Another Goofball COVID thread!!! For Royamcr!!!

This is a lighthearted thread. How about just keeping it that way without hijacking it and it gets closed because so many folks in this forum are too fucking stupid to stick to a simple topic?

Maybe it's just me, but I'd much rather see threads like this pop up than a 20th covid or election denier thread pop up from the usual goofball suspects. Originally Posted by Lucas McCain

I got some good news and some bad news McCain. I'm moving my reply to royamcr out of your lighthearted thread. However this will be the 163rd Goofball COVID thread!!!

I honestly think he and his administration saved several hundred thousand lives worldwide by pushing the mRNA vaccines through the FDA and assisting Pfizer and Moderna with Operation Warp Speed. Without those, the vaccines might have hit the market months later than they did.

However, on topic, yes, saying he wasn't going to get the booster was stupid. Anyone his age and in his physical condition should have gotten the booster, as he ultimately did. Holding super spreader events at the White House and at his rallies was stupid too. Originally Posted by Tiny

Saved 100s of thousand lives??? All the while mishandled the whole thing and over 1.2 million died. Warp speed didn't need a name, it just needed done. Really think Clinton would have just sat around and did nothing? Bullshit. I don't think the pandemic would have gotten out of hand at all if Clinton were president. She probably would have been more prepared to begin with, then when it hit would have been on top of it all. Trump only gave a fuck about getting reelected and how everything he did looked in that regard.

You say saved 100s of thousand lives, I say most likely caused 1 million extra deaths in the US alone. Originally Posted by royamcr

You are an anti-Trump, partisan Democrat. That is to say, you're a wee bit biased.

Trump did not kill 1 million Americans with COVID. That's laughable. "Only" about 360,000 died while he was president. And 1.2 million have died to date.

One argument Democratic Party operatives make is that if the Trump administration hadn't pulled out so many CDC personnel from China, we would have stopped the epidemic in its tracks and it never would have left China. It would have been like the Andromeda Strain. This is laughable too. The Chinese weren't going to let the CDC do jack, and the CDC probably couldn't have done jack anyway. Remember how China covered up what was happening in Wuhan for weeks.

Remember too when Democrats criticized Trump to high heaven for stopping flights from China and later Europe. Biden called him xenophobic for doing that! Crazy!

Another argument is that Trump allowed USA supplies of personal protective equipment to deplete and reduced our pandemic preparedness with budget cuts. Well, George W. Bush had us better situated for a pandemic at the end of his second term than we'd ever been. We started to slip during Obama, and then admittedly the slippage went into overdrive during Trump's term.

But that too wouldn't have made a lick of difference. We weren't going to have 5 billion N95 and KN95 facemasks in reserve under any president, including a President Royamcr. Look at where we are now after three years of Biden. Many of the factories that started up during the Trump administration to manufacture face masks and the like have closed, and hospitals are back to buying mostly from China, Taiwan and South Korea. Our Strategic National Stockpile run by Biden's HHS is fucked up. It spent $1 billion on anthrax vaccines while failing to stock up on N95 masks. States can't give away stockpiled pandemic gear so they're trashing it. That's bull shit. In 2020 I had about 50 expired N95 masks left over from the SARS scare and was damn glad of that. If another 1918 influenza pandemic or 2020 coronavirus epidemic comes along, we won't be prepared.

https://apnews.com/article/coronavir...91a14daadecaba

We have a federal system of government where states and localities and private businesses provide public health care services, and the NIH and CDC provide advice. What exactly would a president Biden have done about that? Maybe called out the military to enforce mask mandates? How do you think people like texassapper and WYID and 40% of other Americans would have reacted to that? Hell, Trump stood up in a rally in Dallas and told people they should get vaccinated and he practically got booed off the stage. If you indeed were going to save 1 million American lives versus the 1.2 million we lost, then Trump and Biden would have had to enforce restrictions on freedom of movement and association, mask mandates, vaccine mandates and the like at gunpoint.

The United States is not an island unto itself, figuratively speaking. It's not socially cohesive. It was never going to perform like Taiwan or New Zealand or South Korea or Australia in terms of limiting Death from COVID.

Trump received universal acclamation from people who knew what they were talking about for Operation Warp Speed. People like Fauci and Redfield. I'm not getting that from Fox News. I'm getting it from Doctor Radio, Sirius XM channel 110.

And there's no way Biden would have pushed approvals for the vaccines through the FDA as quickly as Trump did. You correctly state that a big motivation for Trump was that he figured it would help him in the election if we had a vaccine by, say, October, 2020. But so what. We would have been waiting months longer for a vaccine if Biden had been president. About 40,000 people a month were dying from COVID. Assume three months of lives were saved with a vaccine that was initially 95% effective. That's 120,000 in the USA, and translates to hundreds of thousands of lives saved worldwide, like I said.

