B-Man
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Nobody Has Filled The Strategic PPE Stockpile Since Bush 43
Much of the MSM coverage of the novel coronavirus pandemic has boiled down to a blame game at this point. While there were some hopeful signs of cooperation for a while between federal, state and municipal governments, particularly in New York and California, we’re now seeing some governors blaming the White House, the President calling out the states and almost everyone in cable news and the major newspapers seeking to blame the Bad Orange Man for doing a Bad Job.
Nowhere is this blame game more evident than in the debate over why we don’t have more ventilators, gloves, N95 masks and other personal protective medical equipment in the national strategic stockpile. The President recently blamed previous administrations, with a particular emphasis on Barack Obama, for depleting the strategic stockpile and not refilling it. This is a claim that’s been picked up by many (primarily conservative) outlets in the past week. So is it true? USA Today did a deep-diving fact check of this claim over the weekend and found that it is, but Obama isn’t the only president open to criticism here.
Still, if the claim to be checked is specific to whether or not the Obama administration fulfilled its duties, they concluded that he did not.
Our rating: True
We rate this claim TRUE because it is supported by our research. There is no indication that the Obama administration took significant steps to replenish the supply of N95 masks in the Strategic National Stockpile after it was depleted from repeated crises. Calls for action came from experts at the time concerned for the country’s ability to respond to future serious pandemics. Such recommendations were, for whatever reason, not heeded.
There’s a lot of good background on the history of the strategic national stockpile of PPE in that article and how the system fell into decay. It was established in 1999 and was used during a number of crisis periods including 9/11 and various disease outbreaks. The supplies have been used more than a dozen times since then, but there were no serious efforts to fully replenish the stockpile since it was used by the Bush administration following hurricanes Katrina and Rita in 2005.
The Obama administration reported used up roughly 75 percent of N95 respirators and 25 percent of face masks during the 2009 H1N1 pandemic. The supplies were tapped again during various hurricanes beginning in 2009 as well as the 2014 ebola virus outbreak and the 2016 zika virus event. At no time was the supply replenished. Further, the storage facilities for many of the masks were not maintained properly or inspected, leading to a large number of masks being destroyed by dry rot.
But as I said at the top, there’s plenty of blame to go around. George W. Bush kept tapping the supplies during his last three years in office without replenishing them. And Donald Trump had nearly two full years to address the problem after taking office, but he didn’t do it either.
More at the link:
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IT’S EASTER WEEK :
The “Jesus is just another child’s story, like Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny” claim will be repeated in the mainstream media this week.
For (some) of my fellow PPPers
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1 minute ago, Doc said:
Every so often we get a visit from JCAHO. What a worthless ***** organization that is. Every time they come they find some stupid thing to ding us on so that they can justify their worthless jobs. Now all that ***** has been thrown out the window.
God Yes.
Every two years we had to scramble around,
and the end result was the same as you described.
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THE STORM BEFORE THE CALM:
Surgeon General Warns That This Week Will Be ‘Our Pearl Harbor’ Moment as Virus Deaths Will Spike.
WHEN THIS IS OVER, WE SHOULD LEAVE THE SUSPENDED REGULATIONS SUSPENDED:
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COLLUSION: Democrat Representative Spreads Chinese Propaganda While Blaming Coronavirus Deaths on Trump.
An Illinois Democrat who accused President Donald Trump of killing Americans by lying to the public about the coronavirus also spread pro-China misinformation about the deadly disease during a townhall with constituents.
As COVID-19 spreads across the nation, Rep. Sean Casten (D., Ill.) has repeatedly attempted to blame Trump and Republicans for the death toll, accusing them of spreading fatal misinformation about the pandemic. Casten himself, however, has misinformed the public about China’s role in the pandemic. When one of his constituents asked about the early Chinese response to the outbreak at a March 21 electronic town hall, the congressman refused to talk about the regime’s coverup of the virus. Instead, he incorrectly said that China had successfully isolated the outbreak in Wuhan.
“China, to their credit, once they realize they had a problem, shut down the entire province that this was in and they seem to have largely isolated the cases in China,” Casten said. “We have missed that window in the United States.”
In reality, however, China has failed to isolate the cases in the province of Wuhan, the origin of the illness. The virus has spread to nearly every part of the country, killing thousands in distant provinces such as Guangdong and Zhejiang. And while China’s self-reported data indicate the worst has passed, reports of funeral homes overflowing with urns have led critics to believe that the regime is grossly underreporting the impact of the pandemic. One media report, for instance, estimates China’s coronavirus deaths are in the tens of thousands, as opposed to the officially reported count of 3,308.
Casten’s office did not respond to a request for comment.
Casten also asserted the United States shut down its pandemic response team in the National Security Council, a false claim repeated by many Democrats and mainstream media outlets. Trump merely consolidated several redundant teams, including those tasked with the pandemic response, into one office while retaining much of their original staff, according to Tim Morrison, who previously led the consolidated office.
Uh huh. Why are Democratic members of Congress covering up for the Chinese government’s misbehavior?
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Blame the Chinese Communist Party for the coronavirus crisis.
WELL, YES:
China Will Do Anything to Deflect Coronavirus Blame.
“Not a single reputable epidemiologist has shown any evidence that the coronavirus came from anywhere else but China, and the Italian doctor whose comments were taken out of context to boost the case has publicly refuted it. Yet this is important because by permanently, or even temporarily, injecting doubt into the origins of the coronavirus through this question, Beijing hopes to escape blame for its initial cover-up of the outbreak in December and January, which cost the world precious time to rally resources and create a potentially successful containment strategy.”
