As the United States braces for the highest point on the epidemiological curve in the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, and the ensuing human and economic costs, many of us are attempting to figure out how the country at the forefront of the first world reached this point. Is China to blame as the point of origin? Are left-wing journalists at fault for unfairly criticizing the government’s response? Or does the Trump administration bear the responsibility?
On the one hand, it is pointless to assign blame for this disaster, as the most useful application of our energy is to find the best path forward, but there is one point at which these two desires intersect and that point is situated squarely on Donald Trump’s shoulders. It will be difficult to properly mobilize the resources of the United States without confronting the blunders the president has made over the past few months and is likely to make in the future.
Trump’s response to the ongoing pandemic exemplifies everything that makes him singularly unqualified for his job. His reflexive gainsaying of anything he hears repeated by people in positions of academic and intellectual authority or by left-leaning news organizations is driven by incredible shallowness, at a moment which requires deep empathy and insight and the will to make hard decisions. You need look no further than that time the President stared directly at the sun during a solar eclipse for a portrait of the man’s psychology. Simply because CNN had told him not to, he felt obligated to endanger his own sight. This might be quite amusing if he were not in a position of authority over the planet’s largest economy and its 350 million citizens.
Clearly some form of intellectual myopia is at play here. Over the past several months, Trump has willfully ignored the warnings of medical experts and the scientific community at large. He dragged his feet, insisting that the virus could be contained after it had clearly broken containment and, against the advice of virtually everyone who was tasked with informing him, took no meaningful action to halt the spread of COVID-19. Just this week, he implied that extensive social distancing might end by Easter Sunday—in flagrant disregard of empirical reality, a concept with which Trump has had an intense and baffling feud for the duration of his political career. As our country’s top elected official busied himself in pointless and time-consuming arguments over the proper name for this virus, his citizens rapidly began sickening and dying.
It’s probably no accident that Trump finally came to his senses and declared a national emergency on 13 March, after the DOW fell almost 4,000 points in two days. Short-term economic interests are the only things that seem to matter to him outside of his personal fame—and those interests probably only matter to him because so much of his personal reputation is wrapped up in his public image as a good businessman. Yet, ironically, Trump’s downplaying of the pandemic will almost certainly lead to serious long-term economic consequences, rendering any concern he may have for the day-to-day vicissitudes of the market moot. Last time I wrote for this publication, I focused on Trump’s fatuous nihilism and declared it his most dangerous quality, but perhaps I didn’t give the man enough credit. He’s demonstrated that he’s more than capable of myopic and reckless disregard for human life. Just recently, his medical advice resulted in the death of an Arizona man and the hospitalization of his wife, after they took an anti-malarial drug, recommended by Trump to treat COVID-19. As a businessman, Trump’s casual lies merely had the potential to bring about economic ruin to a few at a time. Now, they are instruments of life and death and bear on the entire national economy. His inability to speak coherently and forthrightly has never been more dangerous.
With over 400,000 confirmed cases in the United States, this situation has the potential to rapidly spiral out of control. Of course, we don’t even know for sure how many people are infected because of the disastrous failure to roll out nationwide testing, the weeks and months wasted by Trump’s refusal to listen to the CDC and WHO and his refusal of aid from the latter and from Germany.
As a private citizen, the costs of Mr Trump’s public lies were measured in dollars; as president, those costs will be measured in American blood.
37 comments
In this conversation, there is a sense of the death of the very notion of a common humanity – a humanity, that is, able to communicate, to speak and to listen…..
It’s very disturbing to observe the tenor of the conversation on this comments feed. I don’t understand why there needs to be such intense hatred and absolute lack of civility expressed on both sides of the line. I wonder if it’s got something to do with the notion that everything nowadays has to be political? You had that in the 15th century in Europe, when people went to war over religion, and now it seems people are willing to go to war over a virus. Why do people put so much store in their political convictions? One thing that I notice is those participating in this comments feed seem to care less about truth and more about “being right”. Also reminds me of the bickering of young children in a family; there always has to be one person who “wants to have the last word”. It’s a sad day when public conversation has descended to the level of trading insults… I wish you would all grow up a bit a show a bit of maturity. Anyway, surely there is more to life than being Republican or Democrat? It rather reminds me of what happened in Croatia in the 1990’s. Instead of ‘ethnic cleansing’, now we have ‘ideological cleansing’, in the form of people who find it impossible to speak to each other as human beings. Also not unlike the situation in Germany in the early 1930’s. At that time, Joseph Roth wrote about how a regime had come to power in which people “barked at each other like dogs”. I think all of you need to learn some manners.
