Category: COVID-19

Misleading claims about COVID-19’s origins and severity.

Trump says it’s ‘badge of HONOR’ for US to lead world in Covid-19 cases

President Donald Trump says that it is a “badge of honour” that the the US has more cases of the coronavirus than any other country.

Speaking at a cabinet meeting this afternoon, the president put the high figure down to the volume of Covid-19tests being carried out.

“When we have a lot of cases, I don’t look at that as a bad thing — I look at that in a certain respect as being a good thing because it means our testing is much better. … So I view it as a badge of honour, really,” he said.

Mr Trump added that this was “a great tribute to the testing and all of the work that a lot of professionals have done.”

The US has conducted 11.28 million tests for the coronavirus, according to figures updated on Monday by the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention.

A total of 1.59 million cases of Covid-19 have been confirmed — approximately 14 per cent of those tested.

More than 91,000 American deaths have been officially recorded as directly caused by the virus.

The president brought up the topic of testing in his response to a question about whether he was considering a travel ban on Latin America, specifically Brazil which now has the third highest number of cases in the world after the US and Russia.

Initially responding that the administration was considering a travel ban, Mr Trump continued: “We hope that we’re not going to have a problem. The governor of Florida is doing very, very well testing — in particular Florida, because a big majority come in to Florida. Brazil has gone more or less herd, and they’re having problems.”

“I worry about everything, I don’t want people coming in here and infecting our people,” he continued. “I don’t want people over there sick either.”

[The Independent]


Trump interrupts PGA to blame Obama for the COVID-19 crisis

Former President Barack Obama may have been out of office for three years, but the 2019 coronavirus was somehow made worse by him, according to President Donald Trump. 

Interrupting the PGA on Sunday, NBC interviewed Trump over the phone, where he name-dropped golfers claiming that he knew them. Then he quickly turned from hoping to bring back sports to blaming Obama for the crisis.

According to Trump, he was left woefully unprepared due to Obama, who left office in 2017. Trump has not yet revealed what he spent the subsequent three years doing if there was such a lack of resources. During Trump’s first two years in office, the Republican Party ran the House, Senate, and White House.

COVID-19 is so named because it stands for coronavirus found in 2019. Obama had been out of office for just under three years during the discovery of the coronavirus. No tests could be invented for coronavirus three years before the virus existed, though Trump seems confused by the timeline about when he took over the White House and when the COVID-19 crisis began.

[Raw Story]

Media

Trump Claims Covid-19 Will Disappear Even Without Vaccine as US Cases Top 1 Million

Having apparently learned nothing about the novel coronavirus since February—when he predicted the contagion would disappear “like a miracle” by April—President Donald Trump insisted during a roundtable with corporate executives Wednesday that Covid-19 will soon “be gone” even in the absence of a vaccine, a view that is not shared by public health professionals.

“It’s gonna go, it’s gonna leave, it’s gonna be gone, it’s gonna be eradicated,” Trump said when asked to explain how the virus will simply disappear without a vaccine. “It might take longer, it might be in smaller sections. It won’t be what we had.”

“If you have a flare-up in a certain area, if you have a, I call them burning embers, boom. We put it out,” Trump continued. “We know how to put it out now. But we put it out.”

In response to Trump’s remarks, Rep. Ted Lieu (D-Calif.) tweeted that the president’s “magical thinking and downplaying of the virus has led to over 61,000 American deaths.”

“Saying the virus is gonna leave doesn’t make it go away,” Lieu said. “But more testing and [personal protective equipment] would help stop its spread.”

The president’s latest prediction came after coronavirus cases in the U.S. officially topped one million and deaths surpassed 60,000. Despite the mounting death toll, lack of nationwide testing capacity, and fears of a devastating second wave, states across the nation are slowly reopening sectors of their economy as the federal government races to develop a Covid-19 vaccine.

Bloomberg reported Wednesday that the Trump administration “is organizing a Manhattan Project-style effort to drastically cut the time needed to develop a coronavirus vaccine, with a goal of making enough doses for most Americans by year’s end.”

“Called ‘Operation Warp Speed,’ the program will pull together private pharmaceutical companies, government agencies, and the military to try to cut the development time for a vaccine by as much as eight months,” according to Bloomberg. “As part of the arrangement, taxpayers will shoulder much of the financial risk that vaccine candidates may fail, instead of drug companies.”

