Re: COVID-19 - On the Ground
Posted: Mon Apr 24, 2023 2:19 pm
The guy who called it a fungus for three years is suddenly worried about facts?
lolrandylahey wrote: ↑Mon Apr 24, 2023 4:01 pm Fauccis research caused a culling of the old and the weak. If anyone should face consequences from anything covid related, its him
If it weren't for the constant death threats, it has to be HIGHLY amusing to see one's reputation become some combination of Mengele, Freeman, Moreau and Voldemort.PhDhawk wrote: ↑Mon Apr 24, 2023 3:11 pmThe guy who called it a fungus for three years is suddenly worried about facts?
There were like 3 days where Fauci, among many, said people shouldn't wear masks because they should be prioritized for health care professionals. And that was extremely early on, before it was known that there were asymptomatic carriers.
Other than that, what did he do wrong? Too many TV interviews? Made a funny face when Trump said stupid shit? is that worth losing a license over?
Wait, Faucci was doing research in China?randylahey wrote: ↑Mon Apr 24, 2023 4:01 pm Fauccis research caused a culling of the old and the weak. If anyone should face consequences from anything covid related, its him
Buckle up, buttercup. It's time for a ride on the Krazy Koaster.Overlander wrote: ↑Mon Apr 24, 2023 8:46 pmWait, Faucci was doing research in China?randylahey wrote: ↑Mon Apr 24, 2023 4:01 pm Fauccis research caused a culling of the old and the weak. If anyone should face consequences from anything covid related, its him
Looking back at the U.S. response to the pandemic, many setbacks and mistakes are well-known. But a closer examination by a team of seasoned experts has brought to the surface a profoundly unsettling conclusion. The United States, once the paragon of can-do pragmatism, of successful moon shots and biomedical breakthroughs, fell down on the job in confronting the crisis. The pandemic, the experts say, revealed “a collective national incompetence in government.”
This warning comes through over and over again in “Lessons from the Covid War: An Investigative Report,” a book published Tuesday by a group of 34 specialists led by Philip Zelikow, the executive director of the 9/11 Commission and a history professor at the University of Virginia. Their verdict: “The leaders of the United States could not apply their country’s vast assets effectively enough in practice.”
Mr. Zelikow mobilized the experts to help get ready for a possible national commission on the pandemic. When Congress and the White House failed to launch a national inquiry, the experts wrote their own report. It is a compelling, disturbing account. They conclude the pandemic was not an inescapable tragedy. The United States could and should have done better.
The United States started out “with more capabilities than any other country in the world,” they note. But it ended up with 1 million dead. “The Covid war is a story of how our wondrous scientific knowledge has run far, far ahead of the organized human ability to apply that knowledge in practice.”
[...]
The authors of the report show, in detail, how federal crisis management “splintered by the third week of March.” HHS Secretary Alex Azar had placed the assistant secretary for preparedness and response, Robert Kadlec, in charge of the HHS effort — but at the same time, Vice President Mike Pence’s staff kicked him off the White House task force. The head of the Food and Drug Administration was not even on the task force for the first month. The CDC was “fractured into too many missions.” While some officials recognized the urgency of a crash program of testing and masks, “Kadlec had no money, no real emergency fund.”
“By late April, as a frightened and bewildered country became more and more confused about continuing business and school closures, and after some brow-raising comments at a White House briefing in which he discussed treating the virus with light, heat, or disinfectant, Trump essentially detached himself from his own government,” the report says. “He moved toward questioning and challenging what other government officials were doing.”
“The administration abdicated its wartime responsibility to lead,” they add. “It left the battlefield, and the war strategy” to the states and localities. By April, the White House chief of staff concluded the task force was “useless and broken.”
There were many other examples of dysfunction — confusion over face masks, shortages of personal protective equipment, conflict over reopening, mixed messages over boosters.
[...]
The pandemic also found the United States navigating without critical information about the virus and how it was moving. “No federal agency, including the CDC, had designed or tried to build a rapid-action, interdisciplinary, systematic biomedical surveillance network,” the report says. “Such a network would show how many people were getting sick, reveal what kind of people were most vulnerable and the key risk factors, illustrate the usual course of the disease, and employ robust capabilities for genomic sequencing.” Other nations, including Britain, Israel and South Africa, used such networks.
U.S. policies were “being designed largely in the dark, reacting as people showed up in hospitals, sick and dying.”
[...]
“Because authorities were flying blind about how the virus was spreading, many communities probably imposed social controls long before they needed to,” the report says. “Timing was hard when authorities could not track the virus spread.”
[...]
The United States did some things well, the experts conclude, such as the crash vaccine development and manufacturing effort, Operation Warp Speed, which was a bargain at $30 billion. But “one of the worst consequences” of the bungled response “was that Americans sensed their governance had let them down. It had let them down in performing the most fundamental task governments are expected to perform, to protect them in an emergency.”
This is a sobering, realistic assessment, one of the most important to come out of the pandemic. The nation should pay heed to it.
And this gets at the heart of the issue - one of the eight plays in the GOP's "Super Tecmo Bowl"-sized playbook is (1) kneecap government, (2) watch government fail, (3) blame government for failing.KUTradition wrote: ↑Tue Apr 25, 2023 10:41 am the nation should pay heed, but it won’t
randy is just one example as to why
faux news is another (not entirely unrelated)
Youre a perfect example. You insisted what a serious deal covid was, dont you want people held accountable for what happened?KUTradition wrote: ↑Tue Apr 25, 2023 11:34 am what’s amazing is your continued willful ignorance, about a great many topics
yesrandylahey wrote: ↑Tue Apr 25, 2023 11:35 amYoure a perfect example. You insisted what a serious deal covid was, dont you want people held accountable for what happened?KUTradition wrote: ↑Tue Apr 25, 2023 11:34 am what’s amazing is your continued willful ignorance, about a great many topics