This is from a letter to the NYT in response to the query of why some, including our leaders, are still denying the pandemic and its seriousness.
“Susan Gardner: “I am a microbiologist and believe that there are three major components of pandemic denialism.
“1. Politicization of the pandemic by the idiot sitting in the White House, his Republican lap dogs, the dangerous pundits at Fox, and misinformation disseminated by Facebook and other social media platforms.
“2. Lack of education. The dearth of people who have a basic understanding of science and how the world works in general has never been as apparent as it is now. This may be due to a number of things, including teaching for those coveted standardized test scores rather than fostering curiosity and discovery in K-12 classrooms, allowing evangelical religion to have a say in what’s taught in the classroom, and generally devaluing the importance of great teachers and a good education.
“3. The lack of ethics, empathy, and service to others.
“I am hopeful that things will change in November. However there is no magical panacea that will reverse the course of ignorance that we as a nation have been on for far too long.”
Ignorance is NOT bliss. It is flat out dangerous.
IMHO
Tidewater News and Opinion Forum 
The writer seems to be doing a pretty good job of politicizing herself.
The politicization of the pandemic has from the beginning been a Democrat operation. It is disappointing that President Trump to some extent took the bait, but he is in no way denying the pandemic.
While a micro-biologist can consider only the spread of the disease, the President must also weigh the economic and social impact and the effect on military readiness, among other considerations.
Those criticizing the President’s response should state specifically what they would have done differently with the information available at the time the decisions were made, and own the economic and social consequences of those choices.
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“The politicization of the pandemic has from the beginning been a Democrat operation. ”
If by politicizing you mean criticizing the response from the administration, then sure. But even Biden has put out a plan to open the schools safely. Trump and his Education Secretary have just said “open”, or else.
…”he is in no way denying the pandemic.”
You seriously believe that? “Some of Mr. Trump’s closest advisers are adamant that the best way forward is to downplay the dangers of the disease. Mark Meadows, the chief of staff, has been particularly forceful in his view that the White House should avoid drawing attention to the virus, according to people familiar with the discussions.
Mr. Meadows has for the most part opposed any briefings about the virus”…
Sounds like administrative denial to me.
“Those criticizing the President’s response should state specifically what they would have done differently with the information available at the time the decisions were made”…
I would not have said It will just magically disappear when it gets warmer. (Heat advisories all weekend and no disappearing act) Nor suggest that ingesting disinfectant would be a good thing.
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“I would not have said It will just magically disappear when it gets warmer. (Heat advisories all weekend and no disappearing act)”
You mean repeat Fauci’s statement that coronaviruses typically decline in summer and return in the fall. At the time, it was a reasonable expectation.
” Nor suggest that ingesting disinfectant would be a good thing.”
Which if course, he didn’t
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“You mean repeat Fauci’s statement that coronaviruses typically decline in summer and return in the fall. At the time, it was a reasonable expectation.”
A guarded statement by Fauci that Trump took to the level of “all will be well come April”. There is NOTHING reasonable at all about that. Trump said it would DISAPPEAR. Where Fauci said it woudl DECLINE and then return.
“Which if course, he didn’t”
Tell that to the idiots who tried it after he said that. He looked straight at Dr. Birx and said we should look into that. She should have stood up right then and there and said, “Mr. President, it is not prudent to even suggest such a thing as disinfectants are not to be ingested.”
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Then there is this little tidbit, often repeated.
“By June the president was regularly making nonsensical statements like, “If we stop testing right now, we’d have very few cases, if any.”
How’s that working out?
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He is technically correct. But out of context it can be misconstrued.
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“But out of context it can be misconstrued.”
Splain that one if you can…..
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OK, Consider 3 identical countries.Same rate of infection.
Country A, which tests 100% of its population. The total positives(assuming accurate testing) will include every symptomatic and asymptomatic infection.
Country B tests every suspected case. Their total will include all of the serious cases but will miss the asymptomatic cases.
Country C tests only hospitalized cases. They will additionally miss all the mild cases.
The further down the priority list you go, the fewer cases you detect, even if all are really the same.
We are somewhere between A & B, testing a lot of communities for tracking reasons, and detecting more cases than if we only tested symptomatic people.
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Not testing asymptomatic people would be a bad choice. One of the primary reasons FOR testing is to determine who has contracted the virus so that tracing can take place and additional cases found. Finding cases is the best way to prevent the spread.
