RIP American Public Health

Created
Tue, 26/11/2024 - 04:00
Updated
Tue, 26/11/2024 - 04:00
A couple of days after the election this year I wrote that I thought a lot of the anti-incumbent movement these past couple of years had to do with unprocessed trauma from the global pandemic. Here in America we lost over 1.2 million people in a very short time from a deadly disease that humans had never seen before. Within just a few weeks in the spring of 2020, New York City alone had lost more than 15,000 people. All of our medical systems were strained, supplies were unavailable and the whole country, the whole world, was in a state of barely suppressed panic. I don’t think we’ve ever really dealt with exactly what happened and we are now in danger of doing it all over again. President Trump failed miserably at the most important thing he was tasked with doing — reassuring the public. Instead he lied, complained, pushed snake oil cures and worried more about the effects of the pandemic on his re-election prospects than the health of the American people. Bob Woodward’s book “Rage” lays out a terrifying narrative, from taped interviews with Trump himself, of just how inept and dishonest he was. Mother Jones’s David Corn reported on the findings of The Select Committee on the Coronavirus Crisis which found that senior Trump officials tried to block CDC scientists from warning the public and barred them from holding press conferences as would be the usual protocol, subsitituting those demented Trump TV briefings instead. The White House…