by Noah
The meme I've chosen for tonight's Midnight Meme is good but it's too mild. I don't make them all. If I did, the key phrase would be Crimes Against Humanity, not Criminal Negligence, but, it's a start. It opens the door.
The quote below comes from a New York Times opinion piece titled The Huge Cost of Waiting to Contain the Pandemic which ran over a year ago in April 2020. It was written by epidemiologists Britta L. Jewell and Nicholas P. Jewell.
On March 16, the White House issued initial social distancing guidelines, including closing schools and avoiding groups of more than 10. But an estimated 90 percent of the cumulative deaths in the United States from Covid-19, at least from the first wave of the epidemic, might have been prevented by putting social distancing policies into effect two weeks earlier, on March 2, when there were only 11 deaths in the entire country. The effect would have been substantial had the policies been imposed even one week earlier, on March 9, resulting in approximately a 60 percent reduction in deaths.
March 16, 2020. That was still relatively the early days of the pandemic but, despite the damage they'd done to the warning systems, the White House knew what was coming well before then and did and said nothing. They'd even fired most of those whose job it was to provide intelligence about potential plagues before they got established. They'd tossed the pandemic playbook in the trash.
As the New York Times piece documents, even one week sooner, just one week, would have resulted in a huge reduction in deaths due to COVID-19. Instead, Trump gave this plague a bigger plateau to take off from. The resulting numbers of casualties became exponentially higher and continued to do so. The bigger the monster, the harder it is to slay.
Forget one week or two. How about a month sooner? February 16th instead of March 16th? Someday, after this plague has had its full run, there will be a final analysis and we will see that the numbers of cases, deaths, and lives, families and businesses that were ruined was far worse than even what the Times piece could imply back in April 2020. That 60% reduction the writers referred to should now be seen as a serious underestimation if extrapolated into long run terms because Trump's malfeasance and negligence didn't stop with the call for social distancing. How could it? He'd already given COVID-19 a running start and he continued to downplay it. He chose to strengthen the chains of transmission, even calling the whole thing a hoax, and it grew and grew. He enabled and encouraged it just like he enabled and encouraged every white supremacist in the country. No disease would go unnourished under the psychopathic lunatic named Trump.
From Trump on down, the psychopaths in the Trump White House and their sociopathic and psychopathic allies in the Republican Party and media went far beyond the criminal negligence they had started out with. Calling the plague of COVID-19 a hoax and deliberately persuading the country to let down its guard was just the beginning and, as far as I'm concerned, that was the point where, in relation to this plague we are in, Trump, his party, and his media hacks all crossed over from criminal negligence into crimes against humanity. Their evil continues to this day as they continue with the non-stop anti-vaccination propaganda that they see only as self-serving. As just three examples, Trump begat the actions of governors Ron DeSantis, Greg Abbott, and Kristi Noem. He showed them the way. Even now, the RNC, led by Ronna Romney McDaniel, raises money to support homicidal maniacs who catapult death-dealing policies and propaganda. It's good for the freezer truck business.
Nuremberg-style trials are called for. Will we ever see them? Of course not. Crimes against humanity happen because we don't punish the perps. In Washington, there is no deterrent. We let them off the hook and that begets more and more and worse and worse. If you want to look for bi-partisanship in DC, look no further.
I'd also like to see the numbers of members of Congress and other Washington jackasses who knew what was on the horizon and did and said nothing but Washington has ways of shutting that down. Human decency is frowned upon in Washington. It's a hoax.