Donald Trump and his Fox News ‘shadow cabinet’ are a ‘genuine public health threat’

Donald Trump’s “shadow cabinet,” the on air personalities at Fox News aka Trump TV, daily tell the president what to think and then he faithfully parrots back their talking points on Twitter and in his public statements. Normally an authoritarian demagogue tells his propagandists what they should say, but in this case, the tale is wagging the dog. The propagandists at Fox News are setting policy, with life and death consequences.

As Chris Hayes editorialized the other day, The dangers of Trump TV: MSNBC host hammers Fox News as ‘genuine public health threat’ amid pandemic:

[on] Wednesday night, MSNBC host Chris Hayes bashed the conservative network for downplaying the seriousness of coronavirus, saying that they are saying what Trump said at his daily briefing Thursday that the United States was at the “top of the hill” and added, “Hopefully, we’re going to be opening up — you could call it opening — very, very, very, very soon, I hope.”

While Trump has advisers like Dr. Anthony Fauci, he also has the unofficial — and unaccountable — advisers he sees on Fox News.

They “are coalescing around the idea the whole thing is just overblown and we need to pump everyone full of the malaria drug and get them back to work. This is what you heard if you watched Trump TV just last night,” Hayes said. He then played clips illustrating exactly that, with hosts ranting and raving about the virus not being as serious as the flu.

“Is it really true that the reason that we’re beginning to think that we’re turning a corner is because we all did what the doctors said we should do or is it because the disease turned out to not be quite as dangerous as we thought?” asked Brit Hume.

Hayes was quick to fact-check the claim.

“The disease not as dangerous as we thought? It’s got a 3.4 percent fatality rate here in the U.S. Ten percent in Italy. that we know of. More than 14,000 American have died from this disease in the last few weeks. More people are dying from it every day in New York than died total on any day in New York in a normal day but sure, not a big deal,” he said.

Hayes noted that from the very beginning “Fox News posed a genuine public health threat” because they refused to take the virus seriously on their air. Meanwhile, their studios were cleaned and precautions were being put in place to keep staff safe from the virus. If Fox hosts are so dismissive of the virus, why aren’t they seen out and about? Why aren’t they shaking hands and signing autographs?

“People have been trying to convince their loved ones not to listen to the dangerously false information in order for their loved ones to stay safe,” said Hayes. “One of those people is co-founder and editor at large Kara Swisher.”

In her recent piece for the New York Times, Fox’s Fake News Contagion, Swisher wrote about trying to get her mother to understand the seriousness of the virus. She explained that her brother is a frontline doctor dealing with the virus every day and has seen the seriousness of the situation.

“I mean, what they are trying to do is they had very bad info information on the air, something my brother and I try to get my mom great information,” said Swisher. “So one of the problems was we were pushing up against the stuff being broadcast very early on by Fox News. Much of which was highly dangerous and so I wrote a column about it. One of the things I think they sort of went crazy about, the fact that I pointed out what a lot of people are experiencing with their parents who only use Fox News to get their news. My mom looks at other news, of course, she does but it has a lot of influence because she was repeating, ‘it’s just like the flu. Get back to work. It’s not a big deal. It’s a Democratic plot.’ All the talking points that were on there she was repeating to me so it took a while for us to get through to her she had to stay home.”

Link to the video at MediaMatters.org.

Chris Hayes’ comments echoed those of dozens of journalism professors and teachers who last week described Fox’s coverage as “a danger to public health” in a scathing open letter.

Nancy LeTourneau at Political Animal blog writes, As Trump Fails, His Enablers Simply Rewrite History (excerpt):

[This] is the opening paragraph of an article titled, The Case for Getting Back to Work. As he indicates, Brian Kennedy doesn’t make the case by consulting experts to determine whether it’s safe to go back to work. Instead, he completely rewrites the history of what happened.

[W]e have compromised the health of the economy, put millions of Americans out of work, and destroyed businesses. In the process, we have exposed a deep flaw in our national response system that must be addressed. Namely, the experts had it wrong, as they often do. The government’s medical professionals misunderstood the virus, misspoke about it in the media, and undercut the president. After initially being caught flat-footed, they overcorrected and caused panic and confusion while insisting that our only choice was a destructive economic shutdown. Once launched, there were no mechanisms to bring the public back from the brink of total lockdown lest it was thought that the president was favoring the economy over human life.

