Liberal Forum

Russ Vought, the acting director of the White House Office of Management and Budget, on Tuesday doubled down on proposed cuts to health services and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), despite the coronavirus outbreak.

Vought came under intense questioning from Rep. Matt Cartwright (D-Pa.) at a hearing about President Trump’s 2021 budget request.

It proposed cutting Health and Human Services funding by $9.5 billion, including a 15 percent cut of $1.2 billion to the CDC and a $35 million decrease to the Infectious Diseases Rapid Response Reserve Fund's annual contribution.

“The question I have is, are we prepared to fight pandemics if we cut from programs that are specifically designed to prepare for them, including the coronavirus?” Cartwright asked.

Vought responded by saying Trump signed into law the $8.3 billion emergency supplemental package Congress approved last week.

That funding, a significant increase over the $2.5 billion emergency request the White House sent over, would be spread out over several years.

The funding in question at the hearing was for next year's spending.

Cartwright pressed Vought as to whether he would amend the request.

“The question is today, as we sit here and we know about coronavirus and the impact it’s taking on the people of the world and the economies of the world and the stock market and everything, as you sit here today, are you ready to take that back?” he pressed.

Vought confirmed that the administration was sticking to its request.

“If you’re asking if I’m sending up a budget amendment, no, I’m not sending up a budget amendment,” he said.

https://thehill.com/policy/finance/4868 ... cA.twitter

Cartwright is my Congressman.

crimsongulf » 11 Mar 2020 5:50 pm » wrote:

Misty » 11 Mar 2020 5:20 pm » wrote:Heaven help us all.

You may have imagined that he is detrimental to your life, but he has been absolutely a jet engine for my life.

I am not imagining anything.
My daughter has to ride the subway every day and already has respiratory issues.
My sister just finished Chemo a few months ago and has a compromised immune system.
And my daughter-in-law works in a doctor's office and is around sick people all the time.
So all three of them are high risk.

Their lives and health are more important to me than a few extra bucks in my pocket.

It gives me no comfort at all that this ignoramus is in charge.

Misty » 11 Mar 2020 6:40 pm » wrote: I am not imagining anything.
My daughter has to ride the subway every day and already has respiratory issues.
My sister just finished Chemo a few months ago and has a compromised immune system.
And my daughter-in-law works in a doctor's office and is around sick people all the time.
So all three of them are high risk.

Their lives and health are more important to be than a few extra bucks in my pocket.

It gives me no comfort at all that this ignoramus is in charge.

Millions of people have respiratory issues this time of year.

I do, dogwood pollen does it to me every year.

This has got to be the biggest fake **** ever fostered on mankind.

I almost hope it turns into what you folks want it to be just so you have to live with it once there is no imagined political gain for you.

I'm sure John Robert's will be issuing a statement any minute now like he did when Chuck Schumer said that Kavanaugh and Gorsuch wouldn't know what hit them if the went forward with an anti-abortion decision.

crimsongulf » 11 Mar 2020 6:43 pm » wrote:

Misty » 11 Mar 2020 6:40 pm » wrote:I am not imagining anything.
My daughter has to ride the subway every day and already has respiratory issues.
My sister just finished Chemo a few months ago and has a compromised immune system.
And my daughter-in-law works in a doctor's office and is around sick people all the time.
So all three of them are high risk.
Their lives and health are more important to be than a few extra bucks in my pocket.
It gives me no comfort at all that this ignoramus is in charge.

Millions of people have respiratory issues this time of year.
I do, dogwood pollen does it to me every year.

My daughter has them all year round.
And so do I, my husband and two of my grandkids.
We all have asthma.

crimsongulf » 11 Mar 2020 6:43 pm » wrote:This has got to be the biggest fake **** ever fostered on mankind.

I guess that's why the World Health Organization declared it a global pandemic today.

crimsongulf » 11 Mar 2020 6:43 pm » wrote:I almost hope it turns into what you folks want it to be just so you have to live with it once there is no imagined political gain for you.

Now you pissed me off.
You seriously think that I want this to get worse for political gain, when people in my own family are at high risk?

That is really **** cold Red.
I can't even deal with you after that.

My respect for you just took a major hit.

Misty » 11 Mar 2020 7:44 pm » wrote:
That is really **** cold Red.
I can't even deal with you after that.

My respect for you just took a major hit.

The majority ( maybe not you) of the death to trumpers are praying to whatever God for there to be a disaster so their failure of a candidate might win.

