As a child, this blogger remembered Saturday afternoons and a radio quiz show, "Ask Dr. IQ," that featured a genius, Dr. IQ, who asked questions to members of the studio audience. Correct answers brought the cry from Dr. IQ: "Give that lady/man 10 silver dollars!" And occasionally, the announced cried out, "We have a lady/man in the balcony." Dr. IQ asked the contestant a question and if he received the correct answer, he awarded the winning contestant a lifetime supply (it seemed) of the candy bars from Mars Candy Company, the show's sponsor. Then another thought came to this blogger as he scanned the article by the NY Fishwrap's Viper (Michelle Goldberg.). In today's version, the announcer yells, "We have an idiot in the balcony." Imaginary Dr. IQ asks the idiot in the balcony a health question and the anwer was "Give the sick person an injection of Lysol." And Dr. IQ replies, "OK, give that idiot a shot of Clorox and send him home." If this is a (fair & balanced) wish that the COVID-19 infection of members of the White House staff might find it's way into the Oval Office and its occupant, so be it.
PS; The source of this blog's noms de stylo serpent reference to the three women on the NY Fishwrap's Op-Ed staff began with this 2001 essay by The Cobra (Maureen Dowd) who's been joined by her distaff colleagues: The Krait (Gail Collins), and — most recently — The Viper (Michelle Goldberg).
[x YouTube]
"The Liar Tweets Tonight" (Parody of "The Lion Sleeps Tonight")
By Roy Zimmerman and The ReZisters, featuring Sandy Riccardi
This genius parody has become this blogger's current earworm and Resistance Anthem. So, if this is a (fair & balanced) first step toward doing the right thing, so be it.
[x NY Fishwrap]
We’re All Casualties Of Trump’s War On Science
By The Viper (Michelle Goldberg)
TagCrowd Cloud provides a visual summary of the blog post below
In 2004, “60 Minutes” aired a segment on what it called “virus hunters,” scientists searching for bugs that can leap from animals to humans and cause pandemics. “What worries me the most is that we are going to miss the next emerging disease,” said a scientist named Peter Daszak, describing his fear of a Coronavirus “that moves from one part of the planet to another, wiping out people as it moves along.”
In the intervening years, Daszak became president of the EcoHealth Alliance, a nonprofit research organization focused on emerging pandemics. EcoHealth worked with China’s Wuhan Institute of Virology to study coronaviruses in bats that could infect humans, and, as Science magazine put it, “to develop tools that could help researchers create diagnostics, treatments and vaccines for human outbreaks.” Since 2014, the EcoHealth Alliance has received a grant from the National Institutes of Health, until its funding was abruptly cut two weeks ago.
The reason, as “60 Minutes” reported on Sunday evening, was a conspiracy theory spread by Representative Matt Gaetz, the Florida Republican who in March wore a gas mask on the House floor to mock concern about the new coronavirus. On April 14, Gaetz appeared on Tucker Carlson’s Fox News show and claimed that the NIH grant went to the Wuhan Institute, which Gaetz intimated might have been the source of the virus — the institute may have “birthed a monster,” in his words.
The first of Gaetz’s claims was flatly false, and the second unlikely; the CIA has reportedly found no evidence of a link between the virus and the Wuhan lab. But at a White House briefing a few days later, a reporter from the right-wing website Newsmax told President Trump that under Barack Obama, the NIH gave the Wuhan lab a $3.7 million grant. “Why would the US. give a grant like that to China?” she asked.
In fact, Trump’s administration had recently renewed EcoHealth’s grant, but Trump didn’t appear to know that. “The Obama administration gave them a grant of $3.7 million?” he asked. Then he said, “We will end that grant very quickly.”
And they did. But ending the grant dealt a blow to efforts to find treatments and a vaccine for the Coronavirus. Remdesivir, the antiviral drug that’s shown some promise in COVID-19 patients, was earlier tested against bat viruses EcoHealth discovered. Now the nonprofit is facing layoffs.
This political hit on Daszak’s work is far from the only way that the Trump administration’s contempt for science has undermined America’s coronavirus response. Conservative antipathy to science is nothing new; Republicans have long denied and denigrated the scientific consensus on issues from evolution to stem cell research to climate change. This hostility has several causes, including populist distrust of experts, religious rejection of information that undermines biblical literalism and efforts by giant corporations to evade regulation.
But it’s grown worse under Trump, with his authoritarian impulse to quash any facts, from inauguration crowd sizes to hurricane paths, that might reflect poorly on him.
Until recently, it seemed as if Trump’s sabotage of efforts to combat climate change would be the most destructive legacy of his disregard for science. But the Coronavirus has presented the country with an emergency that only sound science can solve. That means that the Trump administration’s disdain for expertise, its elevation of slavish loyalty over technical competence, has become a more immediate threat.
Months before this pandemic began [emphasis supplied], Reuters reported, the Trump administration axed the job of an epidemiologist working for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in China to help detect emerging disease outbreaks. As the pandemic raged, the administration removed Rick Bright, one of America’s premier experts on vaccine development, from an agency overseeing efforts to develop a coronavirus vaccine. Last week Bright filed a whistle-blower complaint claiming he’d suffered retaliation because he resisted “funding potentially dangerous drugs promoted by those with political connections and by the administration itself.” (A federal watchdog agency has called for him to be reinstated pending its investigation.)
Another whistle-blower complaint, filed by a former volunteer on the Coronavirus team assembled by Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, claims the effort has been beset by inexperience and incompetence. The Associated Press reported on how the White House buried guidance from the CDC on how communities could safely reopen. Now the president is urging Americans to return to work even as the White House itself has proved unable to keep the Coronavirus at bay.
According to Axios, Trump has even privately started expressing skepticism of the Coronavirus’s death toll, suggesting it’s lower than official statistics say. (Most experts believe the opposite.) “A senior administration official said he expects the president to begin publicly questioning the death toll as it closes in on his predictions for the final death count and damages him politically,” reported Axios. The Trump administration’s approach to the coronavirus began with denialism, and that’s likely how it will end.
Any progress America makes in fighting COVID-19 will be in spite of its federal government, not because of it. “I am speaking out because to combat this deadly virus, science — not politics or cronyism — has to lead the way,” Dr. Bright said when he went public with his complaint in April. Trump won’t let that happen. He’d rather essentially give up on combating it at all. ##&##5;
[Michelle Goldberg has been an Opinion columnist since 2017. She is the author of several books about politics, religion and women’s rights, and was part of a team that won a Pulitzer Prize for public service in 2018 for reporting on workplace sexual harassment issues. She received a BA (English) from the State University of New York (SUNY) at Buffalo and an MS (journalism) from the University of California at Berkeley.]
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