First of all, can we just acknowledge the obvious -- that we have a demented old drug addict running the country, and he has an incompetent hardcore cadre of true believers and opportunists enabling him DURING A PANDEMIC CRISIS? Do they really believe this is something that can just be swept under the rug by November?
Whose bright idea was it to have the dumbass U.S. trade representative attack Dr. Anthony Fauci in an op-ed piece in the country's largest newspaper? Now the backlash is so bad, the White House is claiming Navarro did it on his own.
Uh huh.
After first chewing over the latest horrifying coronavirus statistics, New Day's John Berman welcomed Dr. Peter Hotez.
"The bigger picture here, on the day where we set a record for the number of new cases, the overnight response from the White House, because they clearly sanctioned this letter from Peter Navarro, is to attack the nation's leading infectious disease doctor. What does this tell you, what's the impact?" he said.
Dr. Hotez points out we're facing death totals by the end of the year "that's about almost half the number of people killed in the 1918 flu pandemic that lasted from 1918 to 1920, 1921. So we are in a dire public health crisis. and what do we get from the Rose Garden? You know, King Lear is out ranting about China and the World Health Organization, and Peter Navarro writes this outrageous op-ed piece attacking Anthony Fauci."
"It sends a clear message that the White House is not going to engage, they are not going to exercise leadership, and instead, they are just going to deny and deflect and now they're going to attack scientists. This is very troubling. and last night, I said, you know, the White House has managed to turn a public health crisis now into a full-blown homeland security issue, because nobody feels safe anymore. And I'm very worried for the nation," the doctor said.
Hotez said he wasn't even going to address the points in Navarro's op-ed, because of course they're fabricated and/or misleading.
"The bottom line is, there is no interest in really taking on COVID-19. We have an absent government," he said.
"The lights are on in the White House, but no one's home. And they just can't get their arms around this epidemic. and then the question really comes, if we basically decapitated the leadership of the government in order to run COVID-19 response, who can step up? Can the CDC do it?
"So far, they've not seemed to express that willingness, although we really don't know what's going on between the White House and the CDC. you know, they have to ask Congress to say, there are things that they can do to demand some type of leadership coming out of the federal government. Because otherwise, we're going to continue to spiral. you know, 67,000 cases last night will easily be over 70,000 going to 100,000 and the deaths are increasing."
Hotez said there was some help coming from the feds, but "it's this fragmented state response that clearly is not working. We have the worst ovid epidemic in the world right now. The southern half of the United States, and this is just the beginning. As Bob Redfield said, we're going to just wait until the fall comes when we have influenza around, and I think he's right. I think the big question for this morning is, given the fact that we don't have leadership coming out of Washington, D.C., who steps up and how do we make that happen?"
UPDATE:
