Carl Schramm on the ongoing failure of the CDC.
[Update a while later]
It wasn’t just Fauci; how the Deep State played Trump.
Carl Schramm on the ongoing failure of the CDC.
[Update a while later]
It wasn’t just Fauci; how the Deep State played Trump.
I guess I still don’t buy the basic premises of either linked story:
Masking, social distancing, and sanitizing grocery carts did little or nothing to stop the spread of the virus and imposed huge social costs.
Something slowed the spread of covid in the early days to the point where hospitals weren’t overwhelmed (and the flu even disappeared for more than a year). It wasn’t evolution of the virus. And from personal experience, the infection clusters of covid in my employer in Yellowstone National Park weren’t common in the year 2020 (later years were different), but they were all associated with people who failed to follow these behavioral measures – a campground where the staff had refused social distancing outside of work resulted last I heard in about 40-50% infection rate that I know of. It might have been higher. A second was a group that had been camping out and staying together in a NPS cabin over weekends. I never heard how many were infected in that one. That was it for the employees of the entire park that year.
And well, that was it despite the surrounding counties having growing numbers of cases in late summer of 2020 (their cases died down after the end of the main part of tourist season) and Yellowstone having a weaker, but still massive tourist season that year.
The measures may have been highly inefficient or counterproductive in some ways and most people absolutely loathed them, but they did work for preventing spread of covid.
As to the alleged playing of Trump by the deep state, keep in mind that Trump was doing the propaganda equivalent of having his cake and eating it too. He was preaching noncompliance to his base while having Fauci take the heat for the unpopularity of preventative measures. It would have been a simple matter for Trump to replace Fauci with someone more ideologically compliant. But if Trump did that, then he’d be liable for the consequences – say such as a shutdown of the medical care system in urban areas. The deep state probably got something out of that deal too so they might indeed have played Trump.
But as it was, Fauci was Trump’s boy. Yet the faults and problems created by Fauci didn’t stick to Trump. One should wonder how Trump managed that.
A lor of claims are made about what Mr, Trump supposedly said.
How was he ever preaching non-compliance?
He was offering optimistic scenarios about when the unpopular measures could be relaxed, and supposedly white-male college-educated suburban-dwelling voters “punished him for it”, but that just goes to show the degree of intellectual disability among white-male college-educated suburban voters.
But I never heard him tell people to disobey the directives coming from governors. People on the Right fault Mr. Trump for allowing the governors of states to impose the unpopular measures, and I had thought that Mr. Trump had in fact criticized governors in Georgia and Florida for “opening up” too soon.
Famously, Mr. Trump accelerated development of the vaccines, for which he is denied credit by the Left and pilloried on the Right.