It’s gonna mess up his orange ‘make-up’ too. They should just get a can of Rust-oleum and be done with it.
Let’s take this angle. Let’s say Hillary WAS in charge. I think we’d have been better off in nearly every way (which is why I voted for her), but, specifically, why would she have started procedures in January? Would she have distrusted the WHO and Chinese statements? Because the WHO was saying through most of January that there was no evidence of human to human transmission, that the Chinese had this contained, and that everything was fine. Would Hillary have not sent US supplies and aid to China, instead kept it for our own use? Would she have followed the WHO guidelines on mask use (i.e., they were not needed by the general population, only for first responders)? How about the WHO guidelines on travel (i.e. there was no reason to restrict travel coming out of China)? I’d have to say no…she wouldn’t. She would have stuck with the WHO even longer than Trump did, and believed what the CCP was saying.
Now, if you want to say that by mid-February she would have done substantially more, then I’d buy that, though, again, what could she have really done that Trump didn’t do, aside from the chaos he sows in everything he does, his constant grandstanding and stupid tweets and the like? At some point the CDC and her own advisors would have been fully awake to the issue, and I think she would have been more responsive, but we still would have been behind the curve. She couldn’t magically change the situation with PPE, for instance…most is made in China, and if not the materials or key components are manufactured or processed in China. And the CCP had stopped shipping out and was hording those supplies starting in January. Even assuming Hillary didn’t send a lot of our own supplies early on to China to help (as did many other countries), should couldn’t do a damned thing about the bottle neck.
That brings in the CDC. What would she have done wrt the early effort to create our own test kits? Would she have over ruled the CDC and had them use foreign test kits (mainly from Europe at that time)? Maybe. In hindsight that would have been best, but that’s with 20/20 hindsight, not based on what her own experts and organization was advising. Myself, I think that cluster fuck was bound to happen regardless, but I’m willing to listen to an alternative there.
Basically, short of someone having the ability to look into the future, I don’t see how Hillary or anyone else would have substantially changed the equation early on…in the most critical time. I think that after February you could see some substantial differences in what, say, Hillary might have done and what Trump did do, but by then I think iacta alea est. I also think that had Hillary been in charge the Republicans would have pushed back against everything she tried to do, basically blaming her for not acting sooner and then blocking anything she tried to do going forward. And when the economy started to crumble even her own democrats, at least some of them, probably would have pushed back as well.
I’m actually starting to come around more to the OPs premise at this point, though I think ‘culture’ is the wrong term. But I think without 20/20 hindsight, the basic trajectory of what happened in the US for this Covid outbreak was inevitable. It’s just a matter of how bad it would or could be. Myself, I think Trump is at the extreme end of bad, but I don’t think anyone else as president would be good. Just less bad.
It’s gonna mess up his orange ‘make-up’ too. They should just get a can of Rust-oleum and be done with it.
No, but at this point the GOP seems to angling for a monopsony.
We can never know for sure. One thing to remember is that the WHO only has information that governments freely share with it. Blaming the WHO for how things played out is kind of silly- the US government has the CIA, FBI, military intelligence and more. The WHO can only dream of such resources.
Our government knew about the virus by Jan 1. How soon Hillary might have acted is anyone’s guess, but the key contrast is that Trump famously does not much listen to his briefers while Hillary surely would have. Would she have dismantled Obama’s pandemic response capability? I seriously doubt it.
The one conspiracy theory I humor out of this whole situation is the notion that Trump somehow hobbled the development of the test kits because he is concerned mostly with optics and thought a bunch of positive tests would “look bad”. He’s kept sick people on ships so that US numbers would go up. He said just the other day that if we stopped testing we’d have no cases. Who knows what happened?
The other thing to notice is that the US and South Korea had their first confirmed cases on the same day. Compare the results- they are miles and miles ahead while we are still busy screwing the pooch. Hillary surely would have taken things more seriously.
Still, the US isn’t an authoritarian state like China is. We aren’t going to have the police going around enforcing curfews, and I like it that way. This virus has been a problem for every country in the world really, regardless of their type of government. Trump represents a sort of government worst case scenario, and here we are having wrecked the economy without getting the results we see in other places. Sad!
I blame the WHO for not coming clean on how the CCP was blocking them from getting the data they needed, and instead of blowing the whistle instead decided to buff up the CCP by saying what a great job they were doing, and echoing what the CCP was telling them wrt no human to human transmission and how the CCP was doing such a super job on containment and how no travel restrictions from China needed to be in place because there was no real risk. THAT’S what I blame the WHO for…that and more, but those are the core things. Sorry, it’s not silly to blame them when their actions fucked us all.
