It’s perversely fitting that the anti-science quack whose imbecilic behavior during the pandemic resulted in an unnecessarily high death toll is now declaring that, if returned to power, he will withdraw all federal funds from public schools that require vaccines.
There’s a lot to unpack in that opening paragraph. The Lancet, a prominent medical journal, concluded in a ’21 report that Donald Trump’s “appalling response” to the pandemic (his hostility to mask mandates, etcetera) “expedited the spread of COVID” in the United States; as a result, as many as 40% of the 470,00 deaths that occurred on his watch could have been avoided, had he acted rationally. But has he learned anything since? Of course not. At a Virginia rally in early March, he indeed talked about punishing schools that mandate vaccines, a brain fart he first floated in Iowa a year ago.
As this country slowly goose-steps toward a MAGA Restoration, with roughly half the electorate too dumb or oblivious to take notice, Trump’s record on public health would seem to be relevant grist for fresh discussion. I know, the pandemic was so four years ago, ancient history by our standards – Gore Vidal was right when he quipped that USA stands for “the United States of Amnesia” – but since Trump was once an incumbent, perhaps we should treat him like one by re-inspecting his detestable actions.
And there’s no better time than right now, because, Feb. 29, we marked the four-year anniversary of America’s first confirmed COVID death. Four years ago yesterday, the CDC reported 60 confirmed cases. Four years ago this month, the entire nation virtually shut down.
Trump, we now know, was seriously briefed about the impending crisis long before it hit. But here’s what he said publicly on Feb. 26, 2020: “When you have 15 (infected) people, and the 15 within a couple days is going to be down close to zero, that’s a pretty good job we’ve done…This will end. You look at flu season. (COVID) is a little bit different, but in some ways it’s easier…It’s a little like the regular flu.”
But that’s not what he told Bob Woodward in an interview on Feb. 7: “It’s also more deadly thav even your strenuous flu … This is deadly stuff.” Why didn’t he share these early warnings with his fellow citizens so that they could be better prepared? He answered that during an interview with Woodward on March 19: “Really, to be honest with you…I wanted to play it down. I still like playing it down.” That’s why he fired Nancy Messonnier, a top CDC official, who’d made the mistake of committing public candor on Feb. 25 when she said that Americans should get ready for “significant disruptions” to their lives.
Then we got Dr. Trump’s miracle cures. He pitched hydroxychloroquine (“try it if you like…it’ll be wonderful, it’ll be so beautiful”) – which was deemed worthless by the National Institutes of Health, the Food and Drug Administration, and the World Health Organization. And when Richard Bright, a prominent federal vaccine expert, stated that the drug “clearly lack(ed) scientific merit,” Trump fired him.
Undeterred as always, Trump flashed his medical credentials on the topic of disinfectants. Either half the electorate wants to restore this kind of thinking to the presidency, or, more likely, half the electorate doesn’t remember it, or know it even happened, or doesn’t care that it happened. Trump was talking to a science official who was off camera:
“So supposing we hit the body with a tremendous – whether it’s ultraviolet or just a very powerful light – and I think you said that hasn’t been checked because of the testing. And then I said, supposing you brought the light inside the body, which you can do either through the skin or some other way, and I think you said you’re going to test that, too…I see the disinfectant that knocks (COVID) out in a minute, one minute. And is there a way we can do something like that by injection inside or almost a cleaning? As you see, it gets in the lungs, it does a tremendous number on the lungs, so it would be interesting to check that.”
Suffice it to say that, during the Biden administration, the makers of Lysol hasn’t felt compelled to issue a statement warning against internal uses of its cleaning project.
And suffice it to say that the current president has never said anything this stupid: “(COVID) affects elderly people with heart problems and other problems. In some states thousands of people – nobody young. Below the age of 18, like, nobody. Take your hat off to the young, it affects virtually nobody.” Trump said that in September 2020 – five months after the CDC started tracking thousands of COVID cases among Americans under the age of 18, and one month after the CDC warned that “children are at risk for severe COVID.”
Five days after Trump’s ’17 Inaugural, I wrote that he would likely “get a lot of people killed.” That was a cinch prediction, and indeed he did. If we’re heedless enough to entrust our lives, yet again, to an anti-science sociopath, next time could well be worse.
With apologies to cinema’s “The Gladiator”: nn“Ladies and gentlemen of the cult! I stand before you as a rapist, an insurrectionist, a coup plotter, a financial fraudster, a deadbeat who owes half a billion dollars to courts of law, a thief of classified documents, an accused criminal of 91 felonies, a racist, a porn star philanderer, a denigrator of military heroes, a fear-mongering font of incoherence, a moral vacuum, a doormat for foreign dictators, a vengeful congenital liar with malice aforethought – are you not entertained?!“
And on Super Tuesday they mustered a collective huzzah:
“We are! You are what we want! Give us more!”
I have nothing more to say today. I yield to the poet Langston Hughes:
I am so tired of waiting,
Aren’t you,
For the world to become good
And beautiful and kind?
Let us take a knife
And cut the world in two –
And see what worms are eating
At the rind.
Dick Polman, a veteran national political columnist based in Philadelphia and a Writer in Residence at the University of Pennsylvania, writes at DickPolman.net and is distributed by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate. Email him at dickpolman7@gmail.com.
From The Progressive Populist, April 1, 2024
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