House Committee on Homeland Security Chair Rep. Bennie Thompson (D-MS) announced that the committee’s Democrats will introduce legislation to establish a bipartisan commission aimed at “identifying and examining lessons learned” from the nation’s response to the COVID-19 outbreak.
Republicans will totally reject this, so it’s not going to happen.
And Pence just said, “Trump never belittled …”
Why, the ad writes itself!
Gird yourselves. The Flying Monkeys will be all over FOX, the WH lawn and Donnie’s TWITTER machine. It’s gonna get ugly!
Chop-chop…American Covid death toll is rising and Covid is now the third cause of death in the US!
Start with this list:
ICYMI:
How many Patient 31 (Super spreaders = 1,160 people infected) has the MAGA rallies, FL beach goers and Christians produced?
AND DO NOT FORGET…set up the Congressional Covid Relief Bill Committee ASAP too!
Addendum:
I’m all for laying the blame at the feet of the guilty Orange. But I think it’s a bit too early for this. Work on face masks and ventilators for now.
Me, too.
Remind me again - how many Benghazi hearings/investigations did the House conduct?
Lesson 1: Don’t disband your pandemic response team.
If Benghazi deserved a dozen investigations, this one should receive exponentially more.
legislation to establish a bipartisan commission aimed at “identifying and examining lessons learned” from the nation’s response to the COVID-19 outbreak.
I’m sure there are Republicans qualified to be on this "bipartisan commission.”
I can think of three. Will they be wildly out-numbered?
If the Republicans block the legislation, then Pelosi and Thompson will announce that capturing lessons learned is too important to allow Republicans to play politics and block such a critical effort to safeguard our future - and they’ll start holding hearings in the appropriate committees instead.
And, if they want to stick it to the GOP, their press release would say something along the lines of “Americans are dying and the economy is in tatters because of this panedemic. We honestly thought Republicans might care about making certain it never happens again. Obviously, we were wrong - but we won’t let Americans down. There will be hearings…”
There you go politicizing Trump’s incompetence, again.
Wait for the pushback from the administration and their acolytes in the media. “We can’t investigate while people are dying”.
After 9/11 W. Bush opposed a commission to look into what happened. Then many victims and survivors families pushed the issue so then he wanted it chaired by none other than Henry Kissinger. After some push back from them and revelations that Henry K had some conflicts with one can only guess it was the well respected Tom Kean and Lee Hamilton who were selected.
It goes to show you how effective push back can be particularly from victims and their families.
The same thing ought to occur once the Coronavirus is mitigated or sooner.
Lesson 0: Don’t elect nitwits.
Excellent point. I’d love to see the Orange Creature sit for questioning by Rep. Katie Porter. He wouldn’t last 11 minutes.
Just wanted to pass on a really good article in The Guardian on Covid-19 Vaccine development. It covers a lot of ground, but a few things jumped out at me:
“If we’re lucky” A vaccine will be ready when it’s ready.
The thrust of this revolution – the capacity to create an infinitesimal part of an already minute virus, without handling a virus specimen at all – can seem godlike. But the next two stages – testing vaccines in humans and then manufacturing them for wide use – remain mortally slow. This is especially so because these newest types of vaccines – DNA or RNA vaccines – have never yet been licensed for use on humans. Outside a lab, they are completely unproven. With Covid-19, both contagion and vaccine are so new that there’s no telling what human trials will reveal, or how long they will take. Every scientist, policymaker and researcher I spoke to said that we’ll be lucky to have a vaccine for use within 12-18 months.
There have been previous “accidents” with vaccines. Things can’t be rushed and even a minor failure can spook the public.
The scientists I spoke to, though, kept telling me that testing couldn’t be rushed. “There will be many trials, and we need to be ready for some failures,” Heeney said. He leaned in towards his webcam as if to push his point physically through the internet to me. “We have to avoid overpromising, because if there’s an accident with one of those first vaccines – if someone gets ill and it gets into the Daily Mail, ‘New vaccine threatens survival’ or some ridiculous headline – then people won’t want to take even the later vaccines that do work. It’s a razor’s edge we’re walking here.”
Big Pharma needs to make a profit and set prices. They are not in it for humanitarian reasons.
Diseases that are borne out of poverty, and that require cheap vaccines, such as cholera, are largely ignored, says Peter Jay Hotez, the dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine at the Baylor College of Medicine in Houston. So are diseases that are uncommon, or diseases that have come and gone. Taxpayers fund most vaccine research, but the pharma titans that can make them at scale are reluctant to commit to a vaccine if the likelihood of profit is meagre. “We have a broken ecosystem for making vaccines,” Hotez told me.
If the business wasn’t set up this way, Hotez thinks, he’d have a Covid-19 vaccine to offer, based on an earlier project that wilted from lack of funding.
Sick and tired of this “optimism” bullshit. We pay the President to assess the situation and formulate an appropriate strategy. Optimism is not a strategy, merely a state of mind.
Can you imagine if a CEO told his Board he mismanaged a crisis because he preferred to remain “optimistic”?
I hear the sound of thousands of redactions points popping into existence.
Exactly right. Thoughts and prayers time on steroids.