If you want to blame Trump for not acting sooner, you should be in favor of firing Fauci. Here's Yoda telling us (and presumably Trump) on Feb 29 that "you do not need to change anything you are doing". Trump followed the advice of our supposed experts (thankfully he ignored them when he imposed the China travel ban).
At the time, there were total 66 cases, 0 death in the country .... a national locking down at that moment seems impossible but Fauci should have urged Trump to do more tests, tracking and similar travel ban toward Europe. not sure he did it or not.
point is, Fauci is portrayed as unquestionable, while Trump is accused of not listening to his scientists yet Yoda Fauci was advocating no change in behavior on Feb 29
10 times Trump and his administration were warned about coronavirus The state of play: The first case of COVID-19 reached the U.S. on Jan. 15. The World Health Organization declared it a pandemic on March 11. Trump declared the U.S. outbreak a national emergency on March 13. On Jan. 18, Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar first briefed Trump on the threat of the virus in a phone call, the New York Times reports. Trump made his first public comments about the virus on Jan. 22, saying he was not concerned about a pandemic and that "we have it totally under control." On Jan. 27, White House aides met with then-acting Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney to try to get senior officials to take the virus threat more seriously, the Washington Post reports. Joe Grogan, the head of the White House Domestic Policy Council, warned it could cost Trump his re-election. On Jan. 29, economic adviser Peter Navarro warned the White House in a memo addressed to the National Security Council that COVID-19 could take more than half a million American lives and cause nearly $6 trillion in economic damage. On Jan. 30, Azar warned Trump in a subsequent call that the virus could become a pandemic and that China should be criticized for its lack of transparency, per the Times. Trump dismissed Azar as alarmist and rejected the idea of criticizing China. Also on Jan. 30, the World Health Organization declared the coronavirus a global health emergency. WHO has only done so five times since gaining that power in 2005. On Feb. 5, senators urged the administration in a briefing to take the virus more seriously and asked if additional funds were necessary. The administration made no requests at the time for emergency funding. On Feb. 14, a memo was drafted by health officials in coordination with the National Security Council that recommended the targeted use of "quarantine and isolation measures," per the Times. Officials planned to present Trump with the memo when he returned from India on Feb. 25, but the meeting was canceled. On Feb. 21, the White House coronavirus task force conducted a mock exercise of the pandemic. The group concluded that the U.S. would need to implement aggressive social distancing, even if it caused mass disruption to the economy and American lives, per the Times. On Feb. 23, Navarro doubled down on his warnings in another memo, this time addressed to the president, stating that up to 2 million Americans could die of the virus. On Feb. 25, director of the National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases Nancy Messonnier publicly warned of the virus threat and said "we need to be preparing for significant disruption in our lives.” Trump reportedly called Azar fuming that Messonnier had scared people unnecessarily and caused the stock market to plummet, per the Times. The bottom line: Anthony Fauci said on CNN's "State of the Union" Sunday that "no one is going to deny" that more lives could have been saved if the Trump administration had implemented social distancing guidelines earlier on. https://www.axios.com/trump-coronav...=social&utm_campaign=organic&utm_content=1100
luls...Fire Fauci. Open America for bizness! DO IT DONNY Don't let the libs cuck you with their baseless worries and basless theories!
I don't know if even George Orwell could have written some of these things. Well, maybe: "The Trade Advisor to the President wrote not only one but two urgent memos warning of the impending pandemic and resulting economic devastation but was ignored. When the pandemic occurred, he became the President's point man scumbag to deny the administration could have ever seen it coming." "Mister President, I won't have any credibility." "I'll give you thousands of shares in Acme Hydrochloroquine." "Sold!" I don't know from under which rock Navarro crawled. I'm surprised he doesn't turn to dust when the sun hits him.
Go read his Wikipedia and you'll see why he's in that spot for Trump and where Trump is getting a lot of his advice. Unethical and a borderline sociopath would be nice descriptions of him.
How is it that the hangout thread warned us to take it seriously back in January but not 'leaders' of the country. "Don't go to little Chinatown in Houston, it can be dangerous someone" posted.
So let me get this straight. He won’t issue or reinforce stay at home orders through out the country because of states rights. But he will force states to reopen the economy. What a joke this guy is.
Alexander: "So, Dr. Fauci, it’s Saturday morning in America. People are waking up right now with real concerns about this. They want to go to malls and movies, maybe the gym as well. Should we be changing our habits and, if so, how?" Fauci: "No. Right now, at this moment, there’s no need to change anything that you’re doing on a day by day basis. Right now the risk is still low, but this could change. I’ve said that many times even on this program. You’ve got to watch out because although the risk is low now, you don’t need to change anything you’re doing. When you start to see community spread, this could change and force you to become much more attentive to doing things that would protect you from spread." Welker: "Dr. Fauci, quickly, how does this all end?" Fauci: "You know, it ends if you -- it depends on the nature of the outbreak. I mean, this could be a major outbreak. I hope not. Or it could be something that’s reasonably well controlled. At the end of the day, this will ultimately go down. Hopefully we could protect the American public from any serious degree of morbidity or mortality. That’s the reason why we’ve got to do the things that we have in our plan." That same day, during a press briefing: "The country as a whole, because we get asked that all the time, still remains at low risk. But when we say that, we want to underscore that this is an evolving situation, and in real time we will keep you apprised of what is going on, just the same way as we are doing it today." Later in the briefing, Fauci said, "We need to prepare for further challenges, and we will have them. You will hear about the additional cases that will be coming on. You should not be surprised by that, but to realize that that is something that is anticipated when you get community spread." Whether Fauci himself felt there was no reason for the public to be alarmed at that time, or this was the messaging he was asked to deliver from others on the task force, we don't know. But suggesting that Trump's resistance to taking stronger action sooner was at the behest of Fauci and his medical experts, and not due to political reasons, flies in the face of all that has transpired since March.
