Category: Politics

Adam Schiff (D-CA) wants a 9/11 type investigation into what went wrong with our Coronavirus response.

Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) on Thursday announced a new select House committee to review the Trump administration’s response to the Chinese coronavirus pandemic.

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) on Friday demanded future coronavirus relief measures to be “drafted with a lens of reparations” to atone for “environmental racism” and other “underlying health conditions” that are causing the virus to “disproportionately” affect minority communities.

Thursday on SiriusXM’s “The Dean Obeidallah Show,” Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) said that President Donald Trump’s incompetence during his administration’s response to the coronavirus crisis could lead to “hundreds of thousands of deaths.”

---

I SURE AS HELL AM!

Of course none of this is any surprise. These people are simply pissed off that there’s not a Democrat in the oval office.

They’re still butt hurt that their impeachment didn’t work.

So now they’re piling on to waste more time and more taxpayer money in yet another “Roman Circus” during a national crisis.

I personally would love to tell the all

SIT DOWN and SHUT THE FUCK UP!

Yeah, we weren’t as prepared as we should have been. After all, we had 100 years to prepare. (see articles on the 1917-1918 Influenza)

Yep I said it, Doctors, Scientists, Immunologists, Virologists, and the entire fucking biological and medical field have been saying that a pandemic is not and never has been a matter of IF It happens… but WHEN.

Okay so it happened on your watch… NEXT!

We didn’t prepare as well as we should have. Oh, and it’s not like we didn’t have warnings.

Remember a little thing called HIV? How about SARS? Ebola anyone?

All of these were spread because with air travel, we break down natural barriers that would have slowed or contained the spread.

I’m not suggesting that we abandon air travel. It is a fact of modern life. But given that air travel makes disease spread a lot easier, we should be much more attentive to preparation.

Governments don’t want to put money away for emergencies. Governments want to spend all the money they get because they’ll just raise taxes when they need more. After all, it’s not their money is it?

Why should we stockpile filtration masks? We’ll just order them when we need them. Why should we stockpile anything… We can order it from Amazon and have it tomorrow.

Riiiigghtt!

There are things that can be stockpiled and things that can’t. Hard goods like food, equipment, masks, and surgical supplies, can be stockpiled. Vaccines and other perishable items can’t. Which means that all of our drug and perishable production should be on American soil. So that those items can be manufactured locally and distributed quickly. 

The Pentagon will tell you that the single greatest challenge to a military force is long supply lines. Yet our elected officials ignored that simple fact too. The Pentagon will also tell you just how fast and far a biological or nuclear contaminant will spread. They’ve done research on this exact problem since the 1950’s.

It’s not like the data wasn’t available. 

If our elected officials had spent any time with that data they’d have seen the cold hard truth. Apparently, the cold hard truth didn’t fit someone’s narrative and was ignored.

The Trump administration hasn’t failed. OUR ENTIRE GOVERNMENT HAS!

The four politicians listed above are shining examples of waste and failure.

There are others, to be sure. (R), (D), (I), you name the party.

I simply had these four morons assault me in the news this morning.

Now is not the time for a partisan blame game. Now is the time for all America to see just what kind of stupidity passes for politicians in the hallowed halls of our Government.

And come November it’s time for us, to clean house.

---

04/05/2020

Here’s a little update from USA Today fact checking the Trump administration’s assertion that the national stockpile was depleted.

Guess what? 

It was, and not replenished as it should have been. Starting with the Bush administration and going right on through the Obama & Trump administrations. They’ve all failed the country.

Read the article here

I’m including the text in case the article disappears as so many things seem to do these days.

Perhaps the Fabulous Four mentioned above should read the Damn paper.

---

Fact check: Did the Obama administration deplete the federal stockpile of N95 masks?

Matthew Brown
USA TODAY
Published 12:45 p.m. ET Apr. 3, 2020 | Updated 3:31 p.m. ET Apr 4, 2020

The claim: The Obama administration used and did not replenish the nation’s emergency stockpile of medical supplies, including N95 masks

As the novel coronavirus pandemic strains health care systems, questions around the U.S. government’s response have circulated in the media and online.

On March 26, The Daily Wire published an article centering on the Obama administration’s role in using and allegedly failing to replenish the federal stockpile of N95 masks.

“The Obama administration significantly depleted the federal stockpile of N95 respirator masks to deal with the H1N1 influenza outbreak in 2009 and never rebuilt the stockpile despite calls to do so,” the piece begins.