For some reason the website isn’t allowing me to make a direct reply, so please consider this a reply to user johntshea. The man in question took Chloroquine which is indeed an anti-malarial drug. Also, *I* didn’t establish the standards on medical and scientific evidence. Clinical trials are the established protocol for this, and we haven’t gone through them with regards to using these drugs to treat COVID-19. Until we do, it’s dangerous to promote them as a proper treatment for the disease because there is no reason to think that they will make a patient’s condition better as opposed to worse.
All you are doing now. Mr. Derin is defending the indefensible and digging yourself deeper. Again, for the third and last time, the couple took a fish-tank cleaner whose ingredients included Hydroxychloroquine, which by the way is different from Chloroquine, which President Trump never mentioned. Notwithstanding your pontifications about clinical trials there is EVERY reason to think Hydroxychloroquine has and will continue to make patients’ conditions better. The side effects of both Chloroquine and Hydroxychloroquine are well known and those of the latter are much milder, being chiefly a slight risk of retinal damage after a long time on a high dose.
“there is EVERY reason to think Hydroxychloroquine has and will continue to make patients’ conditions better” too bad that none is given by you.
Katherine Seley-Radtke, Professor of Chemistry and Biochemistry and President-Elect of the International Society for Antiviral Research, University of Maryland, Baltimore County:
“There are already other clinical studies that showed it is not effective against COVID-19 as well as several other viruses. And, more importantly, it can have dangerous side effects, as well as giving people false hope. The latter has led to widespread shortages of hydroxychloroquine for patients who need it to treat malaria, lupus and rheumatoid arthritis, the indications for which it was originally approved.”
https://theconversation.com/a-small-trial-finds-that-hydroxychloroquine-is-not-effective-for-treating-coronavirus-135484
Dr Anthony Fauci, when asked whether hydroxychloroquine could be used to prevent COVID-19, said no. He elaborated with ““The information that you’re referring to specifically is anecdotal… It was not done in a controlled clinical trial, so you really can’t make any definitive statement about it.””
https://abcnews.go.com/Health/wireStory/trump-fauci-president-doctor-spar-unproven-drug-69718358
Dr James Phillips, professor of emergency medicine at George Washington University hospital: “We don’t know enough to make medical recommendations… It’s a dangerous message for someone without a medical license to get up there and tell people to try it. You need to listen to physicians, people who understand science, before you go willy-nilly into the medicine cabinet.”
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/apr/05/coronavirus-fauci-trump-anti-malaria-drug
These are just the results of a 5-minutes Google search. Are you sure it’s Derin who is “defending the indefensible”?
Hello Anonymous 2:17am,
I generally keep engagements with nameless randos to a minimum but I’ll make an exception. Yes, Mr. Derin is defending the indefensible. Though at least under his own name. And now you are doing the same, whoever you are.
“The latter has led to widespread shortages of hydroxychloroquine for patients who need it to treat malaria, lupus and rheumatoid arthritis, the indications for which it was originally approved.”
I am one of those patients, but the obvious answer to any such shortage is not rationing but increased production of this cheap public domain drug throughout the world, which is already happening.
Dr.Anthony Fauci has advised every US president since Ronald Reagan, who first appointed him nearly forty years ago. This whole controversy is to some extent a rerun of Dr. Fauci’s notorious restrictions on HIV treatments then, giving rise to the situation dramatized in the movie “THE DALLAS BUYER’S CLUB” and causing gay activists and others to denounce Dr. Fauci as a latter-day Dr. Mengele. Of course the party-political situation is nearly reversed today, with Leftists defending Dr. Fauci and Hydroxychloroquine suddenly becoming a Right-wing conservative Republican drug!
Once again, doctors differ and patients die, but governments all over the world agree on Hydroxychloroquine as a significant part of treatments.
I suggest you spend a little longer than five minutes on Google.
I don’t need more than 5 minutes, because I know what to look for.
