You are an ignorant fuck, Trump policies kept the economy and stock market showing returns, Biden is just digging a hole of massive debt with no return
seems it is you who is an ignorant fuck on who did what .... as my previous post you can see it all started at the end of the year in 2019 ... last I check trump was president it got even worse by April of 2020 ... last I checked trump was still ther president ...
Did Trump Buck the Experts?
Trump has repeatedly said that his decision to impose the travel restrictions on Jan. 31 was made despite objections from most of the experts on containing the spread of infectious disease.
“But we closed those borders very early, against the advice of a lot of professionals, and we turned out to be right. I took a lot of heat for that,”
Trump said on March 4.
Asked by
Hannity the same day about his rationale at the time he made the decision, Trump said, “I would say everybody said, it’s too early, it’s too soon, and good people, brilliant people, in many ways, doctors and lawyers and, frankly, a lot of people that work on this stuff almost exclusively. And they said, don’t do it.”
Trump repeated this claim at his
town hall in Scranton on March 5, saying that as soon as he heard that China had a problem with the coronavirus, he asked how many people the U.S. had coming in from China. “Nobody but me asked that question,” Trump said. Trump added that his decision to impose the travel restrictions was made “against the advice of almost everybody.”
Everybody? Not according to Azar, who said it was the “uniform” recommendation of experts in his department.
“The travel restrictions that we put in place in consultation with the president were very measured and incremental,” Azar
told reporters on Feb. 7. “These were the uniform recommendations of the career public health officials here at HHS.”
The World Health Organization cautioned against the overuse of travel restrictions, but stopped short of saying that Trump’s decision in the U.S. — or anyone else’s in other countries — was inappropriate.
“[W]e reiterate our call to all countries not to impose restrictions inconsistent with the International Health Regulations,” WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus
told its executive board. “Such restrictions can have the effect of increasing fear and stigma, with little public health benefit. So far, 22 countries have reported such restrictions to WHO. Where such measures have been implemented, we urge that they are short in duration, proportionate to the public health risks, and are reconsidered regularly as the situation evolves.”
As we said, three experts called by Democrats at a House
subcommittee hearing on Feb. 5 questioned the decision.
Dr. Jennifer Nuzzo, a senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, was one of them.
Nuzzo, Feb. 5: [W]e need to seriously reexamine the current policy of banning travel from China and quarantining returning travelers. All of the evidence we have indicates that travel restrictions and quarantines directed at individual countries are unlikely to keep the virus out of our borders. These measures may exacerbate the epidemic’s social and economic tolls and can make us less safe. Simply put, this virus is spreading too quickly and too silently, and our surveillance is too limited for us to truly know which countries have active transmission and which don’t. The virus could enter the U.S. from other parts of the world not on our restricted list, and it may already be circulating here.
The U.S. was a target of travel bans and quarantines during the 2009 flu pandemic. It didn’t work to stop the spread, and it hurt our country. I am concerned that by our singling out China for travel bans, we are effectively penalizing it for reporting cases. This may diminish its willingness to further share data and chill other countries’ willingness to be transparent about their own outbreaks. Travel bans and quarantines will make us less safe if they divert attention and resources from higher priority disease mitigation approaches that we know are needed to respond to cases within the United States.
… We often see, when we have emerging disease outbreaks, our first instinct is to try to lock down travel to prevent the introduction of virus to our country. And that is a completely understandable instinct. I have never seen instances in which that has worked when we are talking about a virus at this scale.
Respiratory viruses like this one, unlike others–they just move quickly. They are hard to spot because they look like many other diseases. It’s very difficult to interrupt them at borders. You would need to have complete surveillance in order to do that. And we simply don’t have that.
During the hearing,
Dr. Jennifer Bouey, chair of China policy studies at the Rand Corporation, agreed saying that the policy to restrict travel “doesn’t help that much in this–the current situation.”
But according to
Paul Offit, chair of vaccinology at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania, those kinds of opinions were in the minority at the time the president made his decision.
“I don’t know anyone who thought the travel restrictions were a bad idea early on,” Offit told us in a phone interview.
When a virus like that is restricted to one location, as it appeared to be early on, travel restrictions can lessen the odds of it spreading to this country, Offit said. Over time, however, and as cases began to be identified in the U.S., travel restrictions make much less of a difference, he said.
Epidemiologists and former U.S. health officials told
Time that the initial travel restrictions were valid and “likely helped to slow the spread of the virus. The problem, they say, is that once it was clear that the virus was within our borders officials did not pivot quickly enough to changing circumstances.”
