Trump's Coronavirus Press Event Was Even Worse Than It Looked

[Dennis Donovan]

https://www.wired.com/story/trumps-coronavirus-press-event-was-even-worse-than-it-looked/


From left: Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar, President Trump, and CDC Director Robert Redfield PHOTOGRAPH: HYOSUB SHIN/AP

ADAM ROGERS 03.07.2020 05:50 PM

On a visit to the Atlanta headquarters of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Friday, President Donald Trump spoke with the press. Alongside CDC Director Robert Redfield and Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar, Trump fielded questions about the federal response to Covid-19, the disease that has so far infected more than 100,000 people around the world and killed more than 3,500—including at least 19 in the United States.

As a reporter, in general I’m not supposed to say something like this, but: The president’s statements to the press were terrifying. That press availability was a repudiation of good science and good crisis management from inside one of the world’s most respected scientific institutions. It was full of Dear Leader-ish compliments, non-sequitorial defenses of unrelated matters, attacks on an American governor, and—most importantly—misinformation about the virus and the US response. That’s particularly painful coming from inside the CDC, a longtime powerhouse in global public health now reduced to being a backdrop for grubby politics. During a public health crisis, clear and true information from leaders is the only way to avoid dangerous panic. Yet here we are.

Most of the deaths from Covid-19 in the US so far have been in Washington state, concentrated in a care facility for the elderly in Seattle. At the CDC, the president said of Washington’s governor Jay Inslee (who has declared a State of Emergency), “That governor is a snake … Let me just tell you, we have a lot of problems with the governor and the governor of Washington. That’s where you have many of your problems, OK?” That animosity doesn’t seem to be related to Inslee’s handling of the outbreak. The president may have been reacting to criticism from Inslee on Twitter about the way the outbreak has been handled, and until last summer Inslee was a candidate for the Democratic nomination to run against Trump in the November presidential election.

Azar started talking about the tests health care workers use to determine if someone is infected with the new coronavirus. The lack of those kits has meant a dangerous lack of epidemiological information about the spread and severity of the disease in the US, exacerbated by opacity on the part of the government. Azar tried to say that more tests were on the way, pending quality control.

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They're fucking this up *badly*.

[smirkymonkey]

1. K&R

[fwvinson]

9. Easy, Peasy....just get the coronavirus into the White House. Frump, Melarky, Jarvaka, Dumberic, and

Last edited Sat Mar 7, 2020, 10:32 PM - Edit history (1)

Frump Jr. need to be infected. Tonite. That would be kinda funny. And, I mean Ha, Ha funny.

[gademocrat7]

2. K&R!

This is all on chump and his minions.

[dewsgirl]

3. ....

During a public health crisis, clear and true information from leaders is the only way to avoid dangerous panic. Yet here we are.😳

[delisen]

4. The CDC already had a problem. Trump has exploited it

[spanone]

5. look at the adoring idiots. good gawd almighty.

[icymist]

6. K & R

[malaise]

7. If this is what it takes for Don the pee pee Con to be sent packing to

the rubbish heap of history, let him proceed with his madness.
He cannot bluff his way out of this one. He will be a one term president (and he stole that one).

[Cryptoad]

8. I wonder how many asshats he sold,,,?

[KY_EnviroGuy]

10. Perhaps these statements can be basis for impeachment articles....

because they can easily be proven to endanger public safety.........

[William Seger]

11. "People are really surprised I understand this stuff"

...Trump said. “Every one of these doctors said, ‘How do you know so much about this?’ Maybe I have a natural ability.”

This man is mentally ill.

[Grokenstein]

12. IIRC, Don-Don no likey people who cough cough cough.

Ergo, everyone in his presence who still has free will should cough cough cough.

[LudwigPastorius]

13. Trump is a fucking mad man.

In most other countries in the world, he, long ago, would have been carted off to the Laughing Academy by the nice young men with white jackets and butterfly nets.

[appalachiablue]

14. *ROBERT REDFIELD, Director, CDC; Background, Anti Gay Views:

(Daily Kos) Laurie Garrett, a former senior fellow for global health at the Council on Foreign Relations, noted in an op-ed for CNN at the time that “Redfield's early engagement with the AIDS epidemic in the US in the 1980s and 90s was controversial.”

Garrett explained: “As an Army major at Walter Reed Medical Institute, he designed policies for controlling the disease within the US military that involved placing infected personnel in quarantine and investigating their pasts to identify and track possible sexual partners. Soldiers were routinely discharged and left to die of AIDS, humiliated and jobless, often abandoned by their families.”

Redfield also worked closely with the Christian organization Americans for a Sound AIDS/HIV Policy (ASAP) in the 1980s, she noted — a group which “maintained that AIDS was ‘God's judgment’ against homosexuals, spread in an America weakened by single-parent households and loss of family values.”

In his 1990 book, "Christians in the Age of AIDS," Redfield and his co-author W. Shepherd Smith, Jr. — who headed ASAP — “denounced distribution of sterile needles to drug users and condoms to sexually active adults, and described anti-discrimination programs as the efforts of ‘false prophets,’” Garrett wrote...

https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2020/3/5/1924891/-CDC-head-is-anti-Gay-bigot-supports-Trump-nonsense-blaming-others-for-his-lack-of-leadership