As for the second paragraph, yes, the US government knew about Covid by early January, but the information we were getting was what the WHO was giving out as well as what the CCP was allowing out…and we know that was all bullshit at this point. The US still wouldn’t have been allowed to send in observers, since even the WHO wasn’t allowed free observation, just some guided dog and pony shows which showed nada. Perhaps Hillary et al would have listed to the warnings coming out of Taiwan that all wasn’t what was being said, but I tend to doubt that…I think Trump is actually closer to Taiwan than Hillary would have been, and was more hostile to China than Hillary would have been, and he missed this completely. Of course, he’s an idiot and she isn’t, so maybe it would have made some difference, but I think the probability is it would be mainly the same.
As for dismantling Obama’s pandemic group, I’m not sure how much difference that would have actually made. I’ve read different takes on that, so not really sure to be honest. I doubt it would have changed much even if she hadn’t (which I agree, she probably wouldn’t have), but that was just an advisory committee to the President, and it’s not like Trump didn’t still have that function even getting rid of the committee.
Less, less bad really.
That last bit is an item that I do think would had happened with less impact as when having a toddler in power that likes to see state budgets go bust for years to come thanks to willful avoidance of any responsibility.
I also would not expect Hillary to go full 1984 and scrub from the internet what the federal reserve of supplies was supposed to do regarding the help they were supposed to give to states.
Further than that, we have turned as a society into entitled fucking brats. And this gets laid, in the conservatives mind directly at the feet of liberals. Liberals probably blame the conservatives.
Either way, it’s sickening.
Yeah, if only there could be a way to check with researchers or scientists to see who is more correct nowadays… /s
The “I shouldn’t have to wear a mask because freedom” is just a fig leaf to cover the underlying macho BS ethos of his supporters, which Trump exploited because it was there to be exploited.
They don’t wear masks because they think wearing a mask signals fear to the other apes in the troupe. But now they get a two-fer, it also signals fealty to Trump, or more precisely, avoids signalling non-fealty.
If a vaccine were to become available before the election (even a totally fake inert one), it would be interesting to see if Trump says he took it. I put it at 50 - 50 at best. What kind of sissy needs a vaccine?
They’re not gonna vote against him, so yes.
I would not be surprised if he will lie about trusting the vaccine and in the end he will recommend the vaccine to others in words only and with a dismissing attitude; as for setting an example, like with masks, I think that he will never willfully demonstrate with actions what should be done like other presidents did.
Faucci basically admitted they flat out lied about mask effectiveness so medical professionals could get them. In the future, as long as there is a maintained stockpile of PPE for medical professionals, and some sort of mechanism for civilian purchase of PPE with tight restrictions to prevent hoarding, I think we will be in *significantly *better off than we were this time.
That is, assuming the next pandemic can be ameliorated by N95 masks.
With a better president, even if numbers got as high as they pre-lockdown, we would have been able to stay locked down longer, and thus actually see cases going down the same way the are even in the other countries that fucked up and started too slowly.
Trump pushed everyone to reopen. He’s so vain that he was worried more about how a down economy would affect him, rather than whether the economy was actually bad enough that we had to reopen. We’d get more federal funds, both because it wouldn’t be all about “not looking weak” by needing a bailout, and because we’d not have as big a debt. Assuming we had a Democratic Congress (which would be more likely if Clinton won), we’d could have even gotten a second round if necessary.
Of course, I don’t think things would have gotten as bad. I do think the pandemic task force would be building up PPE earlier. I don’t think there’d ever be a claim that masks were ineffective. Even without enough masks, they would have been prepared and tested homemade masks earlier, and then could push the idea that the medical pros need the pro masks and we need the homemade ones.
I think that they could have cut through the red tape where states had testing supplies but weren’t allowed to test. I think they could have accepted foreign-made tests like the ones Germany had, while still working on the “better” ones if necessary.
There’s just so, so much that would be different, that I cannot see there being as significant difference.
That was a huge mistake.
Every goddamn thing the whole way has been done wrong before it was done right.
It’s like a first year expansion team. Every time they win it’s a miracle or an accident.
XT- I still think blaming the WHO is a red herring. This theory puts the WHO in a relative position to the US govt similar to what the anti-intellectual crowd says is the relationship between the “librul media” and anyone who isn’t a conservative- a kind of overpowering, Svengali-like mind control that leaves the victim with no free will.