You shift from “there is EVERY reason to think Hydroxychloroquine has and will continue to make patients’ conditions better” to “doctors differ”. But see, there’s one topic where doctors (and anyone else working in fields related to medical research) agree: before treatments are considered effective, they need to go through rigorous Randomized Clinical Trials (RCTs). Otherwise, patients might get ineffective treatments, which a) cost money that could be spent elsewhere, and b) have side effects (every drug has side effects). So there’s a very real risk of doing more harm than good. Doctors agree that Hydroxychloroquine had not gone through rigorous RCTs, for the simple reason that it hasn’t.
Also, I never heard before that “governments all over the world agree on Hydroxychloroquine as a significant part of treatments”, and it reads like fake news to me. Which governments? And why should we even care what politicians think, given that medical researchers agree that the evidence is minimal and contradictory? I cited 2 medical researchers, and the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, whereas you just made unsubstantiated claims. All you need to do is to cite a published meta-analysis of RCTs, or even just a few good RCTs, and I will admit that Hydroxychloroquine works. What will it take for you to admit that it’s too early to tout Hydroxychloroquine? One can hope that this would:
From ‘Hydroxychloroquine in the management of critically ill patients with COVID-19: the need for an evidence base’, published 5 days ago in The Lancet Respiratory Medicine (a top medical journal):
“clinical data on hydroxychloroquine are far from convincing. The first study reported by Philippe Gautret and colleagues,8 which indicated that hydroxychloroquine might be effective, had several limitations: a small cohort of patients, with only 20 participants who received hydroxychloroquine (six of whom received azithromycin) and 16 controls included in the final analysis; a very short observation period (6 days); absence of randomisation, raising concerns about selection bias and imbalance of baseline characteristics in the intervention and control groups; and no report of effects on clinical evolution (6 [17%] patients were asymptomatic and only 8 [22%] had pneumonia). The second French study, although larger, had no control arm.9 Moreover, the inclusion and exclusion criteria were poorly described, most patients (69 of 75 [92%]) had a low National Early Warning Score, and the overall clinical outcome was similar to that reported for untreated patients with COVID-19.11 The combination of hydroxychloroquine and azithromycin was associated with reduced viral load (83% and 93% tested negative on days 7 and 8, respectively), but no other clinically relevant outcomes were reported. In a trial in 30 patients with COVID-19, Jun Chen and colleagues found no significant difference in nasopharyngeal viral carriage on day 7 when hydroxychloroquine was compared with local standard of care; however, concomitant antivirals were given, which might have served as confounders when interpreting the results of this study.12 In a second Chinese trial in 62 patients, Zhaowei Chen and colleagues showed that hydroxychloroquine treatment was associated with a shorter time to clinical recovery (temperature and cough) than placebo;13 the participants had mild disease (SaO2/SpO2 >93% or PaO2/FiO2 >300) and it is not possible to extrapolate these results to critically ill patients. A study of 11 patients with COVID-19 reported persistence of SARS-CoV-2 in the nasopharyngeal swab in 8 of 10 patients receiving hydroxychloroquine.14…
whether viral load is important in critically ill COVID-19 patients or whether progressive lung involvement is related to an overwhelming inflammatory response, unrelated to the virus, remains to be clarified…
the search for effective new drugs requires appropriate and valid trials—ie, prospective, randomised, placebo-controlled clinical studies. Although many drugs have in-vitro activity against the virus, the proposal that such drugs might provide more benefit than harm is inappropriate in the face of no clinical evidence supporting efficacy and safety in patients with COVID-19…
Whether antimalarial drugs could be effective in changing the disease course in patients with severe COVID-19—in particular, in cases requiring ICU admission—remains unknown.”
Hello again Anonymous 2:46 pm,
Thanks for reminding just WHY I minimize interactions with nameless randos! Clearly you did indeed “know what to look for” and found that and nothing else. I never “touted” any drug and I don’t like Hydroxychloroquine half as much as you hate it. And answering your questions would be a waste of my time and obviously never convince you of anything, so think what you will.
Are you kidding me? Asking for good evidence is hate? Searching for RCTs is biased? Asking for sources is tiresome? This is the reasoning of a 10-years old spreader of fake news.
Hello Anonymous 4:19 pm,
Now you’re projecting. Goodbye!
You keep coming-up with empty rhetoric, which is just embarrassing at this point. I’ve been citing top medical researchers, while you’ve been making baseless and dishonest claims. The fact that you pretend that there’s any sort of equivalence is, again, embarrassing.
I sincerely hope that this isn’t how you reason your way through life.
