lin Du, Newport’s president at the time of its sale. “Then I was assigned to a different job.”

In 2014, with no ventilators having been delivered to the government, Covidien executives told officials at the biomedical research agency that they wanted to get out of the contract, according to three former federal officials. The executives complained that it was not sufficiently profitable for the company.

The government agreed to cancel the contract. The world was focused at the time on the Ebola outbreak in West Africa. The research agency started over, awarding a new contract for $13.8 million to the giant Dutch company Philips. In 2015, Covidien was sold for $50 billion to another huge medical device company, Medtronic. Charles J. Dockendorff, Covidien’s former chief financial officer, said he did not know why the contract had fallen apart. “I am not aware of that issue,” he said in a text message.

Robert J. White, president of the minimally invasive therapies group at Medtronic who worked at Covidien during the Newport acquisition, initially said he had no recollection of the Project Aura contract. A Medtronic spokeswoman later said that Mr. White was under the impression that the contract had been winding down before Covidien bought Newport.

It wasn’t until last July that the F.D.A. signed off on the new Philips ventilator, the Trilogy Evo. The government ordered 10,000 units in December, setting a delivery date in mid-2020.

As the extent of the spread of the new coronavirus in the United States became clear, Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, revealed on March 15 that the stockpile had 12,700 ventilators ready to deploy. The government has since sped up maintenance to increase the number available to 16,660 — still fewer than a quarter of what officials years earlier had estimated would be required in a moderate flu pandemic.

Last week, the Health and Human Services Department contacted ventilator makers to see how soon they could produce thousands of machines. And it began pressing Philips to speed up its planned shipments.

The stockpile is “still awaiting delivery of the Trilogy Evo,” a Health and Human Services spokeswoman said. “We do not currently have any in inventory, though we are expecting them soon.”
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Re: Incompetence may have spread the virus

#263 Post by silverscreenselect » Sun Mar 29, 2020 5:15 pm

Trump finally showed some common sense today and listened to Fauci and his other advisers in extending the social distancing guidelines for another month. It remains to be seen how well the red state governors and Jerry Falwell Jr. will listen.

But then he goes on:
For years [suppliers] have been delivering ten to twenty thousand masks. OK, it’s a New York hospital and it’s packed all the time but how do you go from ten to twenty thousand to 300,000? Something’s going on and you ought to look into it as reporters. Where are the masks going? Are they going out the back door? And we. have that in a lot of different places so somebody should probably look into that because I just don’t see from a practical standpoint how that’s possible.
So now the healthcare workers who are putting in double shifts and putting their own lives at risk are trying to make a fast buck pawning some masks on eBay or the street corner. Doesn't he realize that people are burning through these masks trying to treat patients?
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Re: Incompetence may have spread the virus

#264 Post by silverscreenselect » Sun Mar 29, 2020 5:42 pm

Donald Trump's constantly moving goalposts:
Donald Trump 2/17/20 wrote:We had 12, at one point. And now they’ve gotten very much better. Many of them are fully recovered.
Donald Trump 3/29/20 wrote:So if we can hold [the number of US deaths] down, as we’re saying, to 100,000, it’s a horrible number, maybe even less, but to 100,000, so we have between 100 and 200,000, we all together have done a very good job,
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Re: Incompetence may have spread the virus

#265 Post by Bob78164 » Tue Mar 31, 2020 4:19 pm

And now Donny has rejected calls to open a special Obamacare enrollment period for those states using the federal health insurance exchange. My understanding is that states, such as California, that have their own exchanges are not bound by the federal decision. —Bob
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Re: Incompetence may have spread the virus

#266 Post by silverscreenselect » Wed Apr 01, 2020 7:22 am

Donald Trump 3/6/20 wrote:So last year 37,000 Americans died from the common Flu. It averages between 27,000 and 70,000 per year. Nothing is shut down, life & the economy go on. At this moment there are 546 confirmed cases of CoronaVirus, with 22 deaths. Think about that!
Donald Trump 3/31/20 wrote:Think what would've happened if we didn't do anything. I had many friends, people w/ common sense who said, 'why don't we just ride it out? Don't do anything, just ride it out & think of it as the flu'
In 1984, Winston Smith's job was literally re-writing the history books. Now, Donald Trump is trying to do that on a daily basis to cover his rear end.
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Re: Incompetence may have spread the virus