I shut down this **** after Crim's horrid remark! **** YOU, you self centered ASSHOLE!

crimsongulf » 11 Mar 2020 7:53 pm » wrote:
The majority ( maybe not you) of the death to trumpers are praying to whatever God for there to be a disaster so their failure of a candidate might win.

You are a LIAR you think since that is how YOU think that since YOU have no decency integrity or humanity that it is how OTHER people are but the left is NOT that way but its typical because RACIST PIG we know you are a LIAR

Sure, psycho, anyone and everyone who joins the Trump administration immediately becomes a liar.
Wackjob.

It's a job requirement.

I love psychotic moonbat humor.
Especially coming from the psychopath who told years of lies in defense of serial felon / serial rapist Bill Clinton.

Yet you believe the dotard who has lied over 16,000 times in 3 years.

Go figure.

And what's your source for that? The corrupt liberal MSM that carried three years of anti-Trump Fake News, lies, propaganda and ****.

You can't make stuff like this up.

Whichever official said that is lying, because everyone else is saying there aren't enough test kits.

Do you live under a **** rock?
I have seen doctor after doctor saying that, and elected officials from all over the country.

She shrieks without one single shred of evidence.

HHS Secretary Alex Azar: By the end of this weekend we had 1.1 million test kits that originally shipped. We have another one million that are either in transit or waiting for orders. So we actually have a surplus capacity already that have been produced… The tests are out there. The tests are in every public health lab in the country. They’re in hospitals. They’re in labs.

But I think there is a false premise in your question. Which is a notion that just because I as a person can say, “Oh, I’d like to be tested for the novel coronavirus.” I should be walking into any minute clinic or any other facility and just walking in and saying, “Give me my test.” That’s not how diagnostic testing works in the United States or frankly almost any place in the world… We’ve always been clear if their doctor or public health physician believes they should be tested it needs to always be clinically indicated to receive a test.
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2020/0 ... its-video/

Edit: So Azar is the official you're talking about?


He's a member of TrumpCo. so I don't believe a word he says.
Why is he the head of Health and Human Services anyway?
He's not a doctor.
He was a lobbyist for Big Pharma.

I'll bet he's a Russian agent taking orders from Putin, right psycho?

Just like me!

You can't debate honestly, so you lie and smear.

This administration has zero credibility.
What part of that do you not understand?

We all understand that you're a psychopathic liar who hates Trump, and that not one single word you write can be believed.

Coronavirus burial pits so vast they’re visible from space

Two days after Iran declared its first cases of the novel coronavirus — in what would become one of the largest outbreaks of the illness outside of China — evidence of unusual activity appeared at a cemetery near where the infections emerged.

At the Behesht-e Masoumeh complex in Qom, about 80 miles south of Tehran, the excavation of a new section of the graveyard began as early as Feb. 21, satellite images show, and then rapidly expanded as the virus spread.

By the end of the month, two large trenches — their lengths totaling 100 yards — were visible at the site from space.

Termin8tor » 12 Mar 2020 1:15 pm » wrote:

The full extent of this hoax is amazing.

Trump never called the virus a hoax, psycho
But it is the Official Democrat Talking Point Lie you claim never to tell.
Too bad Jonah Goldberg fell for it.

He should never have used the word 'hoax' in any conversation about the virus.
Many of his followers now believe that the whole coronavirus thing is a Democratic hoax .

Termin8tor » 12 Mar 2020 2:17 pm » wrote:

Misty » 12 Mar 2020 1:34 pm » wrote:

Trump never called the virus a hoax, psycho
But it is the Official Democrat Talking Point Lie you claim never to tell.
Too bad Jonah Goldberg fell for it.

He should never.....

Why are you still lying that he called the virus a hoax?

Can you **** read?
He used the word 'hoax' when talking about the virus, so he planted that seed in his followers' heads.
And he knew exactly what he was doing.
I have seen several of his followers interviewed at his rallies who dangerously believe that it is a hoax.

“Now the Democrats are politicizing the coronavirus, you know that, right?” he said.

“Coronavirus, they’re politicizing it. We did one of the great jobs.

You say, ‘How’s President Trump doing?’ They go, ‘Oh, not good, not good.’

They have no clue. They don’t have any clue. They can’t even count their votes in Iowa.”

Then the president, who often dismissed special counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation as a hoax, continued, “They tried the impeachment hoax.

That was on a perfect conversation. They tried anything. They tried it over and over.

They’d been doing it since you got in. It’s all turning. They lost. It’s all turning.

Think of it. Think of it. And this is their new hoax.”

After talking about the coronavirus he said, "And THIS is their new hoax."

He never should have used that word in conjunction with the virus in any context.