That is the kind of argument we’re seeing permeate the entire right-wing media ecosystem right now. What it comes down to is an attempt to suggest that the experts overhyped the threat, Trump handled the crisis perfectly, and it’s all over now so we can get back to work. That is certainly the theme we’re seeing at Fox News.

Of course, any theme that dominates right-wing news is going to be echoed by the president.

According to a report in the Washington Post, Trump is preparing to announce another coronavirus task force. This one will be focused on making recommendations about reopening the nation’s economy. But rather than staffing the task force with experts on pandemics, the names being mentioned include people like chief of staff Mark Meadows, Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin, and economic adviser Larry Kudlow.

Jonathan Chait of New York magazine has done a marvelous job of tracking Kudlow’s consistently wrong predictions about the economy. Even worse, Bloomberg News reports that Meadows has recommended Trump’s grifter family members, prince Jared Kushner and princess Ivanka for the new panel. Their only “expertise” is grifting.

It is worth noting what the president would hear if he listened to the people who actually know something about how to recover from a pandemic. Aaron Carrol summarized four criteria outlined in a report from the American Enterprise Institute titled, “National Coronavirus Response: A Roadmap to Reopening.”

1. 1. 1. 1. Hospitals in the state must be able to safely treat all patients requiring hospitalization, without resorting to crisis standards of care.
         2. A state needs to be able to at least test everyone who has symptoms.
         3. The state is able to conduct monitoring of confirmed cases and contacts.

         4. There must be a sustained reduction in cases for at least 14 days.

The first one is self-explanatory. But the remaining three rely on a national plan for testing and monitoring.

A robust system of contact tracing and isolation is the only thing that can prevent an outbreak and a resulting lockdown from recurring. Every time an individual tests positive, the public health infrastructure needs to be able to determine whom that person has been in close contact with, find those people, and have them go into isolation or quarantine until it’s established they aren’t infected, too.

That is very similar to what was initially needed to contain the virus, which this administration failed to do because the president was so focused on denial. The same kind of system is needed now for us to be confident that reopening the economy will not trigger another outbreak. Instead, this administration is ending federal support for coronavirus testing sites.

I have no doubt that over the next three weeks Trump will announce the easing of federal restrictions. He will do so based on the propaganda being spread by right-wing media and the advice of people like Kudlow. That will surely lead to yet another massive failure by this president. But he can always count on his enablers to rewrite history.

A new study in the scientific journal The Lancet warns Coronavirus lockdown measures should not be lifted until vaccine found:

A new study says that despite stay-at-home measures being successful in flattening the curve of the coronavirus pandemic, any easing of restrictions could be counterintuitive prior to a vaccine being discovered.

“The first wave of COVID-19 outside of Hubei has abated because of aggressive non-pharmaceutical interventions,” the researchers wrote in the study. “However, given the substantial risk of viral reintroduction, particularly from overseas importation, close monitoring of [reproduction number] and [confirmed case-fatality risk] is needed to inform strategies against a potential second wave to achieve an optimal balance between health and economic protection.”

The research was published in the scientific journal The Lancet.

A similar study published last month said a “second wave” could come in China if social distancing was ended too soon in Wuhan.

The research, also published in The Lancet, notes that keeping the social distancing measures in place until early April could delay the “second wave” until early October. If the ban were lifted too soon, it could happen as soon as August.

China lifted the lockdown on Wuhan, a city with more than 11 million residents, on Wednesday. Fox News previously reported that travel restrictions were relaxed in the city.

Dr. Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, recently told Fox News the decline in deaths can be attributed to social distancing, but that “you don’t want to let up at a time that’s premature.”

He added that progress for a “safe” COVID-19 vaccine would take over one year. “The vaccine as I’ve been saying over the past several weeks, we got into a clinician trial faster than ever,” Fauci said, adding a couple of other candidates are in phase 1 trials.

“It’s going to take about a year to a year and a half,” Fauci added. “In general, if you want to do it correctly, it takes about a year to a year and a half.”