Hello again, Anonymous 1:28 am, whoever you are,
I sincerely hope you feel better now. Goodbye again!
Very good article. Trump supporters have succeeded in creating a political culture that shields Trump from any and all fact-based criticism. You can also see it in the knee-jerk reactions of the commentariat. I have no idea how they got away with that, but it’s antisocial as fuck and it’s creepy that it works.
I’m not American (thank God), but you can even see this garbage dynamic in people outside of the US. Apparently enough propaganda was internationalized that you actually have non-Americans (usually on the far-right fringes) who will defend Trump no matter what he does. These are people who don’t have good arguments, mind you. They have just bought into the idea that people in positions of power ought not to be criticized. Trump supporters have leveraged a strategy of repeated lying, loud anger, constant self-victimization and inversal of responsibility (“Don’t make me do that”), while denying any responsibility on their end (Trump literally says things like “I don’t stand for anything” and “I don’t take responsibility for anything”). It should be clear there is no meaningful cooperation with such people, in fact this makes peaceful coexistence all but impossible. I mean, how could you ever hold them accountable for any harm they force on others? They would deflect responsibility, blame their own critics for “making us do that”, and frame any deserved action against them as an unfair attack. The consequence is a thoroughly dysfunctional political culture with no correction mechanisms left – other than physically destroying the people who insist on doing this, ie. civil war. Good luck with your economy in that case. I think it’s telling that the people here in Germany who love Trump the most are literal, unironic neo-Nazis. Let that sink in for a moment.
In any case, I wish luck to the few remaining good and sane people in the USA. You deserve better and I don’t blame you if you are bitter, although I personally have cut all business and personal ties with US-Americans and I certainly don’t cry if people die from drinking toxic cleaner because they take life-or-death information directly from Trump’s idiot mouth. At least that’s not a negative externality.
«I wish luck to the few remaining good and sane people in the USA» – It looks like TDS is an untreatable neurotrauma. My condolences.
Yes, Trump is indeed deranged, as are his followers. That is plain to see for everyone. And it is indeed untreatable, as you have declared yourselves immune to both criticism and reason. If the facts don’t support that, you will simply lie. I don’t see any way to change that now. You have given up on basic concepts of reason and accountability, and we have given up on you.
“On the one hand, it is pointless to assign blame for this disaster, as the most useful application of our energy is to find the best path forward,” followed by five paragraphs of assigning all of the blame to Trump. Take the plank out of your own eye.
It might have been of interest to you to read to the end of that paragraph to find the actual claim I was making there: “…but there is one point at which these two desires intersect and that point is situated squarely on Donald Trump’s shoulders. It will be difficult to properly mobilize the resources of the United States without confronting the blunders the president has made over the past few months and is likely to make in the future.”
When I read something as silly as this article I come away defending Trump. Please don’t make me do that.
Really, what else could one expect from a freshman at UC Davis?
Denial of responsibility for your own actions. Complete lack of fact-based arguments.
“Denial of responsibility for your own actions. Complete lack of fact-based arguments.”
You should study logic. The comment was obviously facetious, nothing I read really *makes* be support Trump, tho it might awaken in me the instinct to side with someone who has been unfairly attacked. And I didn’t make an argument, I offered a personal reaction which is nothing like an argument.
Reply to EK: Ad hominem, complete lack of fact-based arguments.
Except he was not unfairly attacked and you added no arguments that he was.
“Except he was not unfairly attacked and you added no arguments that he was.”
You add no argument of any kind, you simply state your opinion. I added no arguments either, I too just stated my opinion, so we’re even. I think you might be just trolling. If you are interested in logic you’ve got much to learn.
“You add no argument of any kind, you simply state your opinion.”
False. I made an observation. Here’s an opinion: Your behavior is antisocial and despicable. You talk a lot about logic, without using it. There is nothing else to say. I want nothing to do with the likes of you.
“I want nothing to do with the likes of you.”
Good, then please refrain from commenting on anything I say and we’ll both be happier. If you’d use a name, then I’d return the favor, but ‘Anon’ could be anybody.
Yeah, it’s not that simple unfortunately. Your willful antisociality has negative externalities for the rest of the world. Much like a virus that spreads in China and then the German economy and public life are over, we cannot ignore the reality that is Trump.