And your scenarios don’t address the infection rate
But in Trump’s world, if you don’t test at all, then there will be no cases at all and we can get back to our previously scheduled scandals.
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Trump didn’t say not to test, he said our numbers look worse because we do. That’s not the same thing.
My example stipulated an equal infection rate, the point being that with everything else being equal, the PERCEIVED infection rate is dependent on who you test.
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Remember that the hospitals in the surge areas have patients stacked up in the ER hallways.
To refresh your memory on his testing aversion:
https://www.cnn.com/2020/06/22/politics/donald-trump-testing-slow-down-response/index.html
On testing we have Trump’s own words.
“ President Donald Trump now says that he was not kidding when he told rallygoers over the weekend that he asked staff to slow down coronavirus testing, undercutting senior members of his own administration who said the comment was made in jest.
“I don’t kid, let me just tell you, let me make it clear,” Trump told a reporter on Monday, when asked again if he was kidding when he said Saturday he instructed his administration to slow down coronavirus testing.”
Of course he might have been lying, a novel thought.
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Or he might have been smarter than we thought, since it is clear now that we are testing indiscriminately and bogging down the system so much that tests needed for medical decisions are delayed to the point of being useless.
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The point of testing was to eventually combine contact tracing, at least that is my understanding.
Of course waiting a week or two for results makes that impossible.
So like I mentioned the other day, a couple of thousand university or other labs, paid to switch gears, along with a crash program to build machines, and we could get a handle on this and provide a blueprint for future pandemics.
A few billion out of the trillions could make it happen.
I don’t think we are testing “indiscriminately” since most people I know who have been tested had to qualify as needing one.
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No matter how much money you throw at it, we can’t build out the machines and train the operators before a vaccine makes them moot.
Unless, of course, we commandeer those university research machines to run low value surveillance testing, then we’ll delay the vaccines long enough to build the machines.
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If testing were a priority we could do it. Of course it would help if we started in March when the feces hit the fan. We would be 4 months into production already.
But testing is not on the White House radar. Too many infections, don’t you know. Inconvenient for the election.
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Lets just say Trump ignored information from day one. Day one being when the intelligence briefings were given to him to ignore. Early January I think.
Even at that point, checking the stockpiles as mentioned by Azar, would have been a good step to preparedness. Since he ignored all the warnings by Obama before 2017. And as such, the present administration did zip to even check our preparedness.
Economic considerations? Yep, so lets open the country too early so we can go through all this again. And Trump did all he could to force the governors to bend to his will. The GOP guys did and now we are paying a huge price.
National poiicy on wearing the mask? We know the story on that. “My president is not wearing a mask and he told me to #LIBERATE and charge state house virtually spitting in the faces of state police trying to do their jobs.
Spur of the moment speech shutting down Europe travel without even notifying airports, customs, TSA, airlines so they could prepare for the panic. Instead we packed in thousands of travelers in confined spaces for hours and hours, and they they spread the disease to all points around the country.
He turned down Germany and S. Korea’s help in testing kits. Total ignorance about issues at CDC and FDA in his own cabinet.
You know all this, why are you beating the dead horse of “he did the best he could”?
Meanwhile, Merkel and Gemany are at 6% unemployment, the debt is manageable, so they will take a nice head start when economies open up again. The difference? Germany knew what needed to be done and they did it fast. Was the response perfect? Heck no. But it was a lot better than “it will all disappear in the heat”.
IMHO
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The fact that supposedly intelligent individuals on this forum continue to support our current President when he points fingers at the rest of the country for HIS actions, can’t answer a softball question from a friendly media source (TWICE) about his plans for a second term (Dear G-d, please NO), lies about everything, decides that the pandemic is not worthy of his attention and has his Chief of Staff plan things so it isn’t an issue, spits in the face of the rule of law, uses his DOJ to attempt to protect his friends and persecute his enemies and drives wedges between the American people just blows my mind. I get it. He isn’t Hillary. But, damn, if she were in charge things would look much better. -IMO.
My wife said to me this weekend that he is a lot of things, a leader isn’t one of them. And she voted for him.
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“Simple-minded gardener Chance has spent all his life in the Washington D.C. home of an old man. When the man dies, Chance is put out on the street with no knowledge of the world except what he has learned from television.” Review of “Being There” with Peter Sellers.
