White House in disarray as coronavirus numbers explode
16 July 2020
The toll of coronavirus infections and deaths in the United States is moving relentlessly upwards as the Trump administration’s response descends into chaos. Trump and other aides are denouncing the top US infectious disease expert, Dr. Anthony Fauci, while the White House effectively prevents the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention from carrying out its assigned task of coordinating the fight against the pandemic.
On Wednesday, the US death toll passed 140,000, according to the count maintained by the Worldometer website, and the total number of cases reported reached 3.6 million, meaning that more than one out of every hundred Americans has been infected by the potentially deadly virus.
The one-day total of infections set a new record at 71,670. Over the past seven days, the average one-day total has been more than 62,000, triple the level of one month ago.
President Donald Trump, and Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Dr. Anthony S. Fauci at a coronavirus update briefing in April. (Image Credit: Official White House Photo by Andrea Hanks)
It will not be long before the United States experiences more new infections in a single day than China suffered throughout the entire months-long crisis that ravaged the city of Wuhan, where the global pandemic began. Soon after that, the US may hit the 100,000 daily infection rate about which Dr. Fauci warned in his Senate testimony last month.
In cities across the southern and southwestern states, scenes that recall the horrors of April in New York City are now taking place, with hospitals in Miami, Orlando, Houston, Dallas, San Antonio and Phoenix running out of PPE, ICU beds and space to house the dead.
On Tuesday, when there were more than 65,000 new cases across the country, Florida, Texas and California accounted for nearly half. Florida alone had more than 78,000 new cases over the past week, more than most countries have had in the entire course of the pandemic. China, it should be noted, has suffered 83,612 cases of COVID-19 in the eight months since the disease was first discovered in Wuhan.
A front-page analysis in the Washington Post gloomily noted that the soaring global coronavirus toll was being powered by a group of poor countries, and by the United States, more or less suggesting that America resembles a third world country in its efforts to fight the pandemic. The newspaper cited one key fact: “Nearly all the countries struggling with a surge share something in common: After weeks or months of trying to suppress the virus, they reopened their economies, only to find that the virus came roaring back.”
The newspaper failed to point out, however, that the reopening in the US was not in response to popular demand. It was rather carried out, in the face of deep-seated opposition from workers, at the orders of the financial aristocracy and its political servants in both parties, Democratic as well as Republican.
Some of the most strident advocates of the reopening have themselves contracted coronavirus. Oklahoma Governor Kevin Stitt, who hailed the Trump campaign rally held in his state last month at a Tulsa arena, revealed Wednesday that he had tested positive. So did Representative Morgan Griffith of the 9th Congressional District of Virginia, in the Appalachian region, a leader of the ultra-right House Freedom Caucus, who attended a public event in Washington where the participants were generally maskless.
There is a chaotic patchwork, in some cases state by state, in others city by city, of emergency orders, mask mandates and decisions to reopen public schools and other potential flashpoints of a new surge in COVID-19. The Houston Independent School District said it would begin its school year with at least six weeks of online-only instruction, with a plan to review the decision in mid-October. San Francisco announced a similar schedule, while Prince George’s County, Maryland, in the Washington D.C. suburbs, said online-only instruction would continue at least until February 2021.
Two more state governors, Republican Kay Ivey of Alabama and Democrat Steve Bullock of Montana, announced they were dropping their previous opposition and issuing statewide orders requiring anyone out in public to wear a mask. The Republican governors of Georgia and Florida, two of the hardest-hit states, are still refusing to issue orders to wear masks.
At her press briefing on Wednesday afternoon, Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer revealed that the state’s COVID-19 curve had begun to rise again, hitting 891 new cases, the biggest single-day total in two months. Blaming the population for failing to wear masks, Whitmer warned, “If Michiganders don’t mask up when we’re going out in public, cases could rise and we could be forced to close down more of our businesses, including auto manufacturing plants that employ thousands of Michigan workers, jobs that our whole economy depends on.”Many states are being forced to return to some form of partial lockdown, at least banning indoor service at bars and restaurants, in some cases threatening a fuller closing down of the economy.