I've been dancing around Hillary. I don't know how she would have done. If she governed like her husband Bill during his second term, she would have done better than Biden. She would have been much more likely to pursue public/private partnerships like Operation Warp Speed than Biden, who places his faith in the hands of big government. But I don't think she would have gotten the vaccine through the FDA as quickly as Trump. On the other hand she wouldn't have been holding super spreader events like Trump rallies, and she probably would have used the bully pulpit better than Trump.

Trump did not kill 1 million Americans with COVID. That's laughable. "Only" about 360,000 died while he was president. And 1.2 million have died to date.
Was just saying that if Trump didn't ignore the situation for about a month and half, Mid Jan 2020 to end of February 2020, I'm pretty sure the whole situation would have been mitigated early on and the whole pandemic may have not gotten as bad as it did. I think many would have died, maybe 200-300k but not the almost 1.4 million to date in the US alone. Biden won the election and inherited a disaster from Trump. Saying more died under Biden is a weak argument.

One argument Democratic Party operatives make is that if the Trump administration hadn't pulled out so many CDC personnel from China, we would have stopped the epidemic in its tracks and it never would have left China. It would have been like the Andromeda Strain. This is laughable too. The Chinese weren't going to let the CDC do jack, and the CDC probably couldn't have done jack anyway. Remember how China covered up what was happening in Wuhan for weeks.

Remember too when Democrats criticized Trump to high heaven for stopping flights from China and later Europe. Biden called him xenophobic for doing that! Crazy! This has been debunked, Biden's speech was shortly after trumps announcement of restrictions and he wasn't aware of it at the time. Biden supported the restrictions later on.



Another argument is that Trump allowed USA supplies of personal protective equipment to deplete and reduced our pandemic preparedness with budget cuts. Well, George W. Bush had us better situated for a pandemic at the end of his second term than we'd ever been. We started to slip during Obama, and then admittedly the slippage went into overdrive during Trump's term.

But that too wouldn't have made a lick of difference. We weren't going to have 5 billion N95 and KN95 facemasks in reserve under any president, including a President Royamcr. Look at where we are now after three years of Biden. Many of the factories that started up during the Trump administration to manufacture face masks and the like have closed, and hospitals are back to buying mostly from China, Taiwan and South Korea. Our Strategic National Stockpile run by Biden's HHS is fucked up. It spent $1 billion on anthrax vaccines while failing to stock up on N95 masks. States can't give away stockpiled pandemic gear so they're trashing it. That's bull shit. In 2020 I had about 50 expired N95 masks left over from the SARS scare and was damn glad of that. If another 1918 influenza pandemic or 2020 coronavirus epidemic comes along, we won't be prepared.

https://apnews.com/article/coronavir...91a14daadecaba

We have a federal system of government where states and localities and private businesses provide public health care services, and the NIH and CDC provide advice. What exactly would a president Biden have done about that? Maybe called out the military to enforce mask mandates? How do you think people like texassapper and WYID and 40% of other Americans would have reacted to that? Hell, Trump stood up in a rally in Dallas and told people they should get vaccinated and he practically got booed off the stage. If you indeed were going to save 1 million American lives versus the 1.2 million we lost, then Trump and Biden would have had to enforce restrictions on freedom of movement and association, mask mandates, vaccine mandates and the like at gunpoint.

The United States is not an island unto itself, figuratively speaking. It's not socially cohesive. It was never going to perform like Taiwan or New Zealand or South Korea or Australia in terms of limiting Death from COVID.

Trump received universal acclamation from people who knew what they were talking about for Operation Warp Speed. People like Fauci and Redfield. I'm not getting that from Fox News. I'm getting it from Doctor Radio, Sirius XM channel 110.

And there's no way Biden would have pushed approvals for the vaccines through the FDA as quickly as Trump did. You correctly state that a big motivation for Trump was that he figured it would help him in the election if we had a vaccine by, say, October, 2020. But so what. We would have been waiting months longer for a vaccine if Biden had been president. About 40,000 people a month were dying from COVID. Assume three months of lives were saved with a vaccine that was initially 95% effective. That's 120,000 in the USA, and translates to hundreds of thousands of lives saved worldwide, like I said. You can't really say that Biden wouldn't have pushed for emergency approvals. You are speculating that Hillary would have just said fuck everyone I don't care about the citizens. In this context also, we have to assume Hillary would have been handling the Covid situation not Biden, Biden wasn't in the picture until nearly a year after it started.