Democratic Criticism
Trump has repeatedly claimed that Democrats have “loudly criticized and protested” his imposition of the travel restrictions, and have called the decision “racist.” But while leading Democrats have been outspoken in their criticism of the president’s overall response to the epidemic, very few have criticized his decision to impose limited travel restrictions.
“I took a lot of heat,” Trump said during a Feb. 27
press conference. “I mean, some people called me racist because I made a decision so early. And we had never done that as a country before, let alone early. So it was a, you know, bold decision. It turned out to be a good decision. But I was criticized by the Democrats. They called me a racist because I made that decision if you can believe that one.”
At
a rally in South Carolina the following day, Trump said Democrats “loudly criticized and protested” his decision.
“But, anyway — but we’ve done an incredible job because we closed early,” Trump said in
a meeting with African American leaders on Feb. 28. “And actually, the Democrats said I was a racist. Not from the black-people standpoint, but from an Asian-people standpoint, from a Chinese-people standpoint. They said I was a racist because I closed our country to people coming in from certain areas. They called me a racist.”
We reached out to the Trump campaign and asked for names, but we did not get a response. We scoured news clips and could find only a couple of instances of elected Democrats criticizing the president’s action to restrict travel.
In the House subcommittee hearing on Feb. 5 that we referenced earlier, several witnesses called by the Democrats expressed concerns about the travel restrictions and warned they could do more harm than good.
And at least one Democrat agreed.
“The United States and other countries around the world have put in place unprecedented travel restrictions in response to the virus,” said Democratic
Rep. Eliot L. Engel. “These measures have not proven to improve public health outcomes, rather they tend to cause economic harm and to stoke racist and discriminatory responses to this epidemic.”
A day earlier, Democratic Rep. Ami Bera, who presided over the hearing, told
Politico, “In our response, we can’t create prejudices and harbor anxieties toward one population.” Bera told
Politico the decision to impose travel restrictions “probably doesn’t make sense” given that the outbreak had already spread to several other countries by that point. “At this juncture, it’s going to be very hard to contain the virus,” Bera said.
But the Democratic leaders in Congress have simply not mentioned Trump’s travel restrictions.
In a
Feb. 25 tweet, Trump claimed that Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer “didn’t like my early travel closings.” Trump’s comment appears to be based on a
fabricated tweet that circulated widely on Facebook.
Schumer has been
critical of the
Trump administration’s
response to the spread of the
novel coronavirus. But he hasn’t mentioned the travel restrictions in that criticism.
In Trump’s Fox News
interview on March 4, host Sean Hannity said former vice president and current Democratic challenger Joe Biden “accused the president of being xenophobic, while he was trying to protect the health of the American people.”
On the day Trump imposed the travel restrictions, Biden did criticize Trump for his “record of hysteria and xenophobia,” but it is unclear whether Biden was referring to Trump’s travel restrictions, or Trump’s overall qualifications to deal with the epidemic.
“We have right now a crisis with the coronavirus, emanating from China,” Biden said on Jan. 31 at a
campaign event in Iowa. “A national emergency worldwide alerts. The American people need to have a president who they can trust what he says about it, that he is going to act rationally about it. In moments like this, this is where the credibility of the president is most needed, as he explains what we should and should not do. This is no time for Donald Trump’s record of hysteria and xenophobia – hysterical xenophobia – and fearmongering to lead the way instead of science.”
In an op-ed published several days prior in
USA Today, Biden similarly argued: “The possibility of a pandemic is a challenge Donald Trump is unqualified to handle as president.” Biden wrote that he recalled “how Trump sought to stoke fear and stigma during the 2014 Ebola epidemic.” Trump, Biden wrote, “
railed against the evidence-based response our administration put in place — which quelled the crisis and saved hundreds of thousands of lives — in favor of
reactionary travel bans that would only have made things worse.”
Although Democratic leaders and
Democratic presidential candidates have been highly critical of Trump’s response to the coronavirus, we couldn’t find any examples of them directly and clearly criticizing the travel restrictions.
In a
Feb. 4 letter to Trump, Democratic Reps. Nita Lowey, chair of the Appropriations Committee, and Rose DeLauro, chair of one of the subcommittees, wrote that they “strongly support” the president’s decision to declare a public health emergency in response to the novel coronavirus outbreak, and they specifically cited the administration’s actions to impose “significant travel restrictions.”
