NIH director: 'I'm pretty puzzled and rather disheartened' by Trump rally

[Newest Reality]

Francis Collins lamented that commonsense mitigation measures had become politicized

Francis Collins, director of the National Institutes of Health, said Thursday he was “pretty puzzled” and “rather disheartened” by President Donald Trump’s crowded campaign rally in Michigan — at which few of the several thousand attendees could be seen wearing face masks and virtually none appeared to be practicing social distancing.

In unusually frank remarks during a CNN town hall event focused on the novel coronavirus, the nation’s top public health official lamented that commonsense mitigation measures had become politicized and claimed that aliens from far-off worlds viewing Americans’ behavior amid the pandemic would conclude that Earth was all but doomed.

“How did we get here? Imagine you were an alien who landed on planet Earth, and you saw that our planet was afflicted by an infectious disease and that masks were an effective way to prevent the spread,” Collins said when asked about Trump’s Thursday night rally outside an airport hangar in Freeland.

“And yet, when you went around, you saw some people not wearing them and some people wearing them. And you tried to figure out why, and it turned out it was their political party. And you would scratch your head and think, ‘This is just not a planet that has much promise for the future, if something that is so straightforward can somehow get twisted into decision-making that really makes no sense.'”

<snip>

“I am worried. I do think the fall and the winter of 2020 and 2021 are going to be probably one of the most difficult times that we've experienced in American public health because of … the co-occurrence of COVID and influenza,” CDC Director Robert Redfield said in July in an interview with the medical journal JAMA.

https://www.politico.com/news/2020/09/11/nih-official-disheartened-by-trump-rally-412312

[Nevilledog]

1. How can they still be puzzled at this point?

[Newest Reality]

2. That's a good question.

I wonder if they are as focused on the facts and the phenomena as much as some of us here? Distracted?

I can only think of people being newly shocked, puzzled, flummoxed, etc., as not having a clear, concise overview of this horrific, toxic fiend during his entire career of infestation and detrimental behaviors culminating in the last four years of national, stochastic terrorism and destruction at our expense.

[Ferrets are Cool]

3. K and R