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Coronavirus is Being Used as a Political Weapon


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8 minutes ago, bostonangler said:

I'm not worried Trump said the 15 cases would become 0... He has a natural ability to understand these things...

 

B/A

 

Right?....over a thousand cases now and he made that "15 cases would become 0" statement less than a week ago. 

 

Image result for trump fiddles

 

GO RV, then BV  

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Coronavirus: White House officials ‘privately discussing declaration of national state of emergency’

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Rory Sullivan
,
The IndependentMarch 10, 2020
 
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White House officials have privately discussed the possibility of declaring a national state of emergency over the coronavirus outbreak, according to a report.

Aides in Donald Trump’s administration have had preliminary talks about calling a national emergency, which would allow disaster-level action to be taken by the Federal Emergency Management Agency, the Washington Post reported.

It came after Mr Trump issued a flurry of tweets in an attempt to downplay the significance of coronavirus.

In one of more than a dozen posts on Monday, he said: “So last year 37,000 Americans died from the common Flu. It averages between 27,000 and 70,000 per year.

“Nothing is shut down, life & the economy go on. At this moment there are 546 confirmed cases of CoronaVirus, with 22 deaths. Think about that!”

A senior administration official told the Post that Mr Trump had been hesitant to “tell anyone they can’t go anywhere” or to “shut down an industry”.

However, he previewed some emergency measures to consolidate the economy on Monday, as global markets continued to struggle amid slumping oil prices.

The president later told reporters that he favoured a payroll tax cut and other policies to offer relief to workers, describing them as “very dramatic”.

It is not clear how Capitol Hill will view these proposals, with Democrats and some Republicans criticising the president for his handling of the coronavirus outbreak.

Larry Hogan, the Republican Maryland governor, questioned Mr Trump’s approach, saying: “He at times just says whatever comes to mind, or tweets, then someone on TV is saying the opposite. It’s critically important that the message is straightforward and fact based for the public.”

Chris Murphy, a Democratic senator, told the Post: “In many ways this was the moment we feared. A true security threat to the nation and a president who can’t tell the truth, who can’t organise a consistent response and doesn’t have enough experienced people on the job.”

The president has sought to play down fears of widespread coronavirus infections, previously insisting that it had been “stopped” because “we have been very strong at the borders”.

 

https://news.yahoo.com/coronavirus-white-house-officials-privately-115106927.html?.tsrc=jtc_news_index

 

GO RV, then BV

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Fox’s Stuart Varney Confronts Trump Campaign Spox on Not Cancelling Rallies

 

By Zachary PetrizzoMar 11th, 2020, 2:03 pm

Fox Business host Stuart Varney pushed back against President Donald Trump’s 2020 national press secretary Kayleigh McEnany for not canceling rallies as coronavirus spreads.

The segment began with Varney stating, “Let’s turn it to your rally, the president’s rallies.”

“Are you a little worried about holding those kinds of rallies?” Varney asked.

“I’m not, because we have the added advantage here at the Trump campaign that our candidate happens to be the President of the United States, who is surrounded by the best and most talented health experts in the world,” she replied. “Dr. Fauci said to take it case by case…”

The Fox host interrupted, “I’m sorry, Kayleigh, but Dr. Fauci, who is also testifying on Capitol Hill, he just said there should be no large crowds.”

Varney added, “He said it!”

The Trump spokesperson responded that the campaign will proceed as normal and hold rallies in light of the deadly virus spreading across the country.

“Look, we have the commander in chief, we have the best health experts, we are taking it day by day, we are currently proceeding as normal — and look, Joe Biden, he’s suspending his rallies. He’s been dying to get off the campaign trail. The man can only speak for seven minutes,” McEnany stated.

Varney doubled down on his point, stating, “He will immediately be accused of chaos in the White House. The president goes ahead with holding his rallies, his top doctor, top medical guy, says don’t go with big crowds. I mean, you are immediately going to be hit with this.”

McEnany then stated she will leave the decision to cancel rallies to the commander-in-chief.

“Look, the president is the best authority on this issue. He takes into consult the words of everyone around him that would include Alex Azar, that would include Dr. Fauci, that would include others. I will leave it to the president.”

“Right now we are proceeding as normal,” McEnany concluded.

Watch above, via Fox Business.

 

https://www.mediaite.com/tv/fox-business-varney-confronts-trump-campaign-spox-on-not-cancelling-ralliesyou-know-youll-get-hit-for-this/

 

Keyleigh McEnany is so entrenched as a loyal Trump spox person she literally hasn't thought one time about the people in the crowd....not only is Trump's safety imperative, but so are the citizens in attendance....With the close proximity of people to each other one infected person could infect dozens in a heartbeat.  

 

GO RV, then BV

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Conservatives Try to Rebrand the Coronavirus

The term Wuhan virus treats COVID-19 as a Chinese scourge—and ignores an ugly history.

