4/19/20: Most Americans are not buying the BS Trump peddles in his daily press briefings. A new poll shows only 36% trust what the president says about the coronavirus.
(If people read this blog, that figure would drop to 3%. That is assuming some readers suffer from crippling comprehension issues.)
During difficult days, a dose of comedy never hurts. I tuned in to John Oliver’s show on Comedy Central, Sunday night. Here’s some of what I learned by watching a real comedian, rather than Trump, a comic by mistake.
I also did a bit of follow up research:
1. Many Americans are ignorant or incredibly dumb. According to a Gallup survey, 57% of people who indulge in a “conservative news diet” believe the coronavirus is no more or less of a risk than seasonal flu.
2. Other ignorant or incredibly dumb people believe consuming boiled garlic will cure the virus.
3. Others are purchasing (and drinking) mothers’ breast milk, believing it will serve as a health tonic.
4.
That is really gross.
5. Greg Rigano, “a Stanford University Medical School Adviser,” was a recent guest on Tucker Carlson’s show.
6. Rigano was there to tout the curative powers of hydroxychloroquine, an anti-malarial drug that President Trump has also been touting, for use against COVID-19.
7. According to Rigano the drug has been shown in one study to have a cure rate of 100%.
8.
As soon as I heard that,
even during a clip on John Oliver’s show, I thought, “This guy has to be a fraud!”
9. Whereas Carlson replied, “I mean that’s remarkable, isn’t it? Or am I missing something?”
10. Clearly, Carlson was. And the guy was making millions as a commentator on Fox News.
11. Tucker reminded me of a description Barry Goldwater used to saddle a foe: “If he were any dumber, he’d be a tree.”
12. A little checking showed
that Rigano was not in fact associated with Stanford in any way.
13. In the past, Rigano had tried to raise money so he could work on ways to “cure aging,” or “cure cancer,” or “end Alzheimer’s” and – best of all – help people “live forever.”
14. Sean Hannity insisted on his March 19 show that a study Rigano was touting, was done in “consultation with Stanford University School of Medicine, UAB School of Medicine.”
15. This was news to those schools.
16. Rigano had also appeared on Laura Ingraham’s show to trumpet the magical properties of hydroxychloroquine.
17. Ingraham fell for
Rigano’s shtick. Did I mention Goldwater’s comment? It was like Fox News was a
forest.
18. On April 6, Ingraham made a special trip to the White House to see President Trump. She was there to convince him the miracle drug would work.
19. I think she should have pushed Trump to come out in favor of adults drinking breast milk.
20. Last, but not least, I
learned that Pastor Kenneth Copeland, another Trump fan, had his own solution
to our coronavirus crisis.
Trump really hates it when people are rude and nasty.
I also learned, by looking stuff up, that several governors thought Trump’s claim that they had enough testing to start opening up their economies was just more of the president’s franks and beans.
On Friday night, Trump blew off governors’ concerns about problems with testing. In fact, Trump simplified a complex issue – because, if you listen to the man, he never understands important issues. He said his administration was sending out 5.5 million testing swabs to the states. And wasn’t he great! The swabs, he continued, “can be done easily by the governors themselves. Mostly it’s cotton. It’s not a big deal, you can get cotton easily, but if they can’t get it, we will take care of it.”
Also, I think he should have said, little sticks. He should
have claimed, “We will get the states lots of little sticks. Or doctors and
nurses can break twigs off trees and stick cotton balls on the end.”
Trump even complained that Democratic senators were “rude and nasty” during a talk with Vice President Pence. Trump really hates it when people are rude and nasty. I’m sure you have noticed this all along.
Sen. Angus King, an independent, for one, described the Trump administration’s failure to ramp up testing a “dereliction of duty.”
And on the Sunday morning talk show circuit, governors were
out in force, making their concerns clear.
____________________
“But to try to push this off, to say that the governors have plenty of testing and they should just get to work on testing, somehow we aren’t doing our job, is just absolutely false.”
Gov. Larry Hogan
____________________
“That’s just delusional to be making statements like that,” Gov. Ralph Northam of Virginia said in response to Trump’s whining. “We have been fighting every day for PPE,” he said. Some personal protective equipment was coming in. True. But his state had been battling to get the necessary testing kits, and it wasn’t just kits in short supply. “We don’t even have enough swabs, believe it or not. And we’re ramping that up,” Northam explained. “But for the national level to say that we have what we need and really to have no guidance to the state levels is just irresponsible, because we’re not there yet.”
Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan, a Republican, didn’t agree with Trump either. On CNN he explained that “lack of testing” was “probably the number one problem in America and has been from the beginning of this crisis.”
Hogan all but labeled Trump a liar:
And I have repeatedly made this
argument to the leaders in Washington on behalf of the rest of the governors in
America. And I can tell you I talk to governors on both sides of the aisle
nearly every single day. The administration, I think, is trying to ramp up
testing and trying – they are doing some things with respect to private labs.
But to try to push this off, to say that the governors have plenty of testing
and they should just get to work on testing, somehow we aren’t doing our job,
is just absolutely false.
Governor Hogan’s communication director tweeted soon after, saying that following lengthy negotiations, Maryland had “acquired 500,000 COVID-19 tests from LabGenomics in South Korea.”
LIBERATE MARYLAND!
Gov. Charlie Baker, of Massachusetts, another Republican, made it clear the federal government needed to up its game. He said he had talked to numerous officials. He cited both the CDC and FDA as major players in establishing “a far more significant testing capacity in the United States.”
LIBERATE MASSACHUSETTS!
A third Republican governor, Mike DeWine of Ohio, offered similar assessment. Troubles with testing were holding him back. Reagents (chemicals used to read test results) were in short supply. He “could probably double, maybe even triple testing in Ohio virtually overnight if the FDA would prioritize companies that are putting a slightly different formula together for the extraction reagent kit.” Ohio didn’t have enough swabs, or tubes for blood samples, or necessary fluids to carry out the thousands and thousands of tests that were needed.
“We have a shortage, worldwide shortage, of some of the materials that go into this,” he told Chuck Todd in an interview on NBC. “So, we really need help – if anybody in the FDA is watching, this would really take our, take our capacity up, literally Chuck, overnight.”
LIBERATE
OHIO!
“Can’t do the tests without those.”
My favorite, though, would be the governor who requested anonymity before he or she dared risk a petulant president’s puerile wrath. (I am guessing this governor was also a Republican, and hoped to avoid getting slapped with an insulting nickname by the head of his or her party.)
At any rate, Jack Tapper, on CNN, read off what the anonymous governor had written to him. “Just wanted you to know how frustrating the doublespeak is [emphasis added] that’s coming from the White House,” the mystery author explained. “When the White House says there’s plenty of ‘testing capacity’ in the states they are referring to the number of tests that could be run on machines that exist in hospitals, commercial labs and doctor’s offices,” he or she said. “So, why aren’t states using all the capacity? There’s a worldwide shortage of swabs, VTM and reagent. Can’t do tests without all of those. And they don’t come in a package – you have to buy each of those from multiple suppliers.”
LIBERATE SOME STATE!
Nor did it seem that most medical experts were sold on the idea that Trump had done his job well, and governors could do plenty of tests, if they’d only show a little initiative and go looking for some swabs.
Dr. Tom Frieden, former director of CDC, told CNN that the amount of coronavirus testing the United States was currently doing (150,000 tests per day) was not nearly enough. It was “absolutely the federal government’s responsibility” to help boost test capacity. “We really need the federal government, commercial laboratories, private sector hospitals to continue to step up,” Frieden added. “The federal government has a crucial role to play.”
Of course, Trump fans, if they weren’t too lazy, could look it up and quickly find that Frieden had been head of the CDC under Obama (hated name; sound of Trump fans loading their guns). And, like me, they might discover that Frieden was arrested for groping a woman in 2018.
So, they could maybe chalk up his
words to partisanship…
Except, Dr. Deborah Birx, Trump’s own coronavirus expert, also admitted that the U.S. needed to ramp up testing even more, to 500,000 tests per day. Originally, it had been thought that 750,000 tests per week would suffice. “We’ve long since passed that,” she told reporters.
Dr. Fauci, Trump’s other expert, explained that we were doing 1.5 to 2 million tests per week. “We need a partnership between the federal government and the local people, including the governors, to help them get to things that they maybe do not have any access to,” he said.
Faced with a growing chorus of concern, late Sunday, Trump announced he would invoke the Defense Production Act to compel companies to ramp up production of swabs.
Even though he had previously said governors should do their jobs and get the swabs they required.
Speaker of the House Nancy
Pelosi summed up Trump’s performance herself. “We’re way late on it,” Pelosi
said of widespread testing. “And that is the failure. President gets an ‘F,’ a
failure, on the testing.”
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