An Evil Darkness Engulfing the White House

President Donald Trump and his administration are getting crossways with the medical-scientific community as the latter tries to control a pandemic that may wind up killing hundreds of thousands of Americans before year’s end. It has already killed 140,000 Americans in less than five months. COVID-19 is the worst health crisis the U.S. has faced since the Spanish Flu of 1918, which was 102 years ago. This animosity toward health experts looks to me like an evil darkness surrounding the White House.

The Trump administration is publicly trashing the nation’s leading expert on COVID-19. That would be Dr. Anthony F. Fauci, the long-time director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, which is a branch of the nation’s National Institutes of Health. Dr. Fauci has the honorable distinction of having served six U.S. presidents in his stellar career. As a member of President’s Trump’s task force on COVID-19, Dr. Fauci was sort of a spokesperson for it by informing the public of this pandemic. But sometimes, President Trump didn’t like what Fauci said. Trump is all about getting business back to usual and now a full opening of schools next month.

But Trump’s handling of this health crisis has been miserable. The U.S. now suffers from this global pandemic more than any other nation. For instance, we have one-third of all known cases of people throughout the world who have COVID-19 and nearly the same regarding fatalities from it. Yet the U.S. has only 4.5% of the world’s population and supposedly the best health care system in the world (although we don’t have universal health coverage).

An example of this conflict between the nation’s health authorities and President Trump is that we learned this week that he has cut off Dr. Fauci as an advisor to him. They haven’t spoken for nearly two months. Plus, Trump is trying to suppress data about COVID-19 deaths by rerouting this important information to the White House, thus bypassing the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. That may be like cooking the books in business, only in this case it involves peoples’ lives rather than their pocketbooks.

Also this week, the White House anonymously issued a list of comments Dr. Fauci has made since COVID-19 began in an effort to discredit him. They were put forth to support what President Trump said a while ago about Anthony Fauci, “he’s made a lot of mistakes.” But some of these Fauci quotes were taken out of context. And people should realize that this virus is new (novel coronavirus), thus being unknown so that experts didn’t know what it was going to do.

Another example of this disjunct is the op-ed piece in USA Today this week written by Peter Navarro, Assistant to the President, Director of Trade and Manufacturing Policy. In it he said Dr. Fauci has been “wrong about everything.” Oh, great! The economist says the doctor is wrong about everything he says regarding a health issue. That’s typical of this administration, which merely does like its head–Donald Trump. These business folks and economists think they are experts about everything, including health. But it’s OUR HEALTH they’re dealing with.

Then also this week, President Trump’s assistant chief of staff, Dan Scavino, shared a cartoon on social media mocking Fauci as “Dr. Faucet” drowning Uncle Sam with “extra cold” water. It means Fauci’s health directives are detrimental to the economy. But world statistics about COVID-19 show that the U.S. has failed miserably more than any other nation to fight this virus. And much of the cause of this failure has been President Trump denying it was a problem, failing to make testing available and getting medical equipment, and reopening business too soon. That made it worse and it’s mostly because Trump and his administration wouldn’t listen much to health authorities like Dr. Anthony Fauci.