Coronavirus Blame Game Escalates

BY JACK CROWE

April 20, 2020

THE PARTISAN CORONAVIRUS BLAME GAME escalated over the weekend with the release of a blistering attack ad and a number of media appearances in which lawmakers sought to color the public's perception of how we arrived at 40,000 coronavirus fatalities and who should be held responsible at the polls in November.

The Biden campaign released an attack ad on Saturday that will run online in the battleground states of Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Arizona, North Carolina and Florida. "When Trump rolled over for the Chinese, he took their word for it. Trump praised the Chinese 15 times in January and February as the coronavirus spread across the world," the narrator says as images of Trump tweets and quotes appear on screen. The ad is the first major salvo in Biden's efforts to cast the Trump campaign as woefully unprepared to meet the moment. For the next six months we can expect Biden to talk of little else.

On January 31, the day the White House announced that it would bar foreign nationals who had visited China in the previous two weeks from entering the U.S., Biden accused Trump of responding to the crisis with "hysterical xenophobia." The Biden campaign later came out in favor of the travel restriction and now says the xenophobia remark was not made in reference to that specific decision.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi also entered the fray on Sunday, slamming the administration's efforts during an appearance on Fox News Sundays with Chris Wallace. "The president gets an F, a failure, on the testing," Pelosi said. Wallace responded by charging Pelosi with hypocrisy, citing her decision to take a walking tour of San Francisco's Chinatown in late February, three weeks after Trump announced the China travel restrictions. Following the tour, Pelosi held a press conference to assure her constituents that "everything is fine" and urged them to "come to Chinatown."

"If the president underplayed the threat in the early days, Speaker Pelosi, didn't you as well?" Wallace asked.

"No!" Pelosi replied. "What we were trying to do is end the discrimination, the stigma that was going out against the Asian-American community and in fact, if you will look, the record will show that our Chinatown has been a model of containing and preventing the virus, and I'm confident in our folks there and thought it was necessary to offset some of the things that the president and others were saying about Asian-Americans and making them a target. A target of violence across the country."

Representative Dan Crenshaw offered a word in defense of the administration during a Friday appearance on Real Time With Bill Maher. The Texas Republican pushed back on Maher's claim that the administration was slow to respond to the outbreak relative to other countries, and argued that many of the same people who criticized Trump's China travel ban in February are now criticizing him for not being more restrictive.

"He lies about that," Maher said, pointing out that some 40,000 travelers entered the country from China after the restrictions were put in place — the same line of attack featured in Biden's campaign ad. "He said he stopped people coming in from China and he did not."

"Look, let me address that," Crenshaw said. "These were U.S. citizens and passport holders and green card holders being repatriated — U.S. citizens. So, you have to make the argument then that we shouldn't allow them in. It sounds to me like you're fully agreeing with President Trump on this when everybody else disagreed with him. And if you're saying that you wish that travel restriction had been more extreme, okay fine, you apparently had the foresight when nobody else did."

With the exception of Senator Tom Cotton (R., Ark.) and a handful of China hawks in the House, everyone on Capitol Hill and in the administration was slow to realize the scale of the threat facing America and the world. This universal lack of preparedness was in no small part due to the fact that our elected leaders were taking their cues from a World Health Organization that was parroting the Beijing party line. Considering the monumental level of spin Americans are about to be subjected to, it's worth remembering who said what and when.

Coronavirus Death Toll Tops 40,000 as Governors Complain about Lack of Testing Capacity

The U.S. coronavirus death toll reached 40,628 by Monday morning as state governors publicly worried they won't have the amount of tests needed to safely reopen parts of the economy.

"The administration, I think, is trying to ramp up testing. They are doing some things with respect to private labs," Maryland governor Larry Hogan, a Republican, said Sunday on CNN's State of the Union. "But to try and push this off to say that the governors have plenty of testing and [that] they should just get to work on testing–somehow we aren't doing our job–is just absolutely false."

Michigan governor Gretchen Whitmer, a Democrat, criticized the lack of a national testing system to coordinate the effort against the pandemic.

"It would be nice if we had a national strategy that was working with every state, so every state knew what was coming," Whitmer said. Fellow Democratic governor Graham Northam of Virginia complained, "We've been fighting every day for PPE. We have supplies now coming in. We've been fighting for testing….We don't even have enough swabs." (CNN)

Protesters Continue to Call for Reopening Economy Despite Rising Death Toll

Protests erupted over the weekend in several states, including Michigan, Arizona, Texas, Wisconsin, and Nevada, demanding that government officials reopen the economy after stay-at-home orders were issued in response to the coronavirus pandemic.

Demonstrators gathered at the Arizona State Capitol on Sunday morning, organized by Operation Gridlock Arizona. The group asked protesters to drive around the Capitol in Phoenix and block traffic to create a gridlock.

In Michigan, protesters adopted a similar approach, objecting to Governor Gretchen Whitmer's stay-at-home order by blocking traffic around Michigan's Capitol building in Lansing.

"I was really disappointed to see people congregating and not wearing masks," Whitmer said of the demonstration.

Federal Judge Blocks Some Restrictions on Kansas Religious Gatherings

A federal judge on Saturday blocked Kansas governor Laura Kelly's executive order banning religious gatherings of over ten people, allowing churches and other institutions to congregate as long as worshippers maintain social distancing.

U.S. District Judge John Broomes in Wichita criticized Kelly's executive order as unfairly targeting religious institutions.

"Churches and religious activities appear to have been singled out among essential functions for stricter treatment," Broomes wrote in his ruling. Kelly, a Democrat who has drawn criticism from Kansas's Republican-held state legislature, defended the executive order.

Gunman Kills 16 in Nova Scotia in Deadliest Shooting in Canada's History

A gunman killed 16 people during a shooting rampage in Nova Scotia on Sunday, the deadliest shooting in Canada's history.

The suspect, identified as Gabriel Wortman, 51, disguised himself as a police officer and tricked out his car to resemble a Royal Canadian Mounted Police cruiser, authorities said. He was arrested Sunday at a gas station in Enfield, Nova Scotia.

RCMP spokesman Daniel Brien confirmed that 16 people have died in addition to the shooter himself. Police did not elaborate on how the shooter died, although gunfire was exchanged between the suspect and police. (KEPR)

Washington Post: Americans at World Health Organization transmitted real-time information about coronavirus to Trump administration

More than a dozen U.S. researchers, physicians and public health experts, many of them from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, were working full time at the Geneva headquarters of the World Health Organization as the novel coronavirus emerged late last year and transmitted real-time information about its discovery and spread in China to the Trump administration, according to U.S. and international officials.

A number of CDC staff members are regularly detailed to work at the WHO in Geneva as part of a rotation that has operated for years. Senior Trump-appointed health officials also consulted regularly at the highest levels with the WHO as the crisis unfolded, the officials said.

Associated Press: North Korean defectors, experts question zero virus claim

SEOUL, South Korea (AP) — As a doctor in North Korea during the SARS outbreak and flu pandemic, Choi Jung Hun didn't have much more than a thermometer to decide who should be quarantined.

Barely paid, with no test kits and working with antiquated equipment, if anything, he and his fellow doctors in the northeastern city of Chongjin were often unable to determine who had the disease, even after patients died, said Choi, who fled to South Korea in 2012.

Local health officials weren't asked to confirm cases or submit them to the central government in Pyongyang, Choi said in an interview with The Associated Press.