So, while discussing the RNC on Face, one pundit, who describes herself as a “spiritual leader” posted a particularly vitriolic post blaming Trump for “all deaths outside China”. She said:
“The virus shouldn’t have ever left China, as several previous viruses did not. The flights from China were not stopped in time, as they were with SARS and MERS. The administration knew well before March that they needed to take action. There is a great article in the Atlantic that describes the global medical cooperation that succeeded in preventing three other viruses from becoming global pandemics. It required having medical observers on the ground in China and stopping the virus there. It was led by the U.S. and was accomplished by an international team of medical and diplomatic personnel. The U.S. stopped those viruses from getting ANYWHERE outside of China. Trump recalled all the on the ground Chinese observers when he came into office and never replaced them. His international behavior – flirting with dictators and alienating allies, pulling out of treaties, etc. caused many of the medical teams that had cooperated before to no longer be willing to do so. The U.S. was the leader when those other viruses were stopped. The U.S. leadership was completely absent last fall and winter when the work should have been done. It was already too late when Trump supposedly “stopped” the flights from China – giving people a few days grace so a bunch of them could get home before the ban took hold. That’s not effective. And the country has never been in a true quarantine, which might have saved thousands of lives. All the deaths outside of China are on Trump’s hands. I’ll answer your other very polite questions later. You have no idea what you are talking about.“
So I replied:
Dear xxxxx. As a spiritual leader you have more responsibility to be truthful than others, don’t you think? I had no desire to spend time on arguing with you, until I realized who you are. Spreading lies and misinformation is not becoming your position in the community. It’s even dangerous. I don’t blame you, really. You are another victim of sham journalists that feed you false information with a political agenda. The Atlantic cannot be trusted anymore. We live in a time when honest journalists are few and far between. Unlike many in the left, I shall deal with the facts, and not with innuendo like you did.
Re: SARS and MERS
No flights were ever stopped then and the US has done nothing to contain those viruses to China alone. SARS, for example, was spread to 29 countries at the time, including the US. There is a big difference here. SARS was also a Corona virus passed from bats in China. However, that virus was only transmitted by people with serious symptoms. It was therefore much easier to isolate and stop the spread, as in most cases it was limited to health care facilities. Unlike SARS-Cov 2 (our current Covid 19) that is much more infectious and can easily spread by asymptomatic people.
The Obama administration did nothing at the time, and certainly did not stop it from leaving China, (which it did). The CDC just followed their normal procedures (there were only 29 cases confirmed in the US). It was not even declared as a pandemic by WHO. There were only 8,098 people worldwide with SARS and about 700 died. It has since completely disappeared. Any comparison to Covid 19 is totally baseless and is politically motivated. The same is true for Ebola, as Kamala Harris did with a straight face…
So that was lie number 1.
You said: “Trump recalled all the on the ground Chinese observers” etc.
No. That is not what happened. The US had spent many millions on CDC observers in China for more than 15 years. Most of them were local workers, subject to Chinese supervision. That has proven fruitless as no early warnings were ever provided by those workers since China was very diligent in stopping any attempt to warn the world (see the sad story of Dr. Li Wenliang). The US CDC had an office in Beijin, 800 miles from Wuhan. There were 47 workers there before Trump took office, and that number was reduced to 14 by the time Covid 19 showed up in Wuhan. Most of those let go were locals.
The bottom line here is that those “observers” in Beijin have contributed little over all those years, and certainly could not have “stopped the virus there”.
What you couldn’t know by reading only that politically loaded article in the Atlantic, is that the NIH had also provided funding to an NPO by the name of EcoHealth Alliance. EA was collaborating closely with the Wuhan Institute of Virology for the last decade. Yet, despite this close involvement of American researchers, when Covid 19 appeared in Wuhan at the end of last year, they failed to alert the CDC and provide any useful information that could have helped the U.S. prepare. In fact, they did not even contradict the WHO, who as late as January 20, still claimed that SARS Cov 2, the “Corona Virus”, was not transmittable to humans! As a result, on May 1st, months after the pandemic has already spread all over the world, Trump stopped the grant to EchoHealth.
Finally, in the same article you are quoting from, they did bring the following quote:
“The problem was China, not that we didn’t have CDC people in China,” said Scott McNabb, a former CDC epidemiologist who is now a research professor with Emory University. He pointed to China’s censorship as the main culprit in the spread of the pandemic.
So, lie number 2 exposed.
Trump’s actions
Nobody denies that Trump stopped the flights from China on January 31st (on that day there were no deaths reported and less than 10 confirmed cases in the whole country.). This was in spite of strong criticism by your candidate Joe, who accused Trump of being xenophobic and racist for doing so, and your great Speaker, who marched in China Town to show her support (for what exactly?). We don’t really know how many lives were really saved by this decision, but no one is saying now that it was not the right thing to do.
We also know that when this pandemic started, the US stockpile of PPE’s, test kits and ventilators was unusable. This is what the Trump administration inherited from Obama, who did nothing to build up for a future pandemic in 8 years, despite the warning signs of SARS and MERS. Nevertheless, Trump attacked the problem with a focused, high level effort, forming a task force of health and military logistics experts, and in a very short time filled the gap so not even one person who needed a ventilator did not get one, and in fact we have been supplying other countries. Trump has mobilized the country like it was never done since WW2. We are now leading the world in testing, PPE’s and ventilators.
In addition, in preparation for possible large numbers of hospitalizations, the administration mobilized two navy ships and numerous field hospitals in key areas. Fortunately, this proved to be unnecessary. Meanwhile, the task force and CDC have issued detailed guidelines to the states that helped flatten the curve.
So how are we really doing?
It is important to remember that the federal administration cannot micromanage the states and cities. It can only issue guidelines and provide assistance when requested by the governors. This is exactly what happened. Even fierce Trump foes like governors Cuomo and Newsome, admitted that the federal government helped them above and beyond their expectations (remember the ships, hospitals, ventilators etc.). When you examine what happened at the states level, you see huge differences. New York and New Jersey for example, two states with Democrat governors, had the highest mortality rate by far than any other state. In fact, they had more than 5 times!!! the mortality rate than California. No matter how you try, this huge mortality rate cannot be pinned on Trump. The disaster in NY for example, is entirely the result of Governor Cuomo’s years long neglect and mismanagement, coupled with the disastrous handling of the nursing homes during the initial spread of the virus.
Overall, the US is doing better than many other western countries. If you look at testing, the US is leading the world with almost 250,000 tests per 1M and 82M tests to date. With the most important metric, the number of deaths, The US, with 564/1M is at a lower rate than at least 6 other countries: Belgium (852) Spain (620) UK (611) Italy (587) Sweden (576) Brazil (566). This is despite the fact that the US is the most mobile country in the world, with millions of people travelling around the globe and across America every day.
And this is lie number 3 (it’s all Trump’s fault.), debunked.
Finally, you said: “All the deaths outside of China are on Trump’s hands”. Really? Are you blaming Trump for deaths in Russia too?
Now, here you lost any respect I had left for you. This is the worst of all these other lies and is nothing but an evil, vicious smearing of your duly elected President. This kind of rhetoric is not only libelous and false, it is dangerous. Resounding the bogus echo chamber of the radical left, is not what educated, thinking people should be doing.