Dr. Joneigh Khaldun, the state’s top health official, said that the resurgence in the coronavirus was driven by younger people, with the highest rate among those aged 20–29, followed by those aged 30–39. She also noted the spread to new areas of the state not previously significantly affected, including the rural Upper Peninsula and the Grand Rapids area, both of which had their highest infection rates since the pandemic began. Michigan schools are still set to reopen on September 8.
Republican Governor Mike DeWine of Ohio gave a statewide address Tuesday night in which he warned that if no action was taken, “Florida and Arizona will be our future.” He warned against any relaxation of social distancing and wearing masks, saying in that case, “we’re literally playing a Russian roulette game with our own lives, and our families’ and our neighbors’.”
In the Virginia, Maryland and Washington D.C. area, the seven-day moving average of new infections has returned to the level that prevailed before the lockdown of nonessential businesses was loosened at the end of May, passing 1,400 per day, with the biggest increase in the Hampton Roads area, which includes the largest US naval base, as well as the tourist center of Virginia Beach.
Against this backdrop of mounting sickness and death, the White House has been thrown into turmoil by attacks on Dr. Fauci, the longtime head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, by Trump and several aides.
Trump referred disparagingly to Fauci’s “many mistakes” in two media interviews last week, and the attack escalated with White House officials releasing a memorandum detailing supposed errors by Fauci and other materials aiming to discredit him. This culminated in a column published Tuesday in USA Today by Peter Navarro, Trump’s top trade adviser, under the headline, “Anthony Fauci has been wrong about everything I have interacted with him on.”
The op-ed was an ignorant rant by an official with no public health expertise but plenty of nationalistic spleen directed at China, the country Navarro accuses of deliberately unleashing the virus on the world. Navarro evidently regards Fauci’s scientific advice as an obstacle to the anti-China campaign.
After a media and political backlash, White House aide Alyssa Farah claimed that the Navarro column had not gone through “normal White House clearance processes and is the opinion of Peter alone.” Later in the day, Trump disavowed the Navarro column entirely, saying it was a “rogue” effort and that he did not share Navarro’s view of Fauci. But Navarro was only repeating, in more compressed and pointed form, exactly what Trump and other White House officials had been saying against Fauci for a week.
Fauci himself, in a media interview Wednesday, stated the obvious about the White House attack on him: “It distracts from what I hope would be the common effort of getting this thing under control, rather than this back-and-forth distraction, which just doesn’t make any sense.”
He continued, “Let’s stop this nonsense and figure out how can we get our control over this now, and looking forward, how can we make sure that next month we don’t have another example of California, Texas, Florida and Arizona, because those are the hot zones now, and I’m looking at the map, saying we got to make sure it doesn’t happen in other states… Let’s focus on that.”
The White House also reaffirmed the directive issued July 10 for hospitals to bypass the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and send information on COVID-19 patients and resources to the Department of Health and Human Services in Washington. The order—a transparent effort to suppress information about the pandemic by centralizing it under the control of the White House—was roundly criticized by professionals in the public health field.
In a press statement, Dr. Thomas File, president of the Infectious Diseases Society of America, called data collection a “core function of the CDC,” which was being undermined by the Trump administration. “Placing medical data collection outside of the leadership of public health experts could severely weaken the quality and availability of data, add an additional burden to already overwhelmed hospitals and add a new challenge to the US pandemic response,” he said.
According to press reports, hospitals will not actually contact the federal government at all to report COVID-19 information. They will report their data to TeleTracking, a private company in the Pittsburgh area, which was awarded a $10 million no-bid contract to provide HHS with reporting capability.
Trump wages war against science and Dr. Fauci, not coronavirus
14 July 2020
President Donald Trump has stepped up his war of words against Dr. Anthony Fauci, head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) since 1984 and the leading government expert on the coronavirus pandemic. Trump criticized Fauci during two television interviews last week and then had his White House staff leak a hostile memorandum to the media listing Fauci’s supposed mistakes during the COVID-19 crisis.
Most of the statements listed in the memorandum concerned Fauci’s recommendations on specific public health measures, which changed from month to month depending of the scope of the danger. For example, in the early stages of the pandemic he urged people not to wear masks because there were shortages and he thought the limited supply should go to health care workers first.