While I wished I lived in a world where all Chinese people suddenly dropped dead in 2018, they didn’t and this affects my life negatively. Similarly, while I wished I lived in a world where all Trumpists suddenly dropped dead, you won’t and this will continue to affect my life negatively. Stupidity isn’t free. If you were a moron who drinks toxic aquarium cleaner and then dies, I would have no problem with that. If you’re an idiot who creates a global propaganda effort that people in extreme power shouldn’t be held accountable for their bad choices, that harms me directly. Ignoring you doesn’t make that harm go away.
It seems that the concentration of idiots creating posts on this site has reached a critical stage.
Although, if this was the goal of the creators of the site, I congratulate them! They got their way!
Insults, complete lack of fact-based arguments.
This was not a good article. Trite straight through.
Complete lack of fact-based arguments.
“Just recently, his medical advice resulted in the death of an Arizona man and the hospitalization of his wife, after they took an anti-malarial drug, recommended by Trump to treat COVID-19.”
President Trump referred to DOCTORS using Hydroxychloroquine and other drugs to save lies. The Arizona couple took a fish-tank cleaning compound which contained a form of hydroxychloroquine and other chemicals obviously not intended for human consumption. If Mr. Derin gets the Coronavirus, I expect he will refuse hydroxychloroquine and die to prove his point.
On March 21 Trump tweeted: “HYDROXYCHLOROQUINE & AZITHROMYCIN, taken together, have a real chance to be one of the biggest game changers in the history of medicine. The FDA has moved mountains – Thank You! Hopefully they will BOTH (H works better with A, International Journal of Antimicrobial Agents)….. [sic]”. “….[sic] be put in use IMMEDIATELY. PEOPLE ARE DYING, MOVE FAST, and GOD BLESS EVERYONE! @US_FDA @SteveFDA @CDCgov @DHSgov”.
As of that date there were no actionable data to support the usage of those or related drugs as a treatment for COVID-19. It is dangerous for the President to make claims like this without proper scientific support, regardless of whom he’s addressing.
Thanks for your response.Mr. Derin, but I must continue to disagree.
It’s vital that political leaders and we ordinary people speak out and never simply leave such things entirely to the experts, who are our servants, not our masters. You yourself judge what is or isn’t “actionable data” and “proper scientific support” and thereby implicitly condemn all the doctors and hospitals and whole countries that have prioritized Hydoxychloroquine use to save people’s lives, though you have no medical qualifications that I know of.
“Just recently, his medical advice resulted in the death of an Arizona man and the hospitalization of his wife, after they took an anti-malarial drug, recommended by Trump to treat COVID-19.”
Every part of that sentence is wrong. The couple did NOT take an anti-malarial drug and the President’s comment did not “result” in their idiotic decision to consume a fish tank cleaner.
President Trump was far from alone in noting the potential of Hydroxychloroquine, a drug in use against malaria and rheumatoid arthritis etc. since 1955, decades out of patent and therefore cheap and made by various companies all over the world, several of whom have donated tens of millions of doses free to hospitals in the US and elsewhere.
“Every part of that sentence is wrong.”
Thanks for remaining moderate even when confronted with complete slander. Once again I am forced to defend Trump even tho I abhor him.
Yup. That said, I do blame the media, left as well as right, for amplifying his message. There’s no reason to have him on TV at all these days. Or any politician. If the person talking about Covid isn’t a scientist, doctor or at least a professor of statistics, there’s really no reason to listen to them at all. The incentives for politicians as well as cable news talking heads is not the spread of factual information. Politicians, news people and blue check twitter “influencers” are all incentivized by the same thing. Popularity. Doctors and scientists (legitimate ones) are incentivized by facts.
We’ve gotta’ change the incentives before the next pandemic.
What needs to be kept in mind is that science can tell you how to do something, but not what to do. Science doesn’t tell you how to live, or how to be a decent human being. That is a moral, political and ethical problem. That is why it’s important for people to be able to come together and discuss their differences in a reasonable and civil manner, rather than shooting insults at each other. Your political adversary is also a human being, and if you don’t treat them accordingly (regardless of how they treat you), then you won’t be left with much humanity. Without a measure of politeness and good manners, public life and politics is in danger of becoming a zero-sum game, a fight to the death, and then nobody stands to gain anything. What I see in the above conversation is like cave-people running around bashing each other on the head with rocks. With 3000 years of civilization, surely we should be able to do better than that?