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“When you have a respiratory virus that can be spread by droplets and aerosol and … there’s a degree of morbidity associated with that, you can have a catastrophe. … The one that we always talk about is the 1918 pandemic, which killed between 50 and 100 million people. … Influenza first, or something like influenza, is the one that keeps me up at night.”
The above is a quote from Dr. Faucci, but not in 2020 as you might expect. It was to Congress in 2018. And yet when Trump was asked about in early Mar 2020 he said “This is something that you can never really think is going to happen.”
“This is something that you can never really think is going to happen.”
Of course if a president listened at briefings, or read reports without pictures, a president might know about imminent and predictable threats. Or most importantly, if he hadn’t disbanded the pandemic response team that Obama had created.
The level of hypocrisy and stupidity required for this is beyond comprehension. It is equivalent to pulling your fire alarm off your wall and throwing it away and then saying no one could have detected the fire before it became a full house burner.
Leaving aside the myriad other ways Trump mishandled the pandemic, the decision to deliberately undo all the preparation done by his predecessor for exactly the scenario that hit less than two years later is literally criminal. It is manslaughter with over a million counts…and growing by the day.
