During the COVID pandemic, the Pubs seemed to have the idea that lockdowns and mask mandates were some kind of threat to civil liberties. It was incredibly stupid and dangerous thinking, and Trump . . . well, let's just say he did not discourage it. But the stupidity was international.
Trump was counting on a low jobless rate to propel him to re-election. Faced with a pandemic that would require job-killing measures to contain it, he reacted like a toddler and denied the problem, or pushed snake-oil remedies. And he already had shut down the pandemic-response team Obama had created -- not because it was expensive, but only because Obama created it.
As a result, we lost hundreds of thousands of Americans whom a better administration easily could have saved.
This topical, because now, Jay Bhattacharya is to head the National Institutes of Health:
Trump was counting on a low jobless rate to propel him to re-election. Faced with a pandemic that would require job-killing measures to contain it, he reacted like a toddler and denied the problem, or pushed snake-oil remedies. And he already had shut down the pandemic-response team Obama had created -- not because it was expensive, but only because Obama created it.
As a result, we lost hundreds of thousands of Americans whom a better administration easily could have saved.
This topical, because now, Jay Bhattacharya is to head the National Institutes of Health:
An extremely dangerous crank.Bhattacharya opposed the lockdowns and mask mandates imposed in 2020 as a response to the COVID-19 pandemic.[5][6] With Martin Kulldorff and Sunetra Gupta, he was a co-author in 2020 of the Great Barrington Declaration, which advocated lifting COVID-19 restrictions on lower-risk groups to develop herd immunity through widespread infection, while promoting the fringe notion that vulnerable people could be simultaneously protected from the virus.[7][8][9] The declaration was criticized as being unethical and infeasible by Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the director-general of the World Health Organization.[10]