Dear Participant,
I have read through your posts on this thread several times. If you can please link or post what Charlie wrote to initiate this topic.
It seems like we agree on most points. Trump is not a doctor. And he is not the destination for medical advice. People should have followed their doctor’s advice, and not the media’s opinions. [There is a problem here that people do not listen to the doctors anyway. As was shown by the measles outbreak.]
I am not sure how much we agree on assessing the pandemic in general. There are two issues. 1) A global health crises. A lot of patients. Overwhelmed hospitals. Lack of protective gear. People to sick to work. Cities being shutdown. Lack of effective medications. Efforts to find a vaccine. Typical stuff that we see every year or so. [On a much smaller scale.]
2) The other major issue is that this was a little known virus, and still is an unknown disease. Odd symptoms. Unclear diagnoses. Lack of known treatments. Nobody could say what the long term side effects are. On this part the Trump Administration did their part. They put forth a lot of funding for research. They eliminated less needed steps to hurry along potential vaccines. They did not interfere with the scientists.
However just dealing with the first part, requires a lot of cooperation. Smaller state governments, are not capable of dealing with all these issues at once. Some states banded together to be more efficient. Our obese Federal Government exists precisely for these major events that the states cannot handle. I think we agree that the states did most of the work. And Trump picked up some of the tab.
The federal response was full of contradictions. The CDC bungled testing. The problems seemed to indicate a lack of leadership. Instinctively, people point to the president. However, the president has more to worry about than just public health. Obama was not the front man on Ebola or H1n1. At some point, it seemed like Pence was supposed to be the front man. I do not know what happened there.