Termin8tor » 12 Mar 2020 2:39 pm » wrote:

Misty » 12 Mar 2020 2:31 pm » wrote:

Termin8tor » 12 Mar 2020 2:17 pm » wrote:Why are you still lying that he called the virus a hoax?

Can you **** read?

Yes, I have read for days it not weeks that you've claimed that Trump called the virus itself a hoax.
And you've been lying the entire time, no surprise.

Why are some of his defenders calling it a hoax?
Where did they get that idea from?

Some of Trump’s self-appointed surrogates in the media, such as Rush Limbaugh, declared fears of coronavirus were “being weaponized” by the media to scare Wall Street and hurt Trump’s re-election.

The word “hoax” keeps popping up across social media among his defenders.

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/t ... irus-hoax/

Senators vent frustration with senior officials over coronavirus testing shortfall.

Senators vented their frustration to senior administration officials during a closed-door briefing Thursday morning over what lawmakers complain is a persistent shortage of coronavirus testing kits across the country and unreliable data on how fast the virus is spreading in the United States.

After Vice President Pence told GOP lawmakers at a private lunch meeting earlier in the week that millions of test kits would be made available at the end of the week, senators on Thursday complained to senior officials that the shortage of testing kits remains a major problem.

"There's frustrations with the testing," said Sen. Shelley Moore Capito (R-W.Va.), the chairwoman of the Senate Appropriations Subcommittee on Homeland Security, as she left the meeting.

She said lawmakers also expressed frustration over the "accuracy" of the data on "people infected" around the country.

Capito said she and colleagues are frustrated the testing "is just not widespread enough" and "not comprehensive enough."

"What do you tell your constituents? That's where we are," she said.

Senior administration officials warned senators that it will be difficult to distribute enough testing kits because of supply chain problems, highlighting the fact that the kits are primarily manufactured overseas.

"We are going to have - and I suspect are having, and I think they alluded to it in there - a supply chain problem," said Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.).

"We're going to have supply chain problems for two reasons.

The first is these things are primarily made outside the United States and either those supplies are being disrupted by factory shutdowns, like in China, or the countries who make them are hoarding them, like India or South Korea," he said.

"I believe that's going to be an issue that is impeding faster deployment of these tests," Rubio added.

Senators attended the nearly hourlong briefing in the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee room with several senior administration officials, including Dr. Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, and Dr. Robert Redfield, the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Ken Cuccinelli, the acting director of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, also attended.

Rubio said his colleagues are frustrated over a lack of concrete information on the extent of infections in the United States.

"I think people are frustrated," he said. "We all want a date.

We all want to be told by Friday there will be 10 million tests available.

The problem is they can't tell us that."

Senators are on high alert after a staffer in Sen. Maria Cantwell's (D-Wash.) tested positive Wednesday for the coronavirus.

Cantwell has closed her Washington, D.C., office for the rest of the week for deep cleaning.

Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.), who said his staff was in contact with Cantwell's staff, said he will ask his aides to telecommute on Friday.

"We're concerned about it. I think anyone who feels who needs to be tested should be tested immediately," he said.

"We're going to try tomorrow, we're going to try telecommut[ing]" he added.

"We're going to see how that works tomorrow so we don't put any of our employees in danger."

Yet, Manchin said "we should do everything we can to make sure we keep this government working."

"We should not shut the government down in any way, shape or form," he added.

Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah) also told reporters that he will ask his staff to begin teleworking.

Sen. Mike Braun (R-Ind.) said he will continue his regular D.C. operations but is asking staff to be on alert for symptoms of coronavirus and to self-quarantine themselves immediately if they feel sick.

"I think any one individual should treat this with everything we've learned about it.

If you show symptoms, isolate yourself. Do all the things that we've been hearing about.

I'm washing my hands a lot more," Braun said.

But some Senate staff have expressed concern about coming to work in the weeks ahead while the extent of the virus's spread remains largely unknown.

"The Senate building is like a giant cruise ship with people coming in here from off the street," said one concerned staffer.

Congressional leaders announced Thursday morning that the Capitol and the Senate and House office buildings will be closed to the public until April 1 because of the coronavirus but that official business will continue.

https://thehill.com/homenews/senate/487 ... ssion=true

Pence says there's been 'irresponsible rhetoric' from people downplaying coronavirus.

WASHINGTON — Vice President Mike Pence said Thursday that there has been “irresponsible rhetoric” from people who have downplayed the seriousness of the U.S. coronavirus outbreak.

In an interview on the “TODAY” show, Savannah Guthrie asked what message Pence sends to people who aren’t afraid of the coronavirus and think it’s just politics and hype, quoting from President Donald Trump who said on Monday that the “fake news media and their partner, the Democrat Party, is doing everything to inflame the coronavirus situation.”