In contrast to Trump’s insistence that the virus will soon “be gone,” Dr. Anthony Fauci—the nation’s leading infectious disease expert—warned in an interview on CNN Wednesday that a second wave of the coronavirus in the coming months is “inevitable.”

“If by that time we have put into place all of the countermeasures that you need to address this, we should do reasonably well,” Fauci said. “If we don’t do that successfully, we could be in for a bad fall and a bad winter.”

[Common Dreams]


HHS ousts vaccine expert who pushed back on COVID-19 treatment

The former head of the office involved in developing a vaccine for COVID-19 said he was removed after he pushed to vet and to limit drug treatments often touted by President Trump. “Specifically, and contrary to misguided directives, I limited the broad use of chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine, promoted by the Administration as a panacea, but which clearly lack scientific merit,” Dr. Rick Bright said in a statement released by his lawyers Wednesday.

In tweets and public remarks, Mr. Trump has referred to hydroxychloroquine as a potential “game-changer” in treating COVID-19. The president has recommended the use of the antimalarial drug as a potential treatment for the coronavirus, despite limited evidence that the drug would be effective.

Bright was the director of the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority (BARDA) and HHS deputy assistant secretary for preparedness and response by the administration.

He said that he was “involuntarily transferred to a more limited and less impactful position at the National Institutes of Health,” a transfer that he believes came in response to his “insistence that the government invest the billions of dollars allocated by Congress to address the COVID-19 pandemic into safe and scientifically vetted solutions, and not in drugs, vaccines and other technologies that lack scientific merit.”

“I am speaking out because to combat this deadly virus, science — not politics or cronyism — has to lead the way,” he said in his statement. Bright is a career official and not a political appointee. He has requested that the inspector general for the Department of Health and Human Services investigate his dismissal.

Bright said that he’s “prepared to look at all options and to think ‘outside the box’ for effective treatments,” but “I rightly resisted efforts to provide an unproven drug on demand to the American public.”

He demanded that the drugs only be used under a doctor’s supervision and only to “hospitalized patients with confirmed COVID-19” because of the “potentially serious risks associated with them, including increased mortality observed in some recent studies in patients with COVID-19.”

“Rushing blindly towards unproven drugs can be disastrous and result in countless more deaths. Science, in service to the health and safety of the American people, must always trump politics,” Bright said.

[CBS News]

Trump Again Touts Hydroxychloroquine, Which Has Major Potential Side Effects, as COVID-19 Treatment

President Donald Trump is again touting a drug used to treat certain other diseases and says he may take it himself in hope that it will help fend off the new coronavirus.

Trump says “there’s a rumor out there” that hydroxychloroquine is effective, declaring “I may take it.”

He has often pointed to hydroxychloroquine as a possible cure and urged people to take it, despite more sober assessments of its effectiveness by medical professionals.

The drug has long been used to treat malaria, rheumatoid arthritis and lupus. Very small preliminary studies suggested it might help prevent coronavirus from entering cells and possibly help patients clear the virus sooner.

But the drug has major potential side effects, especially for the heart, and large studies are underway to see if it is safe and effective for treating COVID-19.

[Time]

Reality

Dr. Fauci swiftly fact-checks Trump on COVID-19 testing shortages: ‘That is a reality that is happening now’

Dr. Anthony Fauci fact-checked President Donald Trump’s claims about coronavirus testing.

The president insisted that he wasn’t hearing any complaints about Americans who have symptoms of COVID-19 but could not get tested, and Trump disagreed with Fauci’s earlier advice to test everyone to see who should remain in quarantine.

“I’m not hearing it,” Trump said. “We don’t want everybody to go out and get a test because there’s no reason for it.”

Another reporter came back to the topic less than three minutes later in the news conference, and asked Fauci whether testing availability was meeting public demand.

“I get the same calls that many of you get,” Fauci said. “Someone goes into a place who has a symptom and wants to get a test and for one reason or other, multiple logistic, technical, what have you — they can’t get it. That is a reality that is happening now. Is it the same as it was a few weeks ago? Absolutely not, because as the secretary and others have said, right now that we have the private sector involved the availability — not only just availability, but the implementation of the availability is getting better and better and better. Having said that, I understand and empathize with the people who rightfully are sayin, ‘I’m trying to get a test, and I can’t.’”

[Raw Story]

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