Well, China has important allies in the press.
Related: China’s Coming Upheaval: Competition, the Coronavirus, and the Weakness of Xi Jinping.
Plus: How WHO Became China’s Coronavirus Accomplice.
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PROPERLY TARGETED, BUDGET CUTS WOULD PROBABLY MAKE THE FDA MUCH MORE PRODUCTIVE:
FDA Bureaucracy Grows 79% Since 2007.
ANY cuts now will be regarded as "Gutting" the FDA..........?
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STACY MCCAIN: Coronavirus: The Wrong Numbers. Will the media ever admit the failure of doomsday projections?
What matters, from the perspective of avoiding a crisis that overwhelms our health-care system, is not how many people are infected with the coronavirus, but rather the number of patients hospitalized.
As tests for the Chinese virus have become more widely available, a majority of people who test positive — more than 80 percent in some states — are never hospitalized. Earlier projections of a system-crashing crisis have so far been proven false, but the media refuse to acknowledge the failure of the doomsday prophets and their computer-generated pandemic models.”
I’d say it’s a little early to declare victory yet, but I did just hear from a doc in New Orleans that his ICU was full, but not overloaded.
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FIRST-WORLD PROBLEMS:
‘Two Fat Professors’ are afraid of COVID-19 causing ‘fatphobia.’
Like all the other political “phobias,” there’s no such thing as “fatphobia,”
it’s just a term made up by grifters and control freaks.
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The AP begins revising history to attack Trump
by Carol Brown
The media are not only rude and confrontational at press briefings, but they’re also re-writing history about how and when information on the virus came to light. Facts don’t matter. There is only one goal: Get Trump. Toward that end, manipulating timelines has become quite popular as evidenced most recently in this AP report:
More at the linK
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Corona Meltdowns
by Victor Davis Hanson
As the coronavirus outbreak begins to reach its zenith, it remains unclear whether the measures taken to stem its tide will prove sufficient, insufficient, or an overreaction. What is certain, however, is that a number of individuals and entities have behaved shamefully and demonstrated no capacity for leadership or usefulness in this moment.
Nancy Pelosi: Gone are the mythologies that Nancy Pelosi was a pragmatic liberal voice of reason among the otherwise polarizing American Left, honed after years of paying her dues to the Democratic Party, as the mother of five dutifully ascended the party’s cursus honorum.
It does not matter whether her political and ethical decline was a result of her deep pathological hatred of Donald Trump. Who cares that her paranoia arose over the so-called “Squad” that might align with socialist Bernie Sanders to mesmerize Democrats to march over the cliff into McGovern-like oblivion? All concede that very few octogenarians have the stamina and clarity to put in the 16-hour work-days and transcontinental travel required by a Speaker of the House.
Instead, all that matters is that for a nation in extremis she is now puerile, even unhinged—and increasingly dangerous.
{snip}
The Media: Watching the media deal with the daily White House briefings reminds the country that we have never had journalism of this low character before—not in the acrimony over the Founding, not in the furor during the Civil War, not even in the age of yellow journalism at the turn of the 20th century.
Reporters do not wish to transmit knowledge to the public that might aid in confronting the virus. They do not even wish to clarify murky statements from public officials to ensure Americans know exactly what the government wants them to do.
Instead, journalists during White House briefings fixate on two agendas.
One is to goad the president into saying something sloppy, by repeatedly suggesting that in reacting to the virus, he was in error, that he is cruel and heartless, or that he is dangerous. That gotcha obsession explains why the media can call Trump a xenophobe and racist for issuing a travel ban against China—contrary to the earlier advice of WHO, the Centers for Disease Control, the media, and the entire Democratic Party hierarchy—then silently support it. It explains why they then use doctored Chinese data and propaganda from the Chinese Communist Party to convince Americans that China—a nation that lied about the origins, spread, and nature of the virus—is admirably doing a better job in containing the virus than is their own country. Even the media cannot keep straight their own anti-Trump gymnastics.
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Joe Biden: The virus shutdown was first seen as providing a necessary respite for the 77-year-old former vice president to go home, rest up, and recuperate after an exhausting summer, fall, and winter of campaigning—an ordeal that supposedly had explained Biden’s increasing flubs and gaffes.
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He’s done his job for decades, but he’s never faced a crisis like this, and at 79 he’s not super mentally flexible.
Double-blind experiments are the norm, but this isn’t a normal time.
Happily, he’s not managing to roadblock this, thanks largely I believe to Peter Navarro’s task force.
That poll, by the way, was of 6,227 physicians surveyed in 30 countries.
In Spain, 72 percent of physicians said they had prescribed it.
The problem, though, is that President Trump called it a possible game-changer in a tweet and said during Saturday’s coronavirus briefing that he thinks COVID-19 patients should try it, though it’s up to them and their doctors.
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Incompetence or Sabotage ?
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Like the Chinese government, CNN is trying to rewrite history to obscure its own culpability.
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4 pages of their nonsense. (daz28, Tiberius, Q-baby!, Gary Busey )
It does slow down their clogging up other threads I guess........
(I have a bet on which buffoon will respond first )
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What have the Democrats done in the past Four years
in Politics, Polls, and Pundits
Posted