#267 Post by silverscreenselect » Wed Apr 01, 2020 8:01 am

Donald Trump 3/31/20 wrote:Did [the impeachment trial] divert my attention? I think I’m getting A pluses for the way I handled myself during a phony impeachment, I don’t think I would have done any better had I not been impeached, okay? And I think that’s a great tribute to something, maybe it’s a tribute to me, but I don’t think I would have acted any differently, or I don’t think I would have acted any faster.
I'm sure there's some sort of medal that Trump can award himself for fast thinking under impeachment pressure.
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Re: Incompetence may have spread the virus

#268 Post by Spock » Wed Apr 01, 2020 8:55 am

No way am I reading this thread.

But, I reckon that the active posters in it hold China blameless for hiding it for weeks when the worldwide spread could have been easily mitigated. We live in a world where viruses can travel from anywhere to anywhere in 24 hours-when the Chinese hid it for weeks-it was already too late.

And they appear to worship the World Health Organization which has been carrying China's water for months.

I saw Bruce Aylward of the WHO mentioned in a post above:

Go ahead and revere the guy-but the viral video of him carrying water for China and ignoring questions about Taiwan completely kills his credibility and calls into question the ability of the WHO to handle anything regarding China fairly.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UlCYFh8U2xM

The following phrase after he pretended not to hear the question about Taiwan is laughable.
>>"That's OK, let's move to another one."<<<<

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Re: Incompetence may have spread the virus

#269 Post by Bob78164 » Wed Apr 01, 2020 11:54 am

Spock wrote:
Wed Apr 01, 2020 8:55 am
No way am I reading this thread.

But, I reckon that the active posters in it hold China blameless for hiding it for weeks when the worldwide spread could have been easily mitigated. We live in a world where viruses can travel from anywhere to anywhere in 24 hours-when the Chinese hid it for weeks-it was already too late.

And they appear to worship the World Health Organization which has been carrying China's water for months.

I saw Bruce Aylward of the WHO mentioned in a post above:

Go ahead and revere the guy-but the viral video of him carrying water for China and ignoring questions about Taiwan completely kills his credibility and calls into question the ability of the WHO to handle anything regarding China fairly.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UlCYFh8U2xM

The following phrase after he pretended not to hear the question about Taiwan is laughable.
>>"That's OK, let's move to another one."<<<<
The federal government knew plenty. I don't care whether China hid or tried to hide information. Alarm bells were going off within the Administration for literally months, as you'd know if you were willing to expose yourself to the information contained in this thread. Donny just ignored them.

It was his job to protect American lives by getting this right. No excuses. It was his fucking job. He failed. But you want to let him keep doing the job after January, notwithstanding the risk to millions upon millions of vulnerable Americans, including but not limited to my mother (who lives in Queens) and my son's mother (who lives near Seattle and has asthma). (Both have avoided the disease so far.) That tells me you consider your political views more important than the lives of those who are near and dear to me.

Donny failed. And he's still failing. The only appropriate response is to replace him at the helm as soon as we possibly can. --Bob
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Re: Incompetence may have spread the virus

#270 Post by Pastor Fireball » Wed Apr 01, 2020 5:01 pm

silverscreenselect wrote:
Sun Mar 29, 2020 5:42 pm
Donald Trump's constantly moving goalposts:
Donald Trump 2/17/20 wrote:We had 12, at one point. And now they’ve gotten very much better. Many of them are fully recovered.
Donald Trump 3/29/20 wrote:So if we can hold [the number of US deaths] down, as we’re saying, to 100,000, it’s a horrible number, maybe even less, but to 100,000, so we have between 100 and 200,000, we all together have done a very good job,
I would just like to point out that the same people who spent the past 10 years bitching about 4 deaths in Benghazi are now calling 200,000 deaths due to Drumpf's incompetence "a very good job".
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Re: Incompetence may have spread the virus

#271 Post by silverscreenselect » Wed Apr 01, 2020 6:02 pm

At today's briefing, Trump found a new strawman to push the blame on... the Mexican drug cartels. He didn't actually claim they were responsible for the coronavirus; he and Bill Barr just patted themselves on the back for doing such a great job against them smuggling drugs into the US. And he credited his wall once again.

