Trump never intended to deal with the pandemic. He saw it as a distraction from his reelection effort and did everything possible to place responsibility onto the states. To achieve that, he first sidelined the CDC, removing the world's leading public health organization from its designed role on the front lines of the pandemic response to an almost invisible public role. And, even that diminished role was subject to oversight by Trump toadies to insure the CDC did nothing to contradict Trump's incorrect or deliberately false public statements.
Trump implemented his Covid-19 task force to insure that his message regarding the pandemic was the message provided to the public. On that task force, Trump marginalized the experts and for a time made himself the public face of the federal government response. He minimized the Covid-19 risks, promised almost immediate vaccines and attacked state and local officials who implemented quarantines, social distancing and mask requirements.
Ultimately, Trump turned away from the knowledgeable public health professionals complete and put his faith in Scott Atlas, a doctor, but not an epidemiologist. Atlas is a proponent of "herd immunity," which proposes to let the pandemic run it course. His assumption is the once a sufficiently large percentage of Americans have had the virus, the pandemic will be under control. No actual epidemiologist or public health specialist believes that herd immunity is the right path to follow. They recognize that achieving herd immunity would result in hundreds of thousands of additional deaths and potentially leave a vast numbers of Covid-19 survivors with long term physical disabilities.
Despite publicly downplaying it, President Donald Trump and his team of White House advisers have embraced the controversial belief that herd immunity will help control the COVID-19 outbreak, according to three senior health officials working with the White House coronavirus task force. More worrisome for those officials: they have begun taking steps to turn the concept into policy.
...those working on the government’s COVID response say that the attempts by the White House and Atlas to steer clear from using the phrase “herd immunity” are merely a game of semantics. Privately, one of those sources said, the actual policy pursuits have been crafted around a plainly herd immunity approach; mainly, that the government should prioritize protecting the vulnerable while allowing “everyone else to get infected,” that source said.
Even as Trump and Atlas pursue herd immunity, they are making no effort to the protect vulnerable. And, I think there is a simple Trumpian reason for that - racism. The most vulnerable Americans are Black, Hispanic and Indigenous (including Pacific Islanders). Trump is willing to deal with the deaths of quite a few white grandmas and grandpas, if the result is twice as many dead Black Americans.
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