THE prc CORONAVIRUS FLAG IS A REMINDER THE prc IS RESPONSIBLE FOR UNLEASHING THIS VIRUS ON THE WORLD.
CORONAVIRUS. ONE of the worst things to do when dealing with a developing national medical emergency is panic but the inadequate and inappropriate response by the drumpf / trump-pence administration is creating a panic in the U.S. (NOT MY) vice-pres pence is an idiot, he should not be VP and sure as hell should not be in charge of the government response to the coronavirus. Need proof? Check out his response to a doctor who questioned him about the adninistration's proposed Medicaid cuts, he can not even address the issue. pence also opposed and blocked a clean needle program to stop an outbreak of HIV / AIDS in Indiana when he was governor, and actually said smoking does not kill people. DEMOCRATS can not be intimidated by the drumpf / trump-pence administration, they need to expose the administration's response as a political propaganda campaign, not a scientifically based health care response. Their response is make sure drumpf / trump-pence are re-elected, not protecting and providing for the health of the American people. These from the Washington Post and CBS.....
Trump has exposed a huge weakness. Democrats should pounce.
March 2, 2020 at 10:24 a.m. EST
But there’s still more that Democrats could be saying. That’s because Trump has exposed a major leadership weakness, one that goes well beyond just the coronavirus response.
The weakness in question: Trump’s chronic inability to admit that anything on his watch is less than stupendously wonderful. This pathology is deeply ingrained in this presidency. It infects everything from his depictions of the economy to his insane demands of border officials, in addition to (as we’re now seeing) the government’s handling of a public health crisis.
Highlighting this provides a way to integrate criticism of Trump’s management failures with an indictment of his hideous character flaws —his towering dishonesty and megalomania. In this telling, those failings are not just the latest ugly installment of the Daily Trump Show. They’re also shortcomings that threaten major real-world consequences.
A debate over Trump’s handling of the epidemic is one that his propagandists badly want to avoid — so they’re casting all criticism of it as only reflecting a desire to harm Trump himself. Numerous Republicans and right-wing media figures have made variations of this claim.
Perhaps worst of all, Donald Trump Jr. is claiming that Democrats want “millions” to die of coronavirus to end Trump’s “streak of winning.” In so doing, Trump the Younger usefully unmasked his reprehensible instinct to see the prospect of mass U.S. deaths mainly through the prism of how this would impact the president politically.
And yet, on CNN’s “State of the Union,” Vice President Pence actually defended this sentiment as “understandable.” Why? Because it was a response to … criticism of Trump, which is apparently so intolerable that it justifies even this.
This cultish prioritization of protecting Trump above all else, of course, flows from the tone that Trump himself has set. But the case that Democrats can now make is that this very megalomania is itself corroding the government’s ability to handle this crisis.
Trump’s megalomania poses a danger
The Post’s extraordinary weekend report on our evolving response to the crisis underscores the point. Trump badly wanted to minimize coronavirus’s seriousness — it was rattling the markets, which Trump views as a crucial gauge of his reelection chances.
And so, Trump fumed as he watched his own health officials inform the country about the seriousness of the threat, considering this to be alarmist. He raged against the media for treating him unfairly, confirming again that everything gets filtered through how it personally impacts him.
As The Post details, that’s the crucial backstory to what happened next: Trump contradicted his own officials by downplaying the dangers posed. And Trump put Pence in charge of the response after declining to bring in an outside coordinating “czar," in part because he worried that this person might be disloyal — that is, that he or she would tell the country the truth in a way that didn’t reflect well on him.
This is likely to have real consequences.
With a second American dying from coronavirus, officials now fear that the spread on the West Coast due purely to transmission in the community, not through foreign travel, may have been far more severe than we knew, and may have gone undetected.
In a widely cited Twitter thread, Jeremy Konyndyk, a senior fellow at the Center for Global Development, explained that Trump’s “preferences,” his rage at those who suggested the outbreak might be more serious than he wished it to be, probably colored the administration’s response in subtle ways, potentially leading to this lapse in detection.
Time will tell whether this reading is correct. But we already know Trump’s megalomaniacal insistence on making everything about him — and his intertwined belief that he can magically mold reality to his benefit — surely threatens to hamper our response in untold ways.
The Democratic criticisms
The presidential candidates are now hitting Trump over his coronavirus response. Joe Biden is faulting its managerial incompetence. Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) is warning of economic instability. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) is underscoring his case for Medicare-for-all.
And Bloomberg’s new TV ad notes that the president’s role amid such crises is to “marshal facts and expertise,” and to inculcate public confidence that the administration is being “transparent” about the response and that “professionals are in charge.”
From all this, it’s only a short leap to making the point that a major impediment to achieving this is Trump’s pathological need to cast everything on his watch as smashingly marvelous.
We’ve seen this on numerous fronts: In a fury over soaring migration numbers, Trump demanded that border officials break the law. He misled Ohio residents about the health of the manufacturing economy. To mask his trade war carnage, he told farmers to get bigger tractors, and regularly and falsely claims that China, not the U.S. consumer, is paying his tariffs.
This criticism will stand even if officials do ultimately manage coronavirus effectively. That’s because such an eventuality will effectively take place behind Trump’s back — officials will be succeeding despite the obstacles created by his pathologies.
That’s a case Democrats should not shy away from making, despite screams that they must not “politicize” the outbreak. This is exactly the debate the country needs right now — even or especially in the very political context of the presidential race.
Coronavirus: What you need to read
The latest: Washington state announced four more coronavirus deaths, bringing virus death toll in U.S. to six.
