White House chief medical adviser Dr. Anthony Fauci said Thursday he would have been “shocked” to hear a year ago that the U.S. coronavirus death toll would reach more than 500,000 in just one year.
Is this what Trump meant by America first?
Fauci underestimated the GOPs ability to convert covid-19 into a political weapon.
“We had such divisiveness in our country that even simple common sense public health measures took on a political connotation,” Faui said, adding: “It wasn’t a pure public health approach, it was very much influenced by the divisiveness we have in this country.”
In large part owing to the bogus alternative media bubble the American Right built over several decades.
But I and some others sense that the “good times” are coming to an end. Perhaps there’s only so deep that the institutional press will follow the GOP and the Right down the rabbithole.
Thread
Then again, there’s Axios and Politico. Are they part of that world, or just one foot in?
I think Fauci may also have underestimated the lack of knowledge on the scientific process. And couple that with the “You’re not the boss of me” mentality.
Yes, Dr Fauci, at the outset most people would’ve been shocked by the suggestion of half a million dead from the pandemic.
Apparently, though, when Donnie heard that the possible death toll could be in the millions, he took the numbers as aspirations.
May it disappear like Bircher mimeographs.
I seriously doubt there’s anyone around now who misses them, even as a foil to lampoon.
Because I follow developments in the Chinese economy, my friend and I were talking about the virus already in the third week of December 2019. Even as late as February, we thought this would play out more like the first corona outbreak, which just happened to offshore to the Canadian and Taiwanese healthcare systems, both of which had admirable responses. Even if it was the Trump era, however, I certainly never imagined that I would catch covid twice over the next 12 months.
White House chief medical adviser Dr. Anthony Fauci said Thursday he would have been “shocked” to hear a year ago that the U.S. coronavirus death toll would reach more than 500,000 in just one year.
Still downplaying it, Dr. Fauci. Johns Hopkins has it at 530K. Something I never see explored are the lack of upward revisions when a state reveals undercounting COVID deaths. For example, Hopkins’ tally did not jump 6500 deaths when New York admitted the discrepancy between nursing home deaths and the smaller number their Health Department acknowledged:
More than 15,000 New Yorkers in care homes have died since the start of the pandemic.
But - until late last month - the state’s health department had logged just over 8,500 fatalities.
Where are those additional 6500 deaths tallied? Not by Johns Hopkins as far as I can tell. And New York is not the only state to fess up to various instances of misreporting or hiding deaths. But the confessed additional deaths just sort of disappear into the ether when the grand total is discussed. Why is that?
Very true. It caught me by surprise at how easy it was for them
In my opinion, Moscow McConnell, by arranging for Trump’s Impeachment 1.0 acquittal, is responsible for the overwhelming majority of those 500,000+ deaths.
That opinion will never change
I pin it on these people:
Just my $.02. AFAICT, they’re worse.
They’re essentially in that world, but pretend NOT to be, and do so juuuuuust enough that the more mainstream, so-called liberal media (SCLM, which I’ll define (explicitly, and for the first time) as ABC, NBC, CBS, PBS, NYT, WaPo, LATimes, NPR, etc., etc. #NotAllMedia), knowingly or unknowingly, treats them as outside of it.
So do I.
I am a great blame-sharer
Biden ought to give a press conference at some point, but the sheer entitlement of these corporate media assholes is offputting.
Tuck Chodd is perturbed.
I think they were counted in COVID death totals, but not in the Nursing Home subtotal.
Ohio last month late reported 4400 deaths from the previous four months of the winter surge. Indiana had reported 1500 previously unreported deaths. Texas I have some suspicions about. Really, someone needs to put a microscope on every state’s reporting, but particularly the states where the government has downplayed COVID.
Those deaths were counted as hospital deaths. So when you now add them to the nursing home number, you have to remove them from the hospital number. It does not change the total deaths. The dispute is about where to count the deaths, not whether to count them. This is why it’s best to read the actual reports, as opposed to the newspaper writers’ summary articles.
I watch the Johns Hopkins totals daily. I don’t ever recall their death trend humming along for example at, say, about 1200 deaths a day for weeks on end, and then one day, bam!, they publish 7700 deaths for the previous day. Which is what you’d expect if some authority finally determined that yes, a certain state had been adjudicated as underreporting or hiding 6500 deaths.
Cincinnati Enquirer graph showing Ohio backlog with both day of event and day of report; this is a good graphic.
They are searching for conflict-memes.
Understandable, given a host of reasons.
Indignation at the question posed by ABC is, in itself, an example of The Perfect Being the Enemy of the Good…
Put another way, if I were Joe Biden, I would expect canonization right now…and if I dont get it and, instead, see this “gotcha” theme, I would huddle with my team, game a response bereft of a chip on my shoulder…
And smile at the approval ratings coming my way, and the Biden Bill’s way.
Biden is in a very good position right now and should not let Perfect (not getting canonized) be the Enemy of the Good.
