That’s actually real and not a parody? It’s so hard to tell anymore.
He does have a bit of a point.
If he hadn’t fucked up the response so badly, its entirely possible that COVID would have been contained, and we wouldn’t need a vaccine.
I’m happy to slag on Trump as much as the next guy, but this claim is as unlikely as Trump being the reason it didn’t take 5 years to get a vaccine.
Hard to say how a different universe would have worked out, but he did dismantle a decent amount of the international infrastructure that we had in place to detect and contain pandemics.
The rest of the world looked to us a as a leader in the control of infectious diseases, and blame China all you want, but we certainly dropped the ball here too.
And I don’t claim that it would have been contained, I say that it is entirely possible that it would have been contained. I also have no doubt that it would have been far less devastating with more competent leadership.
Absolutely real.
We’re living Poe’s Law every single day now
Completely agree, I just don’t think the American President has enough juice to, by his own excellent choices, shut down a worldwide pandemic to the point where we don’t even need a vaccine.
Dunno. The Obama Administration handled the Ebola outbreak of 2014 much better, without needing to vaccinate everyone.
Ebola is vastly less transmissible than Covid, so that’s not an entirely fair comparison.
Still, the US had more COVID infections and deaths per capita than many other countries, so with a competent president, that might not have been the case.
It’s hard to disprove a negative.
Would the Ebola outbreak been worse with inept handling? Could we have had a single fatality from it?
Impossible to say.
So, ok, not an “entirely” fair comparison, but still apt.
If you want a better comparison, there’s always the 2009 swine flu pandemic. That response was hampered by the fact Congress hadn’t approved all of Obama’s cabinet picks yet, and we still had a pretty good response.
Oh hell yes, absolutely. Also more competent governors would have been useful. Honestly the mere act of making it a partisan issue was incredibly damaging.
Although, to be honest, I wonder how accurate the per capita deaths are for many countries. India, Pakistan, Nigeria and Venezuela are lower on the list than the US. So were they just lucky not to have it spread in their countries? Or was it a lack of testing, either before or after death? I mean, if a person living in a Mumbai slum dies, is a formal post mortem done?
The analysis for many countries will need to be done ex post facto, comparing the death rate before and during the pandemic. Looking for “excess deaths”.
Well, the obvious thing to do is to look at how the US fared in each of those relative to their global peers. Yeah, yeah, I know, American exceptionalism. Get over it.
Ebola epidemic: There were a grand total of 7 cases in G20 nations, 4 of which were in the US. Of those 7, 5 were medical workers who contracted the disease in west Africa, and two (both in the US) were nurses providing care for the first category. There was never any community spread of the disease outside of west Africa, unless you count Nigeria and Mali as outside west Africa (but they only had 28 cases between them). The entire epidemic was almost exclusively in Liberia, Sierra Leone, and Guinea.
2009 H1N1 pandemic: All numbers are estimates, because health agencies stopped testing to determine whether a given flu was H1N1 or some other variant after a while, but CDC estimates for the US were 60M cases (20% pop) and 12,500 deaths (4.1/100k). Global estimates are 10-20% infection rate and 284k deaths (4.2/100k). I don’t promise I did the math right. Seems like the US response was about average, which isn’t terribly surprising as the H1N1 pandemic was in the end pretty much a pretty bad regular flu season, which every nation on earth deals with on a regular basis.
Conclusion: the US performed like a standard industrialized western nation in the 2 prior epidemics, but it’s important to note that Ebola is a very different disease that didn’t really spread outside of west Africa, and the 2009 flu pandemic didn’t end up being all that different from a regular flu season. To the extent that the US has done worse with regards to Covid relative to western Europe, Canada, Japan, etc, it seems plausible to blame much if not all of that on the current American political climate. But pointing at the lack of Ebola deaths doesn’t tell us anything, because there weren’t any Ebola deaths in Europe etc either.
The US response is not limited to what it did in the US alone. It sent people and resources out to combat Ebola where it was. Our international leadership has a lot to do with why it didn’t spread.
I don’t know that we could have contained COVID, likely we could not have. But we didn’t even try.
When given a choice between “do something constructive” and “blame others”, a Republican will go for the blame game every time.
We all know assholes like this; they take no responsibility, and all they do is shift blame. The question for me is: Do these assholes just naturally gravitate to the Republican party, or does the party take normal people and turn them into assholes like this?
Yes.
…
One can speculate endlessly about the alternate universe where Republicans are setting their hair on fire about Hillary being re-elected despite the incompetence she demonstrated by allowing almost fifty thousand COVID deaths on her watch. 
Moving from speculation to hard evidence, we now have before us an example of hard evidence – specifically “evidence of harm” relevant to a certain set of lawsuits:
The three person Board of Stark County Commissioners in Ohio rejected the purchase of more than 1,400 new Dominion voting machines. The county’s Board of Elections had recommended the purchase, but the three members voted to withhold the money for the purchase following pressure from supporters of former President Trump, who falsely accused the machines of manipulating vote tallies in President Biden’s favor…
Not, by itself, evidence of the full alleged $1,300,000,000 worth of harm, but definite irrefutable evidence that real economic harm has been done by the current and future defendants, whose lawyers may be feeling the need for a four-martini lunch today… 
Heheheheheh.
This Reddit commenter makes a VERY good case for why the COVID nightmare is totally Trumps fault, and along the way, why competent leadership would have made a vast difference.