“There's been some irresponsible rhetoric, but the American people should know President Trump has no higher priority than the health and safety and well being of the people of this country,” Pence said in response but it was not clear who he was referring to.

The irresponsible rhetoric is coming from Sniffles and his buddies at FOX News TRUMP TV.

U.S. Virus Response Marred by Overconfidence and Delays

Despite reassurances, testing has been limited and health officials are contradicting White House statements.

As the new coronavirus spread around the world, sickening tens of thousands of people, President Donald Trump suggested that warm weather would kill the virus and said the number of U.S. cases of Covid-19 was “going very substantially down, not up.”

He predicted the imminent availability of a vaccine and blamed the Obama administration for the slow rollout of test kits.

With the number of cases in the U.S. now in four figures, public-health experts have harsh criticism for how the White House has responded.

“This is an unmitigated disaster that the administration has brought upon the population, and I don’t say this lightly,” says Ashish Jha, director of the Harvard Global Health Institute.

“We have had a much worse response than Iran, than Italy, than China and South Korea.”

Financial executives are just as concerned: “Where is the U.S. leadership, which was one of the defining features of the crisis in 2008?” BlackRock Inc. Vice Chairman Philipp Hildebrand said on Bloomberg TV on March 10.

Why didn’t the U.S. move faster?

The federal government’s role in the crisis began in earnest on Jan. 31, when Trump forbade most foreign nationals from entering the U.S. if they had recently traveled to China.

“I give Trump credit for the travel restrictions—and he has taken that credit,” says Ian Bremmer, president of Eurasia Group, a political risk consulting firm.

But the few weeks of time the U.S. bought with the travel restriction were frittered away, experts say.

What other countries have done, and what the U.S. didn’t do, is immediate and widespread testing for the virus, which Jha says is the single most important step in containing the spread of disease.

The administration decided against a test already in use by the World Health Organization and instead developed its own version, even though “you could see the tsunami coming,” Jha says.

The U.S.’s resulting coronavirus test contained a faulty component that led to many inconclusive results.

It took several weeks to fix that.

Initial U.S. guidelines for testing were also narrow, instructing hospitals and doctors to screen only people who had respiratory symptoms and had either traveled in China recently or come into close contact with someone who had been infected.

In California, Oregon, and Washington state, the epicenter of the U.S. outbreak, those limits may have left undetected the virus’s spread to people who had done neither.

The White House’s messaging in January and into late February continued to be that the virus had been contained.

“You would literally not know what to do to protect yourself if you were only listening to” the Trump administration, says Bremmer.

While states and public-health departments are largely responsible for their own preparedness and delivery of health care, the administration didn’t make sure hospitals and health departments had the funds, equipment, and training needed to respond to local outbreaks, say epidemiologists and other experts.

That left facilities underprepared.

On Feb. 25, the president told reporters traveling with him in India that the virus was “very well under control in our country” and that the U.S. was “in very good shape.”

Hours later, federal health officials warned that the spread of the virus was inevitable and advised businesses to arrange for employees to work from home and consider scrapping meetings and conferences.

“It’s not so much of a question of if this will happen anymore, but rather more of a question of exactly when this will happen,” Nancy Messonnier, director of the National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases, part of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, told reporters.

“We are asking the American public to work with us to prepare, in the expectation that this could be bad.”

Trump’s response, upon returning to the U.S., was to contradict that advice, saying he didn’t believe the virus’s spread was inevitable.

“We have it so well under control,” he said.

“We really have done a very good job.”

As criticism of the U.S.’s slow response grew, Trump on Feb. 26 named Vice President Mike Pence as his coronavirus coordinator.

Even then, the president pronounced, “The risk to the American people remains very low.”

The next day, Trump named Deborah Birx as the official in charge of scientific and medical efforts against the virus.

Birx, a medical doctor and retired Army colonel, had been the U.S. State Department’s highly respected global ambassador for AIDS prevention and treatment.

Experts were pleased by her appointment but put off by what the White House did next—ordering all public communications to go through Pence.

Jim Thomas, an epidemiology professor at the University of North Carolina, says previous health scares have typically had a scientist as the public face of the response and complained that this time scientific voices “have had to contend with the confusion introduced by the political voices.”

On March 6, Trump signed an $8.3 billion spending measure to speed federal funds for vaccine development and help state and local governments buy masks and other equipment, hire staff, supply laboratories, and assist community health centers.