Trump was cushioned by his dad’s money all of his life, and combined with his ignorance and apparent lack of reading skills or even interest, along with endless TV watching, we have elected Chance.
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Dr. Fauci and Ms. Birx are both more than eligible for retirement. But they voluntarily stay on to provide some sanity to our madman’s responses to the pandemic.
Their interests lie in patriotic devotion to save Americans during a crisis unlike any we have seen since WW2. For Trump and his minions to hack away at Dr. Fauci because it interferes with his reelection is beyond the pale.
My guess is that they are both trying to be the adults in the room, like some of Trump’s early appointments, particularly retired generals. So the two of them swallow their pride, try to acquiesce and support the unsupportable just to not get fired and leave no one with any expertise to balance the disgraceful management of the pandemic by the administration. But at some point, like Dr. Fauci’s recent interviews, the public must be told the truth and try to curtail disastrous decisions and lies by the president.
So far, Trump has dared not fire Fauci. Instead, he is letting his campaign try to smear him, hoping he’ll leave probably.
Or at least that is my take on the situation.
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A couple of takes on Dr. Birx from yesterday’s NYT anaylsis:
“Dr. Birx was more central than publicly known to the judgment inside the West Wing that the virus was on a downward path. Colleagues described her as dedicated to public health and working herself to exhaustion to get the data right, but her model-based assessment nonetheless failed to account for a vital variable: how Mr. Trump’s rush to urge a return to normal would help undercut the social distancing and other measures that were holding down the numbers.”
…”Dr. Birx and Mr. Hassett were optimistic: Mitigation was working, they insisted, even as many outside experts were warning that the nation would remain at great risk if it let up on social distancing and moved prematurely to reopen.”
“Inside the White House, Dr. Birx was the chief evangelist for the idea that the threat from the virus was fading.
Unlike Dr. Fauci, Dr. Birx is a strong believer in models that forecast the course of an outbreak. Dr. Fauci has cautioned that “models are only models” and that real-world outcomes depend on how people respond to calls for changes in behavior — to stay home, for example, or wear masks in public — sacrifices that required a sense of shared national responsibility.”
Here is the link to the entire article:
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I stand a bit corrected. Maybe that is why Birx is not the victim of a big smear and destroy campaign. For now.
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Of course not. She is firmly “in” the circle.
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That was a good, in depth article than should infuriate any American. That our lives were low priority compared to “looking good “ politically.
A concerted effort to shift all responsibilities to governors and then another concerted effort to not assist without begging, or just not assist at all.
What foul people in the White House.
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Well, once you get past “1.”, the rest is all left wing politicizing psychobabble only to be continued in here. Of course we do get a break from it while the lefties also try to create open borders, get rid of police, burn down the town, disarm the law abiding and fix elections just for starters. And it is sad they don’t see the sheer ignorance in all of this.
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Where do you get these ideas from?
Yes, some extremists are calling for a few of your listed ideas.
Fixing elections? Talk about projecting the conservative agenda.
Get rid of police? Get real. Reform, yes.
Open borders? Libertarians maybe.
Armed, unidentified, jackbooted Feds kidnapping peaceful civilians in unmarked cars.
Oh, you didn’t list that did you?
My bad.
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Seeing as how you and the left constantly claim a few extremists represent all Republicans, I think you own what the left wing hyper-extremisys are trying to sell. Enjoy your meal. Oh, frankly, I don’t care what happens to your hyper-extremist buddies in Portland. They deserve it. IMO
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This guy deserved it? Really.
https://www.pilotonline.com/nation-world/ct-nw-portland-federal-agents-navy-vet-20200720-ldxlo7r2ofgtbk3c33n2ookreq-story.html
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…”a few extremists represent all Republicans, “…
Well, to be honest, the head extremist is in the Oval Office. He is considered the leader of the party.
You now personally own Mr. Donald J. Trump. Goo d luck selling him on Ebay.
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Let’s look at number 3 for just one moment. : “The lack of ethics, empathy, and service to others.”
If you can show me how Mr. Trump has EVER shown any of these attributes, I will be quite surprised. I sometimes wonder if YOU have any of these attributes.
And the only ignorance on display is YOURS. But as with most ignorant people, you are too blind ot see it.
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