I've been dancing around Hillary. I don't know how she would have done. If she governed like her husband Bill during his second term, she would have done better than Biden. She would have been much more likely to pursue public/private partnerships like Operation Warp Speed than Biden, who places his faith in the hands of big government. But I don't think she would have gotten the vaccine through the FDA as quickly as Trump. On the other hand she wouldn't have been holding super spreader events like Trump rallies, and she probably would have used the bully pulpit better than Trump.
Here is how I think Hillary would have handled it. No "warp speed" bullshit marketing. Behind the scenes all information available would have been gathered and analyzed. Work on vaccines for this variant would have been started, they weren't anything new technology wise. No time would have been wasted telling people it was a "flu" and would go away by April. When ready a single CDC recommendation on who should get vaccines and when. No conjecture about alternate treatments or cures would have happened, especially on live TV. Lockdowns and shutdowns would have happened at least a month earlier and would have been much more effective. By the end of 2020 the situation would have been winding down and world wide economic issues would have been avoided. Hillary would have done everything with the health of citizens in mind. Trump on the other hand took his reelection bid first cause he had to get reelected to avoid many court cases looming. Hillary wouldn't have had any of these concerns. Lock her up was never a real thing, to this date she hasn't had one indictment... After Trump lost he pretty much said fuck all to the pandemic and left Biden a monumental disaster to unfuck.
Originally Posted by Tiny

That's all I have time for, for now. If trump didn't fuck up the pandemic and let it get out of control he would probably be president still.

Was just saying that if Trump didn't ignore the situation for about a month and half, Mid Jan 2020 to end of February 2020, I'm pretty sure the whole situation would have been mitigated early on and the whole pandemic may have not gotten as bad as it did. I think many would have died, maybe 200-300k but not the almost 1.4 million to date in the US alone. Biden won the election and inherited a disaster from Trump. Saying more died under Biden is a weak argument. Originally Posted by royamcr

When Biden became president, we had two very effective COVID vaccines available. And a significant % of the population had immunity from COVID infections. Later on, Paxlovid came to market. Still, 840,000 people have died from COVID during Biden's time in office, compared to 360,000 during Trump's term. That's not a weak argument.

My thoughts on this were the same as yours up until the summer of 2020. I said that as forcefully as anyone in this forum.
Well, I was wrong. And so are you. Again, given the rights and powers relegated to the states, localities and individuals in the USA, there's no way we could have held deaths to 250,000, short of imposing draconian controls, like China did. Take a look at this list,

https://www.statista.com/statistics/...n-inhabitants/

If the damage had been limited to 250,000 deaths, the per capita death rate from COVID would have been 750 per million in the USA. Countries that did that well are mostly small, Asian and/or socially cohesive, and/or "islands unto themselves" (e.g. Australia, New Zealand) that shut off to the world. Or they have very young populations or you can't trust their numbers (e.g. African countries.) Again, there's no way we could have gotten there short of martial law, which I don't believe you would have favored.

You can't really say that Biden wouldn't have pushed for emergency approvals. You are speculating that Hillary would have just said fuck everyone I don't care about the citizens. In this context also, we have to assume Hillary would have been handling the Covid situation not Biden, Biden wasn't in the picture until nearly a year after it started. Originally Posted by royamcr

Biden and Kamala Harris said they wouldn't take the vaccine, presumably because they thought Trump pushed it through the FDA prematurely. Unlike Biden, Hillary doesn't have a track record dealing with the pandemic and she isn't running for president.

Here is how I think Hillary would have handled it. No "warp speed" bullshit marketing. Behind the scenes all information available would have been gathered and analyzed. Work on vaccines for this variant would have been started, they weren't anything new technology wise. No time would have been wasted telling people it was a "flu" and would go away by April. When ready a single CDC recommendation on who should get vaccines and when. No conjecture about alternate treatments or cures would have happened, especially on live TV. Lockdowns and shutdowns would have happened at least a month earlier and would have been much more effective. By the end of 2020 the situation would have been winding down and world wide economic issues would have been avoided. Hillary would have done everything with the health of citizens in mind. Trump on the other hand took his reelection bid first cause he had to get reelected to avoid many court cases looming. Hillary wouldn't have had any of these concerns. Lock her up was never a real thing, to this date she hasn't had one indictment... After Trump lost he pretty much said fuck all to the pandemic and left Biden a monumental disaster to unfuck. Originally Posted by royamcr

Like I said, she might have done a decent job, better than Biden has. You give far too much credit and blame to Biden, Trump and a hypothetical Clinton presidency. The president is not all-powerful. Institutions and organizations like the CDC, health departments, hospitals, and state and local governments were collectively more important. Plus there are the American people, many of whom weren't going to follow instructions issued by the government. Hell, where I live, many people ignored social distancing, lockdown and mask measures entered into law by Republican governor Greg Abbott back in late spring and summer of 2020.

It's debatable whether some of the measures you mention would have decreased the number of deaths.

Do you really think that Hillary Clinton would have forced a single recommendation on the CDC? I'd give her more credit than that.