Just after arriving in West Palm Beach, Fla., where he spent the weekend playing golf and hosting a lavish birthday party for his son Donald Jr.’s girlfriend, Trump tweeted, “We have a perfectly coordinated and fine tuned plan at the White House for our attack on CoronaVirus.”

But all over the country, front-line medical workers were telling a different story by warning of supply shortages, and hospitals were uncertain when they’d be able to test suspected cases without relying on government labs.

Lawmakers said the federal government would fall far short of being able to test 1 million people within days, as promised.

Hospitals were getting fewer than half the high-quality respirator masks they were ordering, said Chaun Powell, a vice president at Premier Inc., which helps hospitals purchase supplies.

If Trump’s goal had been to minimize the threat to keep markets calm, his misstatements and delays may have had the opposite effect: On March 9 the stock market saw its biggest rout since the 2008 financial crisis, sending shares down about 19% from their Feb. 19 all-time high.

The U.S. dollar, normally strong in times of crisis as investors seek a haven, has lost value, which may reflect a lack of confidence by markets in the administration’s response.

“The federal government is the only game in town,” wrote Stephen Stanley, chief economist at Amherst Pierpont, in a note to clients, in which he also warned against thinking that additional Federal Reserve easing or fiscal stimulus could do much good.

“I would argue that the most important front right now is the public health response,” he wrote, which has “been underwhelming.”

For a president who often measures his success by how well stocks are faring, the market plunge was enough to reverse course on the need for economic stimulus.

Trump announced he would meet with congressional officials soon to work on a measure to provide “substantial relief,” including to industries that have been hit by the virus.

What can we do to catch up?

Comparisons with other countries’ responses highlight the U.S.’s lack of central coordination.

Singapore is the standout, says Eurasia’s Bremmer.

The country responded quickly and transparently, giving the public a wealth of information about how to protect itself.

For example, the government created an app to inform users where people with the virus had visited so others could avoid those places.

South Korea is a close second, Bremmer says: It created drive-thru testing centers, among other measures.

The U.S. effort is moving toward what those countries have done, belatedly.

The CDC is advising high-risk people to stock up on medicine, food, and household necessities and to avoid crowds and contact with people who are sick.

Conferences, festivals, sporting events, college classes, and business travel are being sharply curtailed.

Under pressure from governors, several large health insurance companies said they’d waive patients’ costs for coronavirus tests.

Labs in every state are now capable of testing for the virus.

But Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker said on March 10 he was “frustrated” by the federal government’s lack of assistance with testing.

For now, the Pollyanna-ish tone at the top has died down.

On Feb. 27, CDC Director Robert Redfield downplayed Messonnier’s warning that the virus would spread beyond those who had traveled to China or come into contact with an infected person.

By March 10, he conceded to House lawmakers that the U.S. is past a containment-only approach and must now try to limit the virus’s impact: “In some areas, we’re in high mitigation.”

'It is a failing. Let's admit it,' Fauci says of coronavirus testing capacity.

"The system is not really geared to what we need right now," Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said at a House hearing.

America has failed to meet the capacity for coronavirus testing that it needs, a top public health official publicly acknowledged Thursday.

"The system is not really geared to what we need right now," Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said in a House hearing about coronavirus test kits in the United States, which were initially dogged by technical glitches.

"That is a failing. Let's admit it."

Fauci was responding to a question from Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, D-Florida, who asked about a claim by trade organization National Nurses United alleging that "countless" health care workers exposed to the coronavirus have been refused a test for it.

When the virus first started appearing in America, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention had narrow criteria for who could be tested for it, further limiting the number of tests performed on top of the technical problems.

Those guidelines have since been expanded.

Dr. Robert Redfield, director of the CDC, who was also testifying in the hearing, directed Wasserman Schultz's question to Fauci.

"The idea of anybody getting it easily the way people in other countries are doing it, we're not set up for that," Fauci told Wasserman Schultz.

"Do I think we should be? Yes. But we're not."

The blunt acknowledgment came as the CDC reported it had tested just over 11,000 specimens for the virus so far, far fewer than other nations, especially given that multiple specimens are needed for each patient.

Meanwhile, South Korea is testing nearly 20,000 patients per day, according to the BBC.

In response to Fauci, Wasserman Schultz said: "That's really disturbing, and I appreciate the information."

The question came a week after a nurse exposed to the virus in northern California said in a statement through National Nurses United that despite having symptoms, the CDC would not test her.

"They said they would not test me because if I were wearing the recommended protective equipment, then I wouldn't have the coronavirus.

What kind of science-based answer is that?" the nurse said.

https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-n ... g-n1157036