I have Dr.Anthony Fauci's recent memoir, "On Call: A Doctor's Journey in Public Service", on my desk right now and actually did something I rarely do and didn't read from the front to the back. I actually began with the section on Covid and Fauci is totally honest in what he has to say about TRAITOR Trump. It is very enlightening. I should also say, in the spirit of full disclosure, that I spent many days at NIH in the mid to late 1990's, two to three trips a year, a week at a time because my wife was a patient there. I met people at all levels of NIH from food service, maintenance, and grounds keeping up to one director of one of the institutes. Everything about NIH is personal to me. I never met anyone there I never liked and respected. Many of the greatest medical and scientific minds in the world work there and Dr. Fauci was one of them. He could have left 20-25 years ago for a multi-million dollar salary with a drug company and stayed because he was committed to making the world a better place. He tells a story in the book about receiving a white powder in an envelope at his desk in the middle of Covid and what he and his family had to go through because of it even though it was nothing. There is absolutely no doubt in my mind that Dr. Fauci received that, and many other pieces of hate mail and attempts at intimidation, because of the words and deeds of TRAITOR Trump. My knowledge of NIH and the people who make it one of the greatest medical and scientific institutions in the world on a daily basis was one of the most productive learning experiences in my life, a life in which I have consistently moved from one learning experience to another in an attempt to make myself a better, better educated human being who might be worthy of making some contribution, however insignificant, to make the the world a better place.
So, with that preface, let's now examine what I learned from reading that section of Dr. Fauci's memoir, that 66 page story about his efforts to help the world win the war against our most recent plague, Covid 19, and his deeply personal disclosures about how TRAITOR Trump impeded that effort on a daily basis which complicated the lives of every employee of NIH and endangered the lives of every citizen of the United States and, ultimately, the world. Dr. Fauci begins his section on Covid 19 with a description of events which occurred in a meeting at the White House on January 29, 2020, at a time when Covid infections in the US had just passed the 7,700 mark and 170 victims had already died. He describes how TRAITOR Trump, whom he consistently refers to with the totally undeserved honorific "President Trump", came into the meeting and began to butter him up, as has always been TRAITOR Trump's way until he decides to move on to sooner or later denigrating anyone he has previously flattered. But, in the spirit of what has always been Dr. Fauci's absolute honesty, he moves on to say that "...he shocked me on day one of his presidency with his disregard of facts such as the size of the crowd at his inauguration. His apocalyptic inaugural speech had also taken me aback, as had his aggressive disrespect for the press." (Fauci, page 346)
It is also very pertinent to know that meeting in which Dr. Fauci first met TRAITOR Trump took place on January 29, 2020, because NPR reported on May 2, 2020, that TRAITOR Trump was told in intelligence briefings on January 23 & 28, 2020, that
"...the coronavirus was potentially going to 'spread globally,' " the official said of the first briefing, which came two days after the first case of the virus was reported in the United States...Five days after that initial briefing, the president was briefed again, according to the official. This time, he was told the virus "was spreading outside of China, but that deaths from the disease were happening only in China," the official said. (NPR, May 2, 2020, https://www.npr.org/sections/coronavirus-live-updates/2020/05/02/849619486/trump-received-intelligence-briefings-on-coronavirus-twice-in-january)
Just the day before the meeting in which Dr. Fauci met TRAITOR Trump for the first time, TRAITOR Trump had been told that Covid 19 was likely to "spread globally". At that January 29, 2020, meeting he was also told that 170 US victims had already died. Obviously, information about Covid 19 was moving and changing rapidly, but what any well run White House is supposed to be best at is gathering, analyzing, and making decisions regarding fast moving crises of any kind. From January 20, 2017 to January 20, 2021, the White House was anything but well run which has been reported on by every ethical news agency in the world thousands of times. Dr. Fauci then reports that on February 25, 2020, Nancy Messonier, the head of the CDC's National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases, said in a conference call with reporters that "...a pandemic in the United States was no longer a matter of if but when and that we should prepare to do things like close schools and work remotely...The media erupted. The stock market plummeted, and President Trump was furious." (Fauci, Page 358)
At that point, TRAITOR Trump had a choice to make about Covid 19, and he had two options: 1) he could and should have chosen to listen to the best scientific minds in America and begin to do what they were telling him, or, 2) he could just ignore the scientists, do nothing effective about Covid 19 in a vain and murderous manner which was intended to protect an economy which his tax cuts for the rich was already destroying. His choice to do that later resulted in the unnecessary deaths of more than a million innocent American victims. Yes, we would have been likely to have a relatively mild epidemic of Covid 19 no matter what the official response was. But, it is highly unlikely that we would have had more than a million deaths if the response had been competently directed from the White House and left in the hands of the scientists throughout the decision making process. It is highly likely that the great majority of the victims would have survived.