The fact that Trump wanted a vaccine before the election was in part what motivated him to push approvals through the FDA. You may not like his reasoning, but you should be happy with the result -- effective vaccines that were developed and in peoples arms in record time.

As to this winding down in 2020, that's a complete pipedream. The Delta and Omicron waves, which killed a lot of people, more than the initial wave, came after that. And they came from foreign countries, during Biden's time in office.

That's all I have time for, for now. If trump didn't fuck up the pandemic and let it get out of control he would probably be president still. Originally Posted by royamcr

I disagree. Whatever he did, with the pandemic the economy would have sucked in 2020, and people vote their pocketbooks. And then there are some of Trump's personal characteristics that make it difficult to win. He's been losing elections for Republicans since 2018. Or 2016 if you look at the presidential popular vote.

This has been debunked, Biden's speech was shortly after trumps announcement of restrictions and he wasn't aware of it at the time. Biden supported the restrictions later on. Originally Posted by royamcr

The fact checkers took what Biden's campaign said at face value and ran with it. You may (or may not) be right about Biden's speech. But the next day he accused Trump of xenophobia in a tweet. He and his campaign certainly knew about the travel ban by then. Subsequently he stressed Trump's purported xenophobia to Asian audiences.

The campaign says Biden’s January 31 accusations – that Trump has a record of “hysterical xenophobia” and “fear mongering” – were not about the travel restrictions at all. The campaign says Biden did not know about the restrictions at the time of his speech, since his campaign event in Iowa started shortly after the Trump administration briefing where the restrictions were revealed by Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar.

THE FACTS: No, Biden did not come out against the travel restrictions on China. He said little about them at the time. In April, his campaign said he supported travel restrictions if “guided by medical experts.”

Biden did say Trump has a record of xenophobia, a comment made during an Iowa campaign event when the restrictions were announced. Biden said Trump was “fear-mongering” against foreigners and the Democrat took issue with Trump’s references to the “China virus” as an example. He did not address the travel steps.

The campaign says Biden’s January 31 accusations – that Trump has a record of “hysterical xenophobia” and “fear mongering” – were not about the travel restrictions at all. The campaign says Biden did not know about the restrictions at the time of his speech, since his campaign event in Iowa started shortly after the Trump administration briefing where the restrictions were revealed by Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar.

THE FACTS: No, Biden did not come out against the travel restrictions on China. He said little about them at the time. In April, his campaign said he supported travel restrictions if “guided by medical experts.”

Biden did say Trump has a record of xenophobia, a comment made during an Iowa campaign event when the restrictions were announced. Biden said Trump was “fear-mongering” against foreigners and the Democrat took issue with Trump’s references to the “China virus” as an example. He did not address the travel steps. Originally Posted by royamcr

That may very well be true, that Biden didn't know about the travel restrictions at the time of the speech. But he sure as hell did the next day when he tweeted this:

The day after Trump announced the travel restrictions on China, Biden tweeted that “We are in the midst of a crisis with the coronavirus. We need to lead the way with science — not Donald Trump’s record of hysteria, xenophobia, and fear-mongering. He is the worst possible person to lead our country through a global health emergency.”

https://www.nationalreview.com/corne...ns-xenophobic/

You can have the last word if you want Royamcr. I've got to get some work done. You're a worthy debating partner.

I spend time looking up things and fact check, It's been around 4 years since a lot of this has happened and we are judging in hindsight. A lot of unknowns at the time and we were scrambling to do anything possible to contain this. Some of it may have seemed overreaching. Distancing, masking, lockdowns, etc. People hated it, didn't affect me too much though, it is what it is. Just do what is recommended, it wasn't that bad wearing a mask. It was more painful seeing all the instant virologist on facebook popping up. Saying masks don't stop the virus, it is too small. Most of them are dummies and didn't realize the virus doesn't float around all by itself. Anytime someone talks, sneezes, or coughs you exhale and if infected that shit can float around, masks did help with that.

We couldn't have had a worse president overseeing all of this. Never has there been a more untrusted, controversial, polarizing, and self serving person as president.

There was way too much mixed messaging from the top, blaming others like Fauci, which is still happening to this day.

That may very well be true, that Biden didn't know about the travel restrictions at the time of the speech. But he sure as hell did the next day when he tweeted this:

The day after Trump announced the travel restrictions on China, Biden tweeted that “We are in the midst of a crisis with the coronavirus. We need to lead the way with science — not Donald Trump’s record of hysteria, xenophobia, and fear-mongering. He is the worst possible person to lead our country through a global health emergency.”

https://www.nationalreview.com/corne...ns-xenophobic/

You can have the last word if you want Royamcr. I've got to get some work done. You're a worthy debating partner. Originally Posted by Tiny