The entire medical community is stunned by Trump’s abject incompetence in handling a lethal virus that is about to hammer the nation, with more deaths reported just today, and a market currently down 700 points despite a Fed rate cut (almost surely ordered by Trump).

From Rawstory,

Dr. Michael Mina, an epidemiologist at Harvard University, gave the Times an even harsher assessment about the Trump CDC’s performance so far.

“The incompetence has really exceeded what anyone would expect with the CDC,” he said. “This is not a difficult problem to solve in the world of viruses.”

That is stunning. The experts do not even believe this is a particularly difficult or complex problem? And yet the Trump administration has already exceeded their expectations – and they did expect Trump to be incompetent – with respect to the response?

The NYT report cited by Rawstory includes a few points that we addressed yesterday, the sudden block in reporting numbers of new cases, and blocking the number of tests going out – including the website that no longer shows the number of tests utilized.

Even as doctors clamor to have a fully functioning coronavirus test, the CDC has stopped answering the Times’ questions about the test’s development process, and the Times notes that “officials appeared to have removed figures on the agency website counting how many Americans had been tested.”

There is another element at play here, one the doctors haven’t yet fully appreciated, and it relates to the story we published this morning. Trump might well have appointed Pence to the committee with the expectation that the committee would fck it all up, and then Trump would use the task force’s failure as a predicate to replace Pence on the ticket.

Is it possible that Trump is ordering a slow response intentionally, and making information hard to obtain intentionally, to make Pence look bad? In other words, is Trump going to risk lives, indeed sacrifice a few lives, all for political gain?

We cannot know. The only thing we do know is that everything we know about Trump tells us that it is not impossible.

Unbelievable, and yet it is entirely believable, even if it is unintentional, it is still a scandal of monstrous proportions.

****

Peace, y’all

Jason

[email protected] and on Twitter @MiciakZoom