A shocking new analysis of the coronavirus timeline in the United States appears to show that President Donald Trump and his administration engaged in a cover-up in the last week of February to hide his reckless response to the pandemic from the American public.
Over 56,000 Americans have died from the coronavirus in just six weeks, nearly eclipsing the number of American soldiers killed during the entirety of the Vietnam War.
This tragedy could have been prevented, a fact we know because New Zealand acted right away to prevent the spread of the virus and it has now been eradicated from the country.
Perhaps our country would not have had the same kind of success. After all, the United States is much bigger and is a hub of international travel. But thousands of lives could have been saved and the infection rate could have been lower, had Trump taken the virus seriously when his own people warned him about it.
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New York University School of Law professor Ryan Goodman and NYU School of Law student Danielle Schulkin worked together on a project to piece together a timeline of the pandemic in the United States and the response to it. What they found is damning to Trump.
“Over the last five days of February, President Trump and senior officials did something more sinister: They engaged in a cover-up,” they wrote in the New York Times.
“Senior officials knew the coronavirus was an extreme threat to Americans,” the pair continued. “Thanks to information streaming in from U.S. intelligence agencies for months, officials reportedly believed that a ‘cataclysmic’ disease could infect 100 million Americans and discussed lockdown plans. The warnings were given to Mr. Trump in his daily brief by the intelligence community; in calls from Alex Azar, the secretary of health; and in memos from his economic adviser Peter Navarro.”
Indeed, the Navarro memo issued in January is clearly damning. And we know that because Trump claims he never saw it.
Despite the warnings, Trump moved ahead with downplaying the virus and the threat it posed to Americans.
“That Wednesday, the president used the day’s news conference by the coronavirus task force, with Dr. Fauci alongside him, to lie to the public,” the duo wrote. “‘You have 15 people, and the 15 within a couple of days is going to be down to close to zero. That’s a pretty good job we’ve done,’ he told the American public. He and Mr. Azar would continue to make such assurances over the next two days — Mr. Azar in remarks before lawmakers and the president in statements from the White House and bellowed at political rallies.”
“In effect, for five days, the president along with some of his closest senior officials disseminated an egregiously false message to Americans,” they concluded. “The messaging would continue well beyond those days until the stark images of refrigerated morgue trucks and spiked lines on colored graphs showed the escalating numbers of cases and dead.”
In fact, Trump is still trying to cover up his recklessness, even repeatedly insisting that he’s done a “great job” as tens of thousands of Americans are dead with thousands more likely to come in the days and weeks ahead. This did not need to happen. A real leader would have taken action sooner and they would not have sought to cover it up. Trump failed the American people and there should be consequences for it.
Featured image via screen capture
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