So now we're giving up the pretense that these briefings are anything other than Trump feel-good rallies that the press is playing the straight man for.
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Re: Incompetence may have spread the virus

#272 Post by Bob Juch » Wed Apr 01, 2020 7:25 pm

Anthony Fauci’s security is stepped up as doctor and face of U.S. coronavirus response receives threats

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics ... story.html

Anthony S. Fauci, the nation’s top infectious-diseases expert and the face of the U.S. response to the novel coronavirus pandemic, is facing growing threats to his personal safety, prompting the government to step up his security, according to people familiar with the matter.

The concerns include threats as well as unwelcome communications from fervent admirers, according to people with knowledge of deliberations inside the Department of Health and Human Services and the Department of Justice.

Fauci, 79, is the most outspoken member of the administration in favor of sweeping public health guidelines and is among the few officials willing to correct President Trump’s misstatements. Along with Deborah Birx, the coordinator for the White House’s task force, Fauci has encouraged the president to extend the timeline for social-distancing guidelines, presenting him with grim models about the possible toll of the pandemic.

“Now is the time, whenever you’re having an effect, not to take your foot off the accelerator and on the brake, but to just press it down on the accelerator,” he said Tuesday as the White House’s task force made some of those models public, warning of 100,000 to 240,000 deaths in the United States.

Trump on Dr. Fauci: 'He doesn't need security, everybody loves him'

Anthony S. Fauci declined to comment on April 1 when asked whether he had been assigned a security detail. (The Washington Post)

The exact nature of the threats against him was not clear. Greater exposure has led to more praise for the doctor but also more criticism.

Fauci has become a public target for some right-wing commentators and bloggers, who exercise influence over parts of the president’s base. As they press for the president to ease restrictions to reinvigorate economic activity, some of these figures have assailed Fauci and questioned his expertise.

Sign up for our Coronavirus Updates newsletter to track the outbreak. All stories linked in the newsletter are free to access.

Last month, an article depicting him as an agent of the “deep state” gained nearly 25,000 interactions on Facebook — meaning likes, comments and shares — as it was posted to large pro-Trump groups with titles such as “Trump Strong” and “Tampa Bay Trump Club.”

Alex Azar, the HHS secretary, recently grew concerned about Fauci’s safety as his profile rose and he endured more vitriolic criticism online, according to people familiar with the situation. In recent weeks, admirers have also approached Fauci, asking to him sign baseballs, along with other acts of adulation. It was determined that Fauci should have a security detail. Azar also has a security detail because he is in the presidential line of succession.

Asked Wednesday whether he was receiving security protection, Fauci told reporters, “I would have to refer you to HHS [inspector general] on that. I wouldn’t comment.”

The president interjected, saying, “He doesn’t need security. Everybody loves him.”

HHS asked the U.S. Marshals Service to deputize a group of agents in the office of the HHS inspector general to provide protective services for the doctor, according to an official with knowledge of the request.

The U.S. Marshals Service conveyed the request to the deputy attorney general, who has authority over deputations for the purpose of providing protective services, with the recommendation that it be approved, according to the official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to reveal sensitive plans that the person was not authorized to discuss.

A Justice Department official signed paperwork Tuesday authorizing HHS to provide its own security detail to Fauci, according to an administration official.

An HHS spokesperson declined to discuss details of the doctor’s security but said: “Dr. Fauci is an integral part of the U.S. Government’s response against covid-19. Among other efforts, he is leading the development of a covid-19 vaccine and he regularly appears at White House press briefings and media interviews.”

As Trump signals readiness to break with experts, his online base assails Fauci

At the briefings, Fauci, who has advised presidents of both parties as director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, has spoken authoritatively about the spread of the coronavirus and the sacrifices involved in mitigating its effects.

