POTUS’ most dangerous statements on the Covid-19 pandemic

March 26, 2020 –

Okay, it’s a given that President Trump lies and dissembles as easily as he breathes.  He says amazingly dumb things with probably the same arrogant frequency.  But with the Covid-19 pandemic, the president has passed over into new and truly dangerous territory, putting millions of Americans’ lives at risk with statements that contradict medical science and the advice of public health experts.  Here is a handful of the most egregious:

“Nobody knew there’d be a pandemic or an epidemic of this proportion.”  (Hardly.  Among those feverishly waving red flags – the Department of Defense, the National Security Council, the Centers for Disease Control, and the World Health Organization.  Didn’t matter; Trump eliminated the NSC’s global health security office and slashed CDC budgets and staffing anyway.)

“One day, it’s like a miracle, it will disappear.”  (Sorry, pandemics just don’t work that way, and it’s delusionally dangerous to encourage people to think they do.  Just ask Italy and Spain, both with better health systems than we have, yet overrun by the pandemic.  The president might also ring up his British buddy, Prime Minister Boris Johnson, who is current in quarantine with the virus.)

“We’re very close to a vaccine.”  (Uh, no.  Medical experts who actually understand the science say it could take a year or longer to develop, manufacture, and distribute a safe vaccine on the mass scale required.  More dangerous delusion.)

New drugs soon available for treating the virus could be “the biggest game-changers in the history of medicine.”  (Right, and maybe one of the new drugs will reverse Alzheimer’s, another will cure cancer, and yet another will unlock the mystery of immortality.  One uncensored Australian researcher told it like it is – Trump’s statement amounts to “insanity.”)

“America will again and soon be open for business.”  “The cure cannot be worse than the disease.”  (Sure it can, much worse in fact, with hundreds of millions of Americans getting sick with Covid-19, and millions of the infected dying as a result.  Encouraging people to ignore lethal risk is criminally sociopathic.)