By Judy Siedlecki
When intelligence, medical, and scientific, governmental personnel warned president Donald Trump in January of the imminent highly-contagious viral pandemic attack known as COVID-19, he blithely ignored them and called it the flu which would disappear with the warm weather in April, and a Democratic Party hoax, and did not prepare to fight it.
Trump still refuses to fully enact the Defense Production Act (DPA) for vitally-needed PPE and equipment to fight the virus. Rather, he lets the governors fight it out, then tries to confiscate whatever materials they acquire to stockpile for states he chooses to reward. Unfortunately, he issued an executive order by DPA last week to require meat-processing workers back to work in virus hot spots with their refusal to work considered quitting to make them ineligible for unemployment compensation.
Trump, in such a hurry to reopen our country, ignores his own guidelines of two weeks of diminishing cases as a prelude to reopening. Pouring money on the economy is ineffective, too, if it is not reaching everyone, not supervised, not enough for small businesses, and ignores the public health area where money has been lacking the most and longest.
Mitch McConnell, U.S. Senate majority leader, said he thinks states should declare bankruptcy rather than provide them financial aid. He doesn’t trust how they’ll spend it, especially Democratic Party states.
Many steps by governments are needed to reopen the country safely: Social distancing and wearing masks in public; hiring thousands for contact tracing; improved and increased testing; isolating the infected; and providing necessary equipment for treatment.
Instead of wasting time blaming China, WHO (World Health Organization), and Barack Obama, Trump needs to own up to his own failings, tell us the facts and truth, and stop spreading conspiracy theories.
COVID-19 is not a man-made or genetically-modified disease made in China which Trump contends. Quoting word-for-word infectious disease specialist, Dr. Anthony Fauci, Friday, April 17: “A recent study by a group of highly-qualified evolutionary virologists looked at the sequence in bats as they evolve and the mutations it took to get to the point it is now where it is totally consistent with a jump of a species from an animal to a human.”
Why does that matter? Knowing where it came from may be the answer to finding a vaccine to protect us in the future, one of the most important duties of our president to defend and protect us.