In January of 2020, I began hearing from some people I know on the periphery of the scientific community that there was a new virus that had people shaking in their boots. I wrote about it here (shamefully calling it the Wuhan virus because that was what everyone else was calling it at the time. I should have known better.)
I don’t usually write about things like this. It’s way out of my wheelhouse. But there was something about this that made the hair on the back of my neck stand up and I decided to share it on the blog. Obviously, I wasn’t the only one. And it wasn’t long until we were fully immersed in this awful pandemic that happened in the middle of the most surreal presidency in history.
The House Oversight Committee has released a report on Trump’s handling of the virus and it’s just as bad as you remember:
Trump administration officials made “deliberate efforts to undermine the nation’s coronavirus response for political purposes,” a House oversight committee led by Democrats said in a report released Friday.The committee, which spent months working to interview former Trump officials, said the administration worked to undermine the public health response to the coronavirus pandemic by blocking officials from speaking publicly, watering down testing guidance and attempting to interfere with other public health guidance.
No kidding. Those of us who have been paying attention knew that as it was happening. Trump allowed tens of thousands of people to die needlessly because he didn’t want to lose the election. And in the process, he and his minions managed to brainwash nearly 40% of the country into refusing to follow the mitigation strategies that are needed to keep the virus in check and worse, to believe it’s actually not a threat to themselves and others. And his actions are still killing people.
Today the Republican party celebrates gun violence and boldly admits that exploiting the vaccine resistance among their followers is an excellent electoral strategy. They are officially a death cult.
We are all tired of this. Exhausted. But we can’t let this go. It’s one of the worst political acts I’ve ever seen. And it’s ongoing.
They are going to try to blame the Democrats for what they’ve done and we simply cannot allow them to do it. It’s one thing to crash the economy, sabotage the recovery and then blame Democrats for failing to fix things. That’s their usual MO. But they’ve taken it to an unprecedented low today. They are literally helping to kill their own supporters for political gain.
We’ve written about this pandemic almost daily for nearly two years now here at Hullabaloo. I yearn for the day when there’s no reason to update readers on what I’m reading about the latest and try to put it into the current political context. But unfortunately, that day is not here yet.
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Happy Hollandaise everyone…