It requires a considerable degree of political hubris to raise the accuracy of Fauci’s statements and predictions to defend the biggest liar in modern American history. It is only a few months since the American public witnessed President Trump suggesting that the injection of bleach might be a useful measure to combat the coronavirus, to say nothing of his shilling for discredited “cures” like hydroxychloroquine and his suggestion that the virus would disappear “like a miracle” once the weather turned warm.
This dirty tricks campaign—and it deserves that label, as the memorandum was characterized by the Washington Post and several television networks as similar to the “opposition research” conducted against a rival candidate during an election—is aimed at undermining Fauci’s increasingly blunt criticism of the colossal failure of the Trump administration and various state governments in stemming the pandemic.
Dan Scavino, deputy White House chief of staff for communications, went so far as to place a cartoon on his Facebook page Sunday night depicting Fauci as “Dr. Faucet,” flushing the US economy down the drain, demanding schools remain closed and even (a real grievance for Trump) suggesting that there would be no professional football season this fall because of the coronavirus.
More importantly, firing Fauci, the administration’s only voice on COVID-19 with any credibility with the public, would undoubtedly generate a political backlash against Trump of major proportions. The 79-year-old Fauci has headed the NIAID under six administrations, Republican and Democratic, and clearly continues to serve in a demanding position, long after he could have retired, because of his devotion to public health.Trump embraces such childish smear tactics, rather than simply firing Fauci, in part because the doctor has extensive job protection under civil service rules and could be removed only by his direct superiors, Secretary of Health and Human Services Alex Azar and Francis Collins, director of the National Institutes of Health, and only for cause.
Tensions between Fauci and the White House have been mounting over the past two weeks as the disease expert let it be known that he did not agree with Trump’s claims that there was no connection between the reckless campaign to reopen the US economy and the subsequent surge in coronavirus infections. In congressional testimony, Fauci warned that the country could soon face 100,000 new infections each day—triple the peak rate of April and May.
Fauci has contradicted some of Trump’s more ignorant public statements, such as his assertion that “99 percent” of coronavirus cases are harmless, and his claim that the number of US coronavirus cases is going up because more people are being tested, not because more people are falling ill. He also disagreed with Trump’s claims that the lower death rate of the past two months meant that the virus was weakening or even “going away.” He told one interviewer, “It’s a false narrative to take comfort in a lower rate of death.”
Two interviews last week seem to have brought Fauci to the brink of a public rupture with the White House. In a podcast with the election website FiveThirtyEight.com, Fauci said that “as a country, when you compare us to other countries, I don’t think you can say we’re doing great. I mean, we’re just not.”
This directly contradicts the incessant claims by Trump that the US response to the coronavirus is an unparalleled success—claims that are ludicrous given that the US leads the world in both deaths and total cases. Fauci went on to say that he could understand why the European Union would continue to ban US citizens from entering, on public health grounds.
In an interview Friday with the Financial Times, Fauci revealed that he had not briefed Trump on the pandemic for at least two months and had not spoken with the president at all since early June. He explained that the White House had blocked most requests for television interviews with him and that his “honesty” was probably the reason.
“I have a reputation, as you probably have figured out, of speaking the truth at all times and not sugar-coating things,” he told the British newspaper. “And that may be one of the reasons why I haven’t been on television very much lately.”
On Monday, after the White House effort to trash his professional reputation over the weekend, Fauci warned that the US hasn’t “even begun to see the end” of the pandemic, although he expressed some optimism about progress in the development of vaccines and potentially therapeutic drug treatments.
Trump responded later Monday, during a brief question-and-answer session with reporters at the White House, by deflecting any discussion of Fauci in particular but reiterating his most absurd and discredited statements about the “great progress” the United States is making against the COVID-19 pandemic.
In response to a reporter who pressed him on his repeated claims that the coronavirus is not actually increasing in the United States, and that the rising number of positive cases is the product of greater testing, Trump replied, “We’re doing great with testing… We’ve done 45 million tests. If we did half that number, we’d have half the cases.”
