The single most disastrous element of the failed federal response to the Covid-19 pandemic is Donald Trump’s continued refusal to launch a massive federal effort to develop the capacity to test more Americans for the virus.
Without magnitudes more testing, public health experts agree, reopening the country is a death sentence for countless Americans, particularly the less affluent. And only the federal government is capable of what’s required.
On Wednesday, Trump explained himself with an extraordinarily revealing quote – one that included both a lie and a confession.
“In a way, by doing all this testing we make ourselves look bad,” Trump told reporters on Wednesday,
It was a lie because the number of tests administered in the U.S. – currently about 7 million – is tiny compared to the actual need.
And it was a confession because Trump was acknowledging that he sees testing as a matter of his own political health rather than the public’s.
The context of his comment was also revealing, because he was speaking entirely about the public perception of the problem rather than the problem itself — and started off […]
The wilful suppression of information, and scientists, is terrifying. Here in Arizona our republican governor is re-opening the state on the 11th, and firing scientists who warn that this is too early. The same is happening in Florida. This immoral suppression of facts, politicizing of an epidemic, and refusal to allow the population itself to decide, will result in so many deaths, mostly among the poorest and most vulnerable populations.
https://www.azcentral.com/story/opinion/op-ed/laurieroberts/2020/05/06/arizona-not-ready-reopen-asu-ua-coronavirus-models-say-fired/5175510002/
It doesn’t matter at all what this administration does. They have absolute power locked down. They own the judicial and executive branches and they have gridlocked Congress. So they can do anything without consequences. The judicial branch will say that whatever actions they do are legal. This is the one-party authoritarian rule that the founders feared.