Dr. Fauci then moves on in the book to discussion of how the Covid 19 Task Force which was being headed by Vice President Mike Pence was operated. "Vice presidents are always publicly loyal to the president. But, in my opinion, Vice President Pence sometimes overdid it. During Task Force meetings, he often said some version of "There are a lot of smart people around here, but we all know that the smartest person in the building is upstairs. He was of course talking about the man sitting behind the Resolute Desk in the Oval Office." (Fauci, Page 359)
We all know what price Mike Pence paid for that misplaced loyalty on January 6, 2021. Dr. Fauci then goes on to describe a telephone call he received from TRAITOR Trump a few days later:
"What I did do during our twenty minute conversation about Covid 19 was to lay out the facts. I encouraged him not to underplay the seriousness of the situation. "That almost always comes back to bite you, Mr. President," I said. "If you are totally honest about what is happening with Covid, the country will respect you for it." (Fauci, Page 359)
We all know that didn't happen, don't we? At no time in his life, has TRAITOR Trump ever been totally honest with anyone about anything anytime anywhere. The misrepresentation of a deadly disease and its potential destruction of the country and the world had only just begun. TRAITOR Trump was now in his favorite and most beloved arena, the creation and propagation of lies, prevarications, fabrications, misrepresentations, and delusions which would become more and more bizarre as the bodies piled up, refrigerated trucks became morgues, and the country began to watch our loved ones dying. Dr. Fauci then discusses some of the bizarre ways in which TRAITOR Trump responded to a situation in which he proved on a daily basis that he was unfit to be in the position which Russia's election tampering had placed him. On page 365 of the book, Dr Fauci says
"And so with the ghastly reality setting in that COVID was not going to go away, Trump began to grab for an elixir that was going to cure this disease. Along came hydroxychloroquine...The fact was, however, there were no clinical studies proving that this antimalarial drug would help people. And it might hurt them. The president seemed unable to grasp that anecdotes of how hydroxychloroquine might have helped some people with COVID did not translate into solid medical advice. This is when I realized that sooner or later I would have to refute him publicly." (Fauci, Pages 365-366)
Farther along in page 366, Dr. Fauci then discusses the way TRAITOR Trump has always attacked and denigrated members of the press corps.
"...even when I did not know the journalists the president insulted, I was still taken aback by his behavior. I was also concerned that my very presence at the lectern or sitting against the wall of the press room would be interpreted as acceptance on my part of his behavior."(Fauci, Page 366)
Those two sentences clearly demonstrate the differences between a consummate professional scientist like Dr. Anthony Fauci and a blustering, aggressive, argumentative, and ignorant individual like TRAITOR Trump especially when such an individual is in a position for which they have always been horribly unqualified and never actually attained in a legal manner. After that discussion of TRAITOR Trump's abuses of many of the best, most professional journalists alive, Dr. Fauci goes on to become more direct in his assessments of the horrible failures of TRAITOR Trump in the remainder of the COVID section of the book. He then moves on to a time late in the fall of 2020, as the presidential election campaign was in full swing and says
"By this time, the virus had infected more than 9 million Americans and killed 230,000. New daily cases were hitting record highs. But out on the campaign trail, Donald Trump insisted, "We're turning the corner. We're turning the corner. We're rounding...the curve. We will vanquish the virus." (Fauci, Page 406)
Thank God, the American people realized what was happening. They knew the country was dying, one COVID case, one beloved relative at a time. President Biden was elected on November 3, 2020, and sworn into office on January 20, 2021. To misquote former President Gerald Ford "Our long national nightmare was over." Now in 2024, we are once again facing the most important and most dangerous election in our nation's history. We have a choice to actually, for the first time, to elect TRAITOR Trump to the highest office in the land, and create God only knows what future disasters which could well make the COVID epidemic look like only a warmup. TRAITOR Trump has already proven beyond a shadow of a doubt that he is unfit to hold any position of public trust at any level. God Help Us, if we make that fatal mistake and allow him near the White House again.
No comments:
Post a Comment