Even this piece of stupidity was not the crudest statement coming from the Trump administration. That prize goes to Admiral Brett P. Giroir, assistant secretary of health and human services, who was the White House-approved spokesman making the rounds of the Sunday television talk shows. Asked on “Meet the Press” about the White House attack on Fauci, Giroir said, “Dr. Fauci is not 100 percent right, and he also doesn’t necessarily—and he admits that—have the whole national interest in mind… He looks at it from a very narrow public health point of view.”
These are words that should be branded on his backside. Trump, of course, according to the sycophantic admiral, has “the whole national interest in mind.” In other words, he upholds the global position of American imperialism and the profits of the giant corporations, which are being undermined as long as workers cannot be herded back into the factories and other workplaces because of the threat of COVID-19.
As for Dr. Fauci, his “very narrow public health point of view” consists of the sincere desire to save millions of people from a serious illness that means death for hundreds of thousands, if not many more, and significant health consequences even for many of those who are fortunate enough to survive. In a contest between those two outlooks, there is little doubt which would be preferred by the working people who make up the vast majority of the country.
All-Time Low Coronavirus Approval Rating Hurting Trump in Swing States
3:45
President Donald Trump’s all-time low rating on his handling of the Coronavirus pandemic is threatening his re-election chances by enabling former Vice President Joe Biden to expand the Electoral map, according to polls released by CBS/YouGov on Sunday.
According to an ABC News/Ipsos poll released last week, 67 percent disapprove of the way Trump is “handling the response to the Coronavirus (COVID-19)” while just 33 percent approve. It is Trump’s lowest mark since polling organizations started surveying Coronavirus issues in March.
And these low marks are hurting Trump in critical Sun Belt states that are now Coronavirus hot spots. The CBS/YouGov polls found that Biden leads by Trump by six points in the critical swing state of Florida and is virtually tied with the president in Arizona and Texas.
The polling found that “Biden has made gains in part because most say their state’s efforts to contain the virus are going badly — and the more concerned voters are about risks from the outbreak, the more likely they are to support Biden.”
The polls found that nearly seven-in-10 voters in these states are taking the Coronavirus crisis very seriously, and “nine in 10 Biden backers cite the coronavirus outbreak as a major factor in their vote, more so than the economy.”
Nearly six-in-10 voters in these important states believe their states re-opened too soon, and nearly seven-in-10 voters in these three states think their states re-opened “under pressure from the Trump administration.”
Nationally, ABC/Ipsos found that Trump’s Coronavirus approval rating plummeted because of “plunging support among independents and even waning support among Republicans.”
Just 26 percent of independents approve of Trump’s handling of the Coronavirus pandemic compared to 40 percent in mid-June while “Trump’s disapproval among independents has risen to 73%, up from 59% in the June poll.”
While 90 percent of Republicans approved of his Coronavirus response in mid-June, just 78 percent do now. In addition, according to ABC/Ipsos, Trump’s 22 percent disapproval rating among Republicans now “is a more than two-fold increase from last month.”
Perhaps even more importantly, the poll found that “even white Americans without a college degree, considered to be a core constituency of Trump’s base, are split in their approval of the president’s handling, with 50% disapproving and 49% approving, compared to 42% disapproving and 57% approving in that last poll.”
Trump’s Coronavirus approval rating may be the most important number in predicting the 2020 presidential election.
CNN recently pointed out “just how correlated coronavirus is to feelings about the election right now” and noted that “it’s actually more predictive of voting for” former Vice President Joe Biden “than disapproval of Trump’s job performance.”
In the most recent CNN poll, which found that Biden had a 14-point national lead, “among the voters who said Biden would be better at handling the pandemic, 96% said they’d vote for Biden. Trump took a mere 2% of those voters.” Biden also won “92% of those who disapprove of Trump’s overall job performance. Trump won 3% of those voters.”
As CNN noted, this trend has been consistent in numerous other polls. For instance, a recent Pew Research national poll “found that 52% of voters were confident that Biden could deal with coronavirus. Only 41% said the same about Trump.” Biden had a 10-point lead over Trump in that national poll.
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