Says President Trump values money over lives
Vox Pop
The director of The National Security Council Pandemic Response Team said the U.S. was not prepared for a pandemic. She was fired the next day. When the president was asked about it he said, “This is something that you can never really think is going to happen.”
The Trump administration created a fictional pandemic scenario beginning January of 2019 through August of that year called ‘The Crimson Contagion’. The fictional pandemic was eerily similar to today’s real pandemic. The outbreak of the fictional respiratory virus began in China and was quickly spread around the world by air travelers, who ran high fevers. In the United States, the fictional virus was first detected in Chicago, and 47 days later, the World Health Organization declared a pandemic. By then it was too late: projections showed 110 million Americans were expected to become ill, leading to 7.7 million hospitalized and 586,000 dead.
The President might have considered the results of his own administration’s fictional test scenario as a warning. Instead, just five months later, in January of 2020, his budget proposed cutting the Center for Disease Control by 16%. The following month his economic advisor said this about the coronavirus, “We have contained this, I won’t say airtight but pretty close to airtight.”
We all knew about the coronavirus in China in January. Trump celebrated the news with his Secretary of Commerce stating “it will help accelerate the return of jobs to North America.” The World Health Organization warned the world in February. Trump ignored it. On March 10, Trump said, “It will go away. Just stay calm. It will go away ... be calm. It’s really working out. And a lot of good things are going to happen.” Last Friday, Trump said, “Nobody knew there would be a pandemic or epidemic of this proportion.”
President Trump has placed too much value on money and too little on lives, his inaction has put thousands of lives in jeopardy, and he has lied to the American people. — Peter Hellios, Granton