Currently, there is no known scientific cure for the disease known as COVID-19 that is ravaging the globe. There are, however, a multitude of different attempts to treat it, including various vaccines in different stages of testing.

Other experimental measures, including drugs approved for other use cases and plasma transfusion from recovered COVID-19 patients, are also being researched.

Fox News’ new argument, that deaths caused by the novel coronavirus might be inflated, are faulty. “There are plenty of reasons to believe that the coronavirus death toll is actually being significantly undercounted, in fact, rather than overcounted. And the lead medical experts on Trump’s coronavirus task force on Wednesday night rejected the theory.” Birx and Fauci reject Fox News-promoted theory that coronavirus deaths are inflated.

America cannot reopen for business until Americans and businesses are confident that it is safe to return. This requires a robust testing protocol, which we do not have. We have no idea how many people have been infected or even how many have died from coronavirus, because of the lack of adequate testing in the U.S.

The man who falsely assured the public on March 6 that “Anybody that wants a test can get a test”, said on Thursday that a widespread COVID-19 testing program to assess whether workers can safely return to their workplaces is “never going to happen” in the United States. Trump Says Widespread Coronavirus Testing ‘Would Never Happen’ And Isn’t Needed To Reopen Country:

As he addressed reporters during the daily White House Coronavirus Task Force briefing, Trump touted the fact that 2 million Americans had been tested for the virus as a “milestone” in the U.S. fight against the global pandemic caused by SARS-Cov-2.

The 2 million tests that have been administered so far represents a high water mark after weeks of problems in obtaining and administering tests caused by the Trump administration’s rejection of a test developed by the World Health Organization. However, that number means only .61 percent of the 330 million U.S. population has been tested for COVID-19.

That’s a paltry number compared to many other countries which have implemented testing programs. Italy, for example, has administered tests to approximately 1.4 percent of its population, and South Korea, which flattened its infection curve with widespread testing, has reached .9 percent of its population.

Most public health experts have stressed the need for the U.S. to significantly expand its testing program, both with currently available tests to determine whether a given person is infected with SARS-Cov-2, and with so-called “antibody tests” to determine whether a person has successfully fought off the virus and is therefore immune to it.

Both varieties of test, experts say, must be administered in far greater quantities than currently being done in order to allow Americans to return to work without fear of infection, though Trump has repeatedly suggested that the U.S. could begin to emerge from social distancing measures within a few weeks.

But when asked how his administration could discuss “reopening” the U.S. economy without an adequate testing program in place, Trump claimed that such a program was not just unnecessary, but was something that was simply not in the cards.

“Do you need it? No. Is it a nice thing to do? Yes,” Trump said.

Jason Easley correctly notes at Politicususa:

Trump pulled one of the favorite rhetorical tactics of the right. The question was about a national testing system, which Trump twisted into testing every American. In Trump’s view, we test every American or no one.

Donald Trump wants to send millions of workers back into potentially unsafe workplaces and potentially unleash a deadlier wave of coronavirus because he wants a bump in the economy before the election.

Prompted by his Fox News “shadow cabinet,” Trump  is seeking a strategy for resuming business activity by May 1. Trump administration pushing to reopen much of the U.S. next month:

The Trump administration is pushing to reopen much of the country next month, raising concerns among health experts and economists of a possible covid-19 resurgence if Americans return to their normal lives before the virus is truly stamped out.

In phone calls with outside advisers, Trump has even floated trying to reopen much of the country before the end of this month, when the current federal recommendations to avoid social gatherings and work from home expire, the people said. Trump regularly looks at unemployment and stock market numbers, complaining that they are hurting his presidency and reelection prospects, the people said.

Trump said at his daily briefing Thursday that “Hopefully, we’re going to be opening up — you could call it opening — very, very, very, very soon, I hope.”

So we are going to experience a second wave of coronavirus infections and deaths because of the lack of COVID-19 testing in the U.S., and Donald Trump and his Fox News “shadow cabinet” demanding to reopen the country too soon based upon Trump’s reelection campaign calendar, rather than the timing of sound medical science. They are literally sacrificing the lives of Americans.

There needs to be a reckoning where each and every one of them are held accountable for their criminal negligence.