Again, the US has better information-gathering ability than the WHO. If the WHO said things that weren’t accurate, we should nonetheless be able to get to the bottom of it.
I am not a WHO expert though, so maybe you’ve got a link or a good counterpoint for me.
Not sure what you are looking for. The WHO knew that China was not giving them the access and data they needed. Despite that, they (the WHO) CHOSE to, instead of bringing this up (it being a violation of the charter and all) to instead praise the CCPs efforts, to praise, repeatedly, their ‘transparency’ and how well they had handled things, to essentially restate China’s position wrt halting or curtailing travel from China, to continually say there was no indications of human to human transmission and that this wasn’t a pandemic, etc etc. This shouldn’t be a liberal verse conservative thing, shouldn’t even be political. This also has zero to do with saying the WHO is the same as a sovereign nation state like the US…or China. This has to do with the WHO’s actual charter, and the fact that a charter member wasn’t giving the information or access they are obliged too. Obviously, the WHO couldn’t force the CCP to do jack shit…that’s not where their authority is and they have zero methods to enforce anything or compel a nation state like China to do anything. They can, however, make all the other nation states aware of this, especially when it is this critical. Instead, they blew sunshine up the worlds collective skirts, praising the CCP and their ‘transparency’ and how great they were, saying dippy shit like if they were to get the virus, the place they wanted to be was in China (this was from one of their high officials, who later was sidelined because his nose was a bit too far up the CCPs ass for even the WHO leadership to find comfortable…IMHO anyway).
I don’t know where you get the impression that the US intelligence gathering (or anyone else) IN CHINA AND SPECIFICALLY ABOUT A VIRUS is or could be superior to the WHO’s (assuming the WHO is given the data and access of course), but unless we are allowed to send in our own observers (which we tried to do and were denied…as was everyone else except the WHO, eventually, and they weren’t exactly given free access to investigate :p) we basically knew what the CCP told us. I’m sure a lot of folks think we have spies on every corner in ever province in every country on the planet, but the reality is we don’t. I’m unsure why what Taiwan TRIED to tell us wasn’t listened too (by us or anyone else except the South Korean’s, including the WHO), or why we weren’t paying attention to Chinese social media early on (though here you’d have to be quick, because the CCP wiped things almost as fast as they appeared), but in the end you rely on getting access for something like this…unless the country in question has a free and open press as well as a really open social media, where you can get information from sources that are there. Which China definitely isn’t and doesn’t have.
I’m looking for an explanation why, if the WHO bamboozled the world, did South Korea (who reported their first confirmed case the same day as the US) successfully respond to the virus anyway, while the US clearly failed.
My motive is that you seem to be laying the blame for the US failure at the WHO’s feet. Maybe I am misunderstanding you there. I am saying the US is responsible for itself even if the WHO is a bad actor.
I’ve seen spy satellite photos from November of Chinese hospital parking lots being jammed full, as compared to sparsely populated in prior years. I can only speculate about US spying abilities, but stuff like that suggests high-level folks in the US were monitoring the situation well before “China is lying to us!!” hit the airwaves. I am not so sure China can keep something like this fully secret. I doubt 119k dead Americans and counting (prob to 750k before herd immunity) can be blamed on the WHO and we all just forget about it.
I think there is a grain of truth to the OP.
As an expat living in China, I really see the differences in culture every day.
On the Chinese mainland, people generally obey government instructions no questions asked. Of course, this is often a bad thing, and is partly because people are not free to do otherwise (but it is also cultural: nobody wants to be seen as a non-conformer, even if there is no penalty).
Meanwhile in much of the rest of the world, populations trust their governments enough to generally follow a new rule, but very much with questions asked. Good reasons need to be given.
The US meanwhile is fiercely individualistic, and I think you would always get a significant proportion of people refusing to follow a rule that they are not actually compelled to follow, regardless of whether the rule makes good sense.
Furthermore, there is currently a culture of conspiracy theories and inventing ones own reality, very much endorsed by the government itself.
When the pandemic started spreading around the world, it was obvious to me that the US was likely to be one of the worst hit because of these factors (and of course, the president). I don’t want it to sound like schadenfraude, it’s been awful to helplessly watch it play out.
But we didn’t even TRY to adjust that culture. No public relations campaign about masks and hand-washing. It should have been like the propaganda of WW1 and 2, or MADD, or Safe Sex. Every bus should have had PSAs, Facebook should have been plastered with them, Spotify should have rung with songs about “Love you mom from afar this mother’s day!” We had none of that. Under any other administration, we would have.