As the global death toll for coronavirus surpasses 1 million, with roughly 20 percent of those deaths in the US, it becomes even more unfathomable how the president has handled the worst public health crisis in history.
With four percent of the world population, America has 20 percent of the victims of Covid-19. It is a disgraceful performance the greatest mishandling of a crisis since Lincoln's Immediate predecessors made the Civil War inevitable.
It bears mentioning one more time that all Trump needed to do was call in the Center for Disease Control specialists and turn the management of the epidemic over to them.
After all, you don’t call a plumber when a person has a heart attack. Trump, the equivalent of that plumber, never allowed the experts to probe the scientific reality of the virus and act accordingly. Instead, he indulged himself in trips to fantasy land, imagining the virus would go away with the first hint of summer, or that unproven drugs would form the perfect remedy.
The anti-science bias, the wallowing in ignorance, and disposing of the best advice cost the US dearly. Suffice to say if it were a corporation handling the crisis, Trump as CEO would have been long banished.
When all the voodoo cures failed, he blamed the scientists and denigrated Dr. Antony Fauci, the world’s leading expert. It was like benching Mickey Mantle and Team America has suffered greatly since.
There is no question that with a proper leader in the White House, those Covid death figures in the US - now over 205,000 - could have been greatly diminished.
Public health professionals are absolutely adamant that a single simple action, wearing a mask in public, helps save thousands of lives.
The CDC Director Dr. Robert Redfield even posited that wearing a mask was more important and effective than the vaccines we are waiting so eagerly for. He told Congress last week: "I might even go so far as to say that this face mask is more guaranteed to protect me against Covid than when I take a Covid vaccine, because the immunogenicity may be 70%. And if I don't get an immune response, the vaccine is not going to protect me. This face mask will."
Yet the president’s concern was that Redfield had misspoken and had somehow gone rogue.
A proper president would have immediately moved on the issue, creating nationwide guidelines that all people should wear a mask in public. To do anything else defies all scientific logic.
He could have cited South Korea which encountered the coronavirus at the same time as the US, ordered a mask-wearing mandate, and has now reduced deaths to under 40 a day while the US is still losing close to 1,000.
But his followers march like lemmings to the cliff edge behind him. Judging by polls, more than 40 percent of the country continues to approve of President Trump, hanging on to his every word as if it was the gospel from Jesus himself.
Alas, it is not, and the devastating number of deaths because of this celebration of ignorance is truly heartbreaking. So wake up America, wear a mask, and help save a life-it is that important. This is not about politics it is about public health.
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