According to a new report from The Daily Beast, the Trump White House is once again trying to salvage Donald Trump’s chances for a second term at the expense of the American public — this time, specifically our teachers, school workers, and children.
Trump and his people have long been insisting that children are “virtually immune” to the potentially deadly coronavirus, therefore it’s no big deal for them to head back into crowded, enclosed schools this fall (despite the fact that this is the exact environment in which the virus best breeds). And, evidently, completely ignoring the fact that schools are heavily employed with textbook high-risk individuals.
“This thing’s going away. It will go away like things go away,” Trump has said of the fatal pandemic that’s killed hundreds of thousands of people in the United States alone, as he continues to push for mass reopenings.
However, senior government officials who are working on the country’s responses to the deadly pandemic aren’t nearly as confident in the safety of Trump’s decisions.
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Officials are worried that state and local officials, specifically those in southern areas of the country that have been hit the hardest by the virus, are not taking the numerous health risks associated with reopening schools nearly as seriously as they should be.
The report goes on to claim that these senior officials have repeatedly tried to raise their concerns regarding school reopenings to the Trump White House, asking that the administration pump up their risk warning, however, they’ve been met with little more than disinterest and pushback from the Trump White House — who seem to be more concerned with “dedicating additional air time to underscoring the president’s leadership on the government’s virus response.”
One senior official said, “If you have Trump going out there and saying everything is fine there’s a risk that that’s what people are going to think going back. There’s a real possibility that counties won’t implement all the measures outlined in the CDC guidelines and will just say, ‘Look, we’re doing the best we can and that’s it.’ There’s no one to enforce that stuff.”
Officials found their worst fears to be true when reports came out of nine positive cases at a Georgia school, where just days before photos depicted hallways packed with maskless students.
“This is exactly what I was afraid of,” one senior official said of the positive cases at the GA school. “This is inevitably going to happen when we send kids back to school. But the real question is whether school districts are prepared for this and whether they will take it seriously.”
But even with all that said, officials say they just don’t see the Trump White House giving in and raising alarm bells surrounding the risks involved in reopening schools.
“So much emphasis has been put on supporting this idea of getting kids back to school that they aren’t going to backpedal down,” the official told The Beast.
In case you hadn’t somehow caught on by now, Donald Trump is clearly ready and willing to sacrifice every man, woman, and child to this virus if it means saving himself.
You can read the full report here.
Featured image via Flickr/Michael Vadon, under Creative Commons license 2.0
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