Well, yeah, exactly. Even BEFORE he was downplaying its threat to Americans. One of his own advisors was suggesting that COVID-19 could be a major health catastrophe and a just as major economic disaster.
Yet the president chose to ignore these warnings just as he ignored warnings from his intelligence advisors and his health/medical advisors.
This lack of response is criminal even if it is from incompetence but as more information becomes available on the thought processes in the White House leading up to the pandemic, it appears it was intentional. The man in the Oval Office and the denizens of his regime in the West Wing have blood on their hands.
A top White House adviser starkly warned Trump administration officials in late January that the coronavirus crisis could cost the United States trillions of dollars and put millions of Americans at risk of illness or death.
The warning, written in a memo by Peter Navarro, President Trump’s trade adviser, is the highest-level alert known to have circulated inside the West Wing…
“The lack of immune protection or an existing cure or vaccine would leave Americans defenseless in the case of a full-blown coronavirus outbreak on U.S. soil,” Mr. Navarro’s memo said. “This lack of protection elevates the risk of the coronavirus evolving into a full-blown pandemic, imperiling the lives of millions of Americans.”
Dated Jan. 29, it came during a period when Mr. Trump was playing down the risks to the United States, and he would later go on to say that no one could have predicted such a devastating outcome.
emphasis mine
So the White House knew. Since at least January. The White House knew yet even today we can’t get a straight answer from the president nor a cognizant plan to fight it. We still don’t have enough tests. We still don’t have enough equipment. We still don’t have active focused federal government support to the states to get this thing under control.
And now we again have a president eager to get the economy reopened while we haven’t even hit peak pandemic. And everyday more Americans die, needlessly.
A second memo that Mr. Navarro wrote, dated Feb. 23, warned of an “increasing probability of a full-blown COVID-19 pandemic that could infect as many as 100 million Americans, with a loss of life of as many as 1.2 million souls.”
When will Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and his party have had enough?
If I remember correctly the incoming Bush administration was warned “terrorists were planning on using commercial aircraft to attack the USA”. Perhaps republicans are just plain clueless.
our gov’t is at sleep at the switch. We will all die because they suck at their appointed jobs.