Dr. Anthony Fauci said Sunday that calls to implement life-saving social distancing measures faced “a lot of pushback” early in the US coronavirus outbreak and that the country is now looking for ways to more effectively respond to the virus should it rebound in the fall.
“I mean, obviously, you could logically say that if you had a process that was ongoing and you started mitigation earlier, you could have saved lives,” Fauci, the nation’s top infectious disease expert, told CNN’s Jake Tapper on “State of the Union” when asked if social distancing and stay-at-home measures could have prevented deaths had they been put in place in February, instead of mid-March.
“Obviously, no one is going to deny that. But what goes into those decisions is complicated,” added Fauci, who is a key member of the Trump administration’s coronavirus task force. “But you’re right, I mean, obviously, if we had right from the very beginning shut everything down, it may have been a little bit different. But there was a lot of pushback about shutting things down back then.”
The comments from Fauci come a day after a report from The New York Times detailed the Trump administration’s missteps in the early days of the pandemic and how President Donald Trump ignored his advisers’ warnings of the potentially deadly disease
Golly, I wonder who was pushing back? Oh wait. We know who it was, don’t we?
Donald Trump, of all people, gets no benefit of the doubt. He’s been a disaster from the moment he came down that escalator in 2015. His administration has been chaotic and dysfunctional in every way. We were all holding our breath hoping that we somehow got through this term without a major crisis . We almost made it.
Oh, and by the way, he’s still lying:
“We’re in great shape with ventilators,” Trump said on Friday. “We’re in great shape with protective clothing. We have additional plane loads coming in but we’re not getting any calls from governors at this moment… We’re getting very few calls from governors or anybody else.”
“I get calls from governors every single day,” Hogan replied. “We’ve had 12 calls now with every single governor in America, eight of which the president and/or vice president was on the call with us.”
“I had a call with the FEMA administrator just yesterday afternoon,” he continued. “I know there’s people in Washington working very hard to help the states but I think to say that everybody is completely happy and we have everything we need is not quite accurate.”
“I mean, everybody still has tremendous needs on personal protective equipment and ventilators and all of these things that you keep hearing about,” Hogan added.
The stories about how the Trump administration delayed the response in the early days of the pandemic are very important. Trump’s narcissism and ignorance cost lives. But we can’t forget that he’s still doing it!
He’s lying every day as he has since he started his campaign (probably since he was a child.) Now it’s costing American lives in communities all over the country.