President Trump suspended payments to the World Health Organization — a move Bill Gates called “as dangerous as it sounds” — in a frantic attempt to deflect blame from his own delinquency in acting to protect Americans against the pandemic and his ongoing failure to ramp up testing, which would allow economic reengagement.
It is hard to quantify the damage, both human and material, that Trump’s utter incompetence has caused. We are in the midst of the initial wave of the pandemic, and others might well follow (as happened in the 1918 Spanish flu). There are some handy charts showing the implications of a two-month delay in responding to the pandemic…
It is human nature to ask: What if we had acted earlier? The country deserves to know at least in rough terms the number of deaths that could have been avoided had Trump responded quickly to his advisers’ warnings dating back to November or even to the end of January, when the WHO sounded its alarm.
Now we have one estimate to help quantify the unnecessary deaths. Two epidemiologists writing in the New York Times base their calculations on the widely used University of Washington data. The answer is stunning…
Read the full essay by Jennifer Rubin in The Washington Post here: https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/04/15/trumps-inaction-has-staggering-toll/