The article draws from the reporting of outlets including Bloomberg News and the Los Angeles Times. According to Bloomberg News, “after the H1N1 influenza outbreak in 2009, which triggered a nationwide shortage of masks and caused a 2- to 3-year backlog orders for the N95 variety, the stockpile distributed about three-quarters of its inventory and didn’t build back the supply.”

“After the swine flu epidemic in 2009, a safety-equipment industry association and a federally sponsored task force both recommended that depleted supplies of N95 respirator masks, which filter out airborne particles, be replenished by the stockpile,” the Los Angeles Times reported.

On Wednesday, President Donald Trump said during a press conference the country’s stockpile of personal protective equipment, including medical gear like N95 masks, is almost depleted.

A history of the national emergency stockpile

Established in 1999 to prepare the country for threats like pandemics, natural disasters and acts of bioterrorism, the United States has used and maintained its Strategic National Stockpile of medical supplies during times of acute crisis in the health care system.

The reserve was originally named the National Pharmaceutical Stockpile, but was renamed during a 2003 restructuring when additional materials were added to the supply. The stockpile is jointly managed by the departments of Defense and Health and Human Services.

While officials rarely discuss specifics about the reserve, like the exact locations and value of its contents, the fund’s restocking contracts are largely public, including a July 2019 deal for vaccines valued at $1.5 billion.

Warnings about the United States’ lack of preparedness for a serious pandemic have come from both inside the federal government and elsewhere since at least the early 2000s and as recently as last year.

“SARS has infected relatively few people nationwide, but it has raised concerns about preparedness for large-scale infectious disease outbreaks,” a 2003 analysis from the Government Accountability Office reads.

HHS Secretary Alex Azar said in April 2019 the BioDefense Summit that a pandemic was among his top concerns, CNN reported on Friday. “Of course, the thing that people ask: ‘What keeps you most up at night in the biodefense world?’ Pandemic flu, of course. I think everyone in this room probably shares that concern,” Azar told the summit. (His full remarks are available on the HHS website.)

The stockpile has been used at least 13 times since its creation, including during the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks and 2001 anthrax attacks. Also during the George W. Bush administration, the national stockpile was deployed in response to hurricanes Katrina and Rita in 2005 and then again for Hurricanes Gustav and Ike in 2008, according to the stockpile’s history published by the HHS.

In 2005, the Bush administration published a report that urged investment in local and national stockpiles, increasing domestic production capacity and coordinating research efforts toward cures and vaccines. In 2006, Congress approved expanding the stockpile to include protective gear like N95 surgical masks.

During the presidency of Barack Obama, the national stockpile was seriously taxed as the administration addressed multiple crises over eight years. About “75 percent of N95 respirators and 25 percent of face masks contained in the CDC’s Strategic National Stockpile (∼100 million products) were deployed for use in health care settings over the course of the 2009 H1N1 pandemic response,” according to a 2017 study in the journal Health Security.

Again according to NIH, the stockpile’s resources were also used during hurricanes Alex, Irene, Isaac and Sandy. Flooding in 2010 in North Dakota also called for stockpile funds to be deployed. The 2014 outbreaks of the ebola virus and botulism, as well as the 2016 outbreak of the zika virus, continued to significantly tax the stockpile with no serious effort from the Obama administration to replenish the fund.

ProPublica reported on April 3 that congressional budget battles in the early years of the Obama administration contributed to stockpile shortages. But the article notes available funds were used not to replenish masks: “With limited resources, officials in charge of the stockpile tend to focus on buying lifesaving drugs from small biotechnology firms that would, in the absence of a government buyer, have no other market for their products, experts said. Masks and other protective equipment are in normal times widely available and thus may not have been prioritized for purchase, they said.”

During the presidency of Donald Trump, analysts have warned the United States is not prepared for a serious pandemic.

“We assess that the United States and the world will remain vulnerable to the next flu pandemic or large scale outbreak of a contagious disease that could lead to massive rates of death and disability, severely affect the world economy, strain international resources, and increase calls on the United States for support,” the 2019 World Threat Assessment from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence states.

The Trump administration has not taken significant steps to replenish the masks in the Strategic National Stockpile.

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.

Our fact-check sources:

Department of Health and Human Services, Strategic National Stockpile: History
Government Accountability Office, 2003 Report on Public Health Capacity
Health Security, Personal Protective Equipment Supply Chain: Lessons Learned from Recent Public Health Emergency Responses
Homeland Security Council, 2005 National Strategy for Pandemic Influenza
National Institute of Health, The Strategic National Stockpile: Origin, Policy Foundations, and Federal Context
2019 Worldwide Threat Assessment of the US Intelligence Community