What you need to know about coronavirus: What is it? How deadly is it? How does it spread?
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Mike Pence said smoking "doesn't kill" and faced criticism for his response to HIV. Now he's leading the coronavirus response
When President Trump announced Wednesday that Vice President Mike Pence will lead the administration's response to the coronavirus, he said Pence "has a talent for this."But some public health experts have raised alarms not only about Pence's lack of medical training, but also his history of questionable and sometimes false statements on health and science issues.
Before entering the White House, Pence espoused views that can be disproven with data found on U.S. government webpages. As Indiana's governor, he faced a public health emergency that pushed him to reverse some of his stances — but only after delays that, according to health officials, made the situation worse.
Pence is now in charge of the U.S. response to a global outbreak that has already killed at least 2,800 people worldwide, sickened more than 83,000 and decimated the stock market at a rate not seen since the Great Recession.
These are a few of Pence's past positions and actions. When asked for comment, Pence's office directed CBS News to an interview Pence gave Friday on Rush Limbaugh's radio show, in which the vice president defended his record on public health. Quotes from that interview are featured below.
Pence also defended his actions at a White House press conference about coronavirus on Saturday, saying he was "proud" of his work in Indiana. Mr. Trump supported him as well, saying the vice president has done "a phenomenal job on health care."
"Smoking doesn't kill"
In a 2001, when Pence was running for Congress, he wrote a post on his campaign website warning against "the worst kind of Washington-speak" about regulating tobacco.
"Time for a quick reality check. Despite the hysteria from the political class and the media, smoking doesn't kill," he wrote in the article dug up by BuzzFeed News.
He continued, without citing sources: "In fact, 2 out of every 3 smokers does not die from a smoking related illness and 9 out of ten smokers do not contract lung cancer." [The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says "people who smoke cigarettes are 15 to 30 times more likely to get lung cancer or die from lung cancer than people who do not smoke."]
Pence conceded that "smoking is not good for you," and urged people to quit. But he suggested that "back handed big government disguised in do-gooder health care rhetoric" would be "more harmful to the nation" than second-hand smoke. He also equated the dangers of smoking to fatty foods, caffeine and sports utility vehicles.
Years later, in Congress, Pence voted against legislation giving the Food and Drug Administration power to regulate the tobacco industry and adding new warning labels to tobacco products and ads. The bill passed, and President Obama signed it into law.
The CDC says smoking "is the leading cause of preventable death," with cigarette smoke responsible for more than 480,00 deaths per year in the United States (including more than 41,000 deaths from secondhand smoke exposure). It says tobacco use causes more than 7 million deaths per year worldwide.
Pence: Condoms are "very, very poor protection" and the safest sex is "no sex"
Pence, then a U.S. congressman representing Indiana, participated in a CNN panel in 2002 about abstinence education. Pence responded to recent remarks by Secretary of State Colin Powell, who said he supported and encouraged condom use.
Pence said Powell's comments marked "a sad day" and went on, "Frankly, condoms are a very, very poor protection against sexually transmitted diseases." He said Powell "may be inadvertently misleading millions of young people and endangering lives."
Pence said later in the panel that he believes "the only truly safe sex" is "no sex," and "we ought to be sending a message to kids across the country" that "abstinence is the best choice for young people."
The CDC and World Health Organization say condoms can significantly reduce, though not eliminate, the risk of STDs — as well as other diseases like Zika and Ebola. A nonpartisan study in 2007 concluded that abstinence-only programs have little impact on teen sexual behavior.
Indiana's HIV crisis
In 2015, when Pence was governor of Indiana, the state had its worst-ever HIV outbreak, with dozens of people contracting the virus after sharing needles to inject addictive painkillers.
The CDC recommended clean needle exchanges. But this was illegal in Indiana, and Pence initially opposed making a change for the crisis.
More than two months after the outbreak was detected, state health officials and CDC doctors pushed in a meeting for Pence to relent. Pence's health commissioner told The New York Times that after the meeting, the governor said, "I'm going to go home and pray on it." (This has apparently led to the false claim, spread by critics including Bernie Sanders, that Pence wanted to "pray away" the epidemic. There is no record of him saying that.)
Days later, Pence issued an order allowing a temporary needle exchange, while making clear that he still opposed such policies and would veto any legislation for a broader needle exchange program. He did, however, later sign legislation allowing needle exchanges in counties that could prove they were experiencing an epidemic.
A 2018 study by Yale School of Public Health researchers, published in The Lancet medical journal, said that earlier action could have averted more than 120 infections or even prevented the outbreak altogether. The study also noted that, under Pence's watch, funding was cut for the last HIV testing provider in the rural county where the epidemic exploded.
In an interview Friday with Rush Limbaugh, Pence stood by his handling of the HIV epidemic, as well as other outbreaks in Indiana during his tenure as governor. Pence pointed out that needle exchanges were illegal in the state and he was personally opposed to them, but said he "made the hard call" when the crisis called for it.
"We dealt with the issue. We ended the spread of the disease. Everyone received treatment, and the community has completely recovered and I'm proud of it," Pence said.
He added that the experience taught him "the value of partnerships when you're dealing with a health issue," and he believed that was "the main reason" why Mr. Trump tapped him to lead the coronavirus response.
"I think by putting me over the administration's response to the coronavirus, the president wanted to signal the priority that he's placed on this," Pence said. "But he talked to me about my practical experience as a governor, because a lot of people are aware the CDC is involved, HHS is involved, Homeland Security is involved, and we've managed the quarantines."
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