MARCH 11, 2020
Professor of science writing at MIT
Representative Paul Gosar MATT YORK / AP

Until recently, Representative Paul Gosar, a Republican from Arizona, was most famous for tweeting a lie: a faked photo of President Barack Obama shaking hands with Hassan Rouhani, the president of Iran. This weekend, Gosar made news with another tweet: In response to the report that he had been in contact with a man confirmed to have contracted the novel coronavirus, he announced that he was placing himself in self-quarantine from what he called the “Wuhan virus."

Scientists are using the internationally accepted name COVID-19 to describe the disease caused by the novel coronavirus that was discovered late last year. But a number of prominent conservatives—including Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and Senator Tom Cotton of Arkansas—are going with Wuhan virus, as if the deadly new pathogen were one more scourge to be blamed on the Chinese. As many of the responses to Gosar on Twitter pointed out, this kind of rhetoric invites the public to see a global epidemic in racial or (at best) geopolitical terms.

Defenders of the term countered both that the virus did appear first in a real place called Wuhan, and that many diseases are named after the site of a first or famous outbreak. That’s true of the viral hemorrhagic infections Ebola and Marburg, tick-borne Lyme disease, and others. But the geographic defense has to be weighed against the rhetoric that says out loud what locating the  current threat to Wuhan only implies.

In the past five years, Donald Trump has explicitly promoted the notion that foreigners carry contagion. In 2015 he proclaimed that Mexicans were to blame for “tremendous infectious disease … pouring across the border,” a charge he has repeated as president. Meanwhile, the deliberate cultivation of fears of infectious disease from China has a long, nasty history in the United States—one that even today’s bitter partisans should be willing to acknowledge.

Hawaii had been in turmoil through much of the 1890s, especially after 1893, when white immigrants from the United States overthrew the last Hawaiian monarch, Queen Lili‘uokalani. Her efforts to regain power failed, and the United States annexed the islands in 1898. The next year, in November, a ship outbound from Hong Kong made port in Honolulu. At least one passenger made his or her way to the city’s Chinatown. On December 12, the disease that unidentified traveler had carried announced itself in the death of a 22-year-old Chinese bookkeeper named You Chong, the first victim on American territory of what is now known as the third global pandemic of the bubonic plague. Four more Chinatown residents became sick and died soon after.

Local officials reacted swiftly and decisively. Chinatown was cordoned off, locking about 10,000 people in place, and the local board of health acted on its theory of the infection: The bubonic plague was caused by the dirt—the word used was “filth”—and packed conditions in which Honolulu’s Chinese residents lived.

If the muck the white authorities saw bred into the lives and habits of the Chinese really was the cauldron in which disease brewed, then the solution was obvious. As the historian Nayan Shah writes, the head of the board of health, Henry Cooper, ordered the creation of a literal firebreak between the supposed reservoir of disease in Chinatown and the rest of the city. On January 20, officials set what was supposed to be a controlled burn, a strategic disinfection. Just as the first fires ignited, the wind picked up, embers flipped to neighboring roofs, and within the day, all of Chinatown was in flames. The fire burned for more than two weeks; 45,000 people lost their homes.

A similar sequence of malign ignorance, combined with a depressingly contemporary money-motivated blindness would play out over the next few years as the disease moved on. The pandemic was already more than a century old when it reached Honolulu. It had started in China’s Yunnan province in the 1770s, but had remained a mostly local outbreak until the 1850s, when a combination of civil war and the globalization created as European powers extended their empires sped the disease on its way. The plague reached China’s coast in the 1870s, and from there, the ships that bore imperial trade carried the plague across the globe. Infection in Hawaii 20 years later delivered a clear message: The disease was still on the move. There was little doubt about its next destination: the American West Coast, and most likely its busiest port, San Francisco.

Its journey didn’t take long. The first documented victim, a Chinese laborer named Wong Chut King, died in San Francisco’s Chinatown on March 6, 1900. The outbreak that followed lasted until 1904, killing more than one hundred people, most of them Chinese. The established racial mythology of the day—that the Chinese were alien threats, vectors of social contagion—molded the city’s response. On March 7, the day after Wong died, a rope barrier appeared around Chinatown, and police forced every ethnic Chinese person to remain confined in the area—while allowing white people to leave. (For my account of these events I’ve relied on Gunther Risse’s Plague, Fear, and Politics in San Francisco’s Chinatown; Nayan Shah’s Contagious Divides: Epidemics and Race in San Francisco’s Chinatown; and David K. Randall’s Black Death at the Golden Gate.)

 

The quarantine didn’t hold—but in its place came proposals for a much more radical solution. If the packed and impenetrable Chinese neighborhood was the source of a dread disease, why not simply eradicate it, to achieve by design what Honolulu’s firebrands had accomplished by accident? As the historian Gunther Risse reports, a newspaper said the quiet part out loud: Chinatown was a “foul spot” and “the only way to get rid of that menace is to eradicate Chinatown from the city … and give the debris to the flames.” Burn it down, start again (not coincidentally, on a patch of prime real estate), and as for those who lived there? A member of the San Francisco Board of Health knew what to do: “Every Chinese in Chinatown ought to be removed to a detention camp somewhere in the hills.”

