There is a line in Shakespeare’s MacBeth, where MacBeth returns to his wife, and out of guilt mourns his brutal murder of his trusted Captain Duncan. In the scene, MacBeth looks at his bloodied hands and says: “Will all great Neptune’s ocean wash this blood clean from my hand?” Unlike MacBeth, Trump has expressed no remorse or guilt regarding his inaction to stop the spread of coronavirus in the US, or the loss of 224,000 loved ones. He said himself that he “took no responsibility.”
Contrary to what Trump claimed this past Thursday during the final debate with Joe Biden, COVID-19 is not rounding a turn, it is not going away, and there is not going to be a vaccine before the election. Yesterday, the US reported more than 80,000 new COVID-19 cases, the highest daily case number since the pandemic began. According to Johns Hopkins, deaths are also increasing, with 856 reported on Thursday, with the seven-day average of daily deaths at 763, the highest average in a month. Our nation’s embattled leading infectious disease expert, Dr. Fauci, who needs a security detail to protect him since getting death-threats from COVID-19 deniers, said Friday that he’s concerned about a massive surge in coronavirus cases across the country and urged people to take measures to prevent the spread of the virus. But apparently experts and scientists don’t know anything, and Trump continues to hold his mask-less “super-spreader” rallies as we get closer to election day. People are getting sick, people are dying, and Trump said Thursday night that we’d just have to “live with it.” I did appreciate Biden’s response of, no “people are dying with it.”
So how did we get here? A new study by researchers at Columbia University estimates that between 130,000 and 210,000 deaths from coronavirus in the United States could have been avoided. That’s mothers and fathers, sisters and brothers, sons and daughters, loved ones who have contracted and died from a horrible virus, a virus that the Trump administration ignored. The first author of the report, Irwin Redlener (the founding director of the National Center for Disaster Preparedness at Columbia University), is quoted by the Daily Beast as saying: “We believe that this was a monumental, lethal screwup by an administration that didn’t want to deal with reality.” The study compared the US response with those of six other countries (Canada, Japan, South Korea, Germany, Australia and France) and found that the factors that led to higher mortality rates in the US, included delayed stay-at-home orders, botched testing, the lack of a unified response by the White House and the federal government, and a failure to mandate masks and social distancing measures across thenation.
Trump’s dismal response in the U.S. to COVID-19 is evident in other publications that were released this week as well. The Kaiser Family Foundation stated that coronavirus is now the third-leading cause of death in the country, behind heart disease and cancer, but this is not the case in other nations. In countries such as Japan, Australia and Germany, COVID-19 doesn’t even make the top 10 list of causes of death. The Trump administration’s failures to manage the pandemic from its start, his spreading of lies and misinformation about the virus are well known and documented. He deliberately downplayed the severity of the pandemic in February, telling us we had nothing to worry about, then he called is a “hoax” perpetrated by the Democrats, he said it was just going to “go away,” he said “it is what it is,” and now recently, we’re just going to have to “learn to live with it.”
But that’s not all, what happened to the pandemic response team formed under Obama? In 2016, President Barack expanded the Global Health Security and Biodefense group, which focused in large part on pandemic preparedness, and it was formed in response to criticism of how his administration handled the Ebola outbreak in 2014 and 2015. At that time, Republicans blasted Obama for not imposing quarantines or travel bans, and several GOP lawmakers urged Obama to establish someone to oversee the response after two American nurses contracted Ebola while caring for an infected patient in 2014. The pandemic response unit was set up as part of the National Security Council, and it’s purpose was to coordinate pandemic preparedness for future outbreaks. Then in May of 2018, under Trump, former national security adviser John Bolton restructured Trump’s National Security Council and disbanded the global health unit, claiming that it needed restructuring and streamlining. Its former head, Rear Admiral Timothy Ziemer, resigned from the administration and was never replaced. When the WHO declared the coronavirus outbreak a pandemic back in March, Bolton defended the restructuring of the unit on Twitter.
When Trump claimed that the coronavirus “came out of nowhere” and “blindsided the world,” but that was a bald-face lie. Health experts and scientists had been warning the US about the next pandemic for years and publicly criticized the Trump administration’s decision to gut the National Security Council unit in 2018. Safeguarding our nation’s health is something that should not be taken for granted, and is as important as any other aspect of national security. Who is to say how many deaths may have been prevented had the pandemic unit not been disbanded. We’ll never know. But what we do know is that the current administration continues to trivialize a pandemic that has killed hundreds of thousands, and there is no end in sight for the near future. This pandemic has caused not only the historic loss of 8 million jobs, but as many as 12 million Americans may have lost their health insurance as well. What are these people going to do if they get sick? Sure, Trump’s COVID-19 care and medical bill at Walter Reed were paid by us, the American people, he didn’t have to pay a dime. But for most Americans, for people who aren’t president, medical bills could mount to more than $100,000, and patients could also face significant surprise bills and medical debt even after health insurance pays its share.
COVID-19 is still very dangerous, and very real. Yet the White House continues to deny it, to downplay it, to ignore it, to make fun of it, and that is inexcusable. Even after being hospitalized with COVID, after his wife and son tested positive, Trump still continues to deny the severity of this virus. In a recent rally, he said that people are “tired” of hearing about “COVID, COVID, COVID.” His inability and refusal to understand science has resulted in one of the most deadly pandemic responses in the world, leading to the loss of hundreds of thousands of lives. Trump has blood on his hands, and his incompetence, ignorance and pathological denial of this pandemic is both unconscionable and unforgivable.
So the answer Mr. Trump is “no,” “not all of great Neptune’s ocean will wash the blood clean from your hands.”
If you haven’t already voted, think about this on Election Day.
Sources:
1. https://www.cnn.com/2020/10/23/health/us-coronavirus-friday/index.html
4. https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2020/05/trump-obama-coronavirus-pandemic-response
6. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/07/upshot/trump-hospital-costs-coronavirus.html
7. https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2020/10/trumps-lies-about-coronavirus/608647/