He has at times corrected the president, in particular when prompted by reporters. After Trump said a covid-19 vaccine would be available in a couple of months, Fauci said it would in fact be available in about a year to a year and a half, at best.

His role has turned him into a hero for some. When he was absent from a briefing last month, followers who had grown accustomed to his frank assessments of the outbreak were alarmed that he might have been sidelined for his forthrightness. Many took to Twitter to ask, “Where is Dr. Fauci?” causing the question to trend on the platform.

He gained viral attention two days later when he placed his hand in front of his face in a gesture of apparent disbelief as Trump referred to the State Department as the “deep state department” from the White House briefing room.

Fauci has also given several interviews in which he has tempered praise for the president with doubts about his pronouncements, including about the viability of anti-malarial drugs as a treatment for the novel coronavirus. Most notably, he told the journal Science that he attempts to guide Trump’s statements but “can’t jump in front of the microphone and push him down.”

These moves have inspired fandom. But they have also drawn scorn from some of the president’s most vocal supporters, even as both men have sought to tamp down the appearance of tension.

“The president was right, and frankly Fauci was wrong,” Lou Dobbs said last week on his show on the Fox Business Network, referring to the use of experimental medicine.

Right-wing news and opinion sites have gone further, launching baseless smears against the doctor that have gained significant traction within pro-Trump communities online.

Outlets such as the Gateway Pundit and American Thinker seized on a 2013 email — released by WikiLeaks as part of a cache of communications hacked by Russian operatives — in which Fauci praised Hillary Clinton’s “stamina and capability” during her testimony as secretary of state before the congressional committee investigating the attacks in Benghazi, Libya.

The headline in the American Thinker referred to Fauci as a “Deep-State ­Hillary Clinton-loving stooge.” The author, Peter Barry Chowka, didn’t respond to requests for comment. When asked about the relevance of Fauci’s emails to his role in advising the White House’s coronavirus response, Jim Hoft, the editor of the Gateway Pundit, said, “I don’t have a problem with more information being shared about the doctor.”

The outlet has continued to criticize Fauci in recent days, saying that by offering new predictions about the possible death toll, Fauci and others were “going to destroy the U.S. economy based on total guesses and hysterical predictions.”

Several senior administration officials said that Trump respects Fauci and that the two generally have a good working relationship. Trump heeded the guidance of Fauci and Birx this week when he announced his administration would extend social-distancing guidelines for another 30 days. Last week, many health officials and experts grew worried when Trump said he hoped to reopen the country by Easter, even as coronavirus cases in the United States continue to rapidly climb.

The immunologist, who graduated first in his class from Cornell’s medical school, has been the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases since 1984. Between 1983 and 2002, he was the 13th-most-cited scientist among the 2.5 million to 3 million authors worldwide and across all disciplines publishing in scientific journals, according to the Institute for Scientific Information.
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Re: Incompetence may have spread the virus

#273 Post by Bob Juch » Wed Apr 01, 2020 9:28 pm

How America built the best pandemic response system in history – and threw it away

https://www.newstatesman.com/world/nort ... -flu-avian
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Re: Incompetence may have spread the virus

#274 Post by silverscreenselect » Thu Apr 02, 2020 8:19 am

Donald Trump 3/31/20 wrote: Think of it: 151 countries. Somebody said to me today that wasn’t in this particular world — they didn’t know that we had that many countries. A hundred and fifty-one countries. That’s something.
He's just as good at geography as he is at science.
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Re: Incompetence may have spread the virus

#275 Post by Bob Juch » Thu Apr 02, 2020 8:28 am

silverscreenselect wrote:
Thu Apr 02, 2020 8:19 am
Donald Trump 3/31/20 wrote: Think of it: 151 countries. Somebody said to me today that wasn’t in this particular world — they didn’t know that we had that many countries. A hundred and fifty-one countries. That’s something.
He's just as good at geography as he is at science.
There are 195 countries.
I may not have gone where I intended to go, but I think I have ended up where I needed to be.
- Douglas Adams (1952 - 2001)

Si fractum non sit, noli id reficere.

Teach a child to be polite and courteous in the home and, when he grows up, he'll never be able to drive in New Jersey.

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