San Francisco’s Chinatown survived the threat, of course; it’s still there today. Its residents were not marched to the hills; California’s Asian concentration camps would not appear until 1942 with the internment of residents of Japanese origin. But in a wholly depressing anticipation of our present-day predicament, the focus on an alleged ethnic link to the emergence and spread of the disease both fueled ongoing discrimination and made a terrifying epidemic worse.

 

Then as now, leaders at first tried to minimize the sense of danger. Just as Trump and other political leaders initially downplayed the threat from COVID-19, city and state officials in California in the early 1900s tried to deny that the Chinatown deaths were due to the plague. Hoping to limit the economic damage that news of an epidemic would cause, they belittled the scientists and ignored their brand-new understanding that plague was caused by a bacterium carried by fleas riding on rats. Once the reality of the outbreak was undeniable, the characterization of the plague as a disease born of a specifically Chinese squalor within the Chinatown ghetto delayed the response that the handful of trained public-health experts in place knew was necessary: eradicating the rats that could carry the disease beyond any quarantine line San Francisco’s city fathers might choose to draw. As a result, the disease gained time and space in which to spread—first, across the bay in an almost all-white population, three years after San Francisco’s last case in 1904, and then into rodent populations that spread across the American West, where plague remains endemic to this day.

 

That’s the epidemiological price we’re still paying for allowing racist tropes to drive disease response more than a century ago. And that provides the context in which to judge Gosar, Pompeo, Cotton, and others who seek to rebrand COVID-19 as a Chinese problem and blame one more of our afflictions on a malign outside entity. As in 1900, to insist on a geographic definition of disease today is to locate responsibility somewhere other than here. This is a cowardly evasion. But that’s not the worst of it, at least in pragmatic terms. Now, as then, emphasizing place rather than the clinical details of how a disease works and spreads means that epidemics get a head start.

What’s in a name? Life and death.

 

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/03/stop-trying-make-wuhan-virus-happen/607786/?utm_medium=offsite&utm_source=yahoo&utm_campaign=yahoo-non-hosted&yptr=yahoo

 

GO RV, then BV

 

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13 hours ago, coorslite21 said:

Yes it is......just tired of all the "blame game" articles being posted......would rather see how Americans might all work together to solve the deep divide within the country.....it didn't used to be that way...

  CL

Agreed CL... I would also say it will be interesting to see 30 days, 6 months, several years down the road. I have heard some say President Trump has not done much. I bet time will tell later on down the road. Reason I say this, the NBA, MLB, NHL and all of the other major pro sports are just not gonna stop and shut down. The money involved that they will lose is astronomical. I bet a phone call from the White House started it all. The PGA Texas Open was coming up and getting ready to start. They said they would have it, but no fans, then a few hours later, cancelled completely. the NBA game the other day, stopped as it was about to start. In reality, it could have went on then cancel the rest of the season. Several college games stopped halfway through. There is a lot more going on here than meets the eye. 
 

I am afraid though, all this stopping of stuff and not having these mass crowds will work in controlling the virus and spread. This is what the CDC and all those in the health care recommend by the way. It won’t be as bad here as in China and Italy. That is when you will start hearing that the government over reacted to the situation. They won’t look at the big picture and what was done. I do agree with the President, we have the best people and the best health care system in the world. We will overcome and come out on top. 

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FLASHBACK: Biden Called Trump’s Chinese Coronavirus Travel Ban ‘Xenophobia’

 

While Democrats in March attack President Donald Trump for not doing enough to end the coronavirus epidemic, the same Democrats were bashing the president’s decision to ban travel from China in January.

In January, President Trump banned all foreign nationals who were in China during the time of the coronavirus outbreak from entering the United States. Many pundits and health experts have since credited this decision with helping to slow the coronavirus pandemic on American shores.

However, at the time former vice president Joe Biden railed against the decision.

During a campaign rally, Biden said that “In moments like this, this is where the credibility of a president is most needed, as he explains what we should and should not do.”

“This is no time for Donald Trump’s record of hysteria and xenophobia, hysterical xenophobia, to uh, and fear mongering,” Biden continued.

 

Joe Biden opposed the China travel restrictions wisely put in place by President Trump in January – restrictions that health experts credit with slowing the spread of coronavirus & saving lives.

If Biden had been in charge, more Americans would have contracted the virus faster.

 
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While Biden rejected President Trump’s travel ban in January, in March he has complained that the president has been “dismissive” of the virus, and that he has stifled coronavirus testing.

NPR reported:

Democratic presidential front-runner Joe Biden on Thursday took direct aim at the Trump administration’s response to the coronavirus outbreak, saying, “The administration’s failure on testing [potential cases] is colossal.”

“We must know the true extent of this outbreak,” Biden added in prepared remarks. The United States’ coronavirus testing capacity has been widely criticized by public health experts.

The former vice president also said President Trump risks acerbating the spread of the virus by downplaying its severity and being “dismissive” of science.

It is unclear what Biden would do to combat the spread of coronavirus if elected president, as most of his public statements have focused on criticizing President Trump on the issue, and not putting forward his own plan.

 

Oops! Biden done shot off his mouth again.

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