The biggest lie, among many, at the Democratic Party’s Orange Man Bad Fest on Tuesday night was that President Trump did not act aggressively or effectively to save lives from the Chinese coronavirus.
Here are a couple of key facts that Bill Clinton must have missed: President Trump ended flights from China in January, only to be attacked for “hysterical xenophobia” by former Vice President Joe Biden in Iowa on February 1. President Trump ended travel from Europe in March to the dismay of Democrats, including Biden who said the order was “counterproductive.”
On March 13, as part of a larger announcement by President Trump on COVID-19 response, the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) issued an updated Centers for Disease Control (CDC) guidance for how nursing homes should handle coronavirus cases.
These measures, along with the Trump Administration’s historic industrial mobilization to ensure Americans have the necessary personal protective equipment (PPE) to fight the coronavirus, are saving lives. The Monday morning quarterbacking at the Democratic convention this week is simply an attempt to deflect from the failed policies of their own party leaders, specifically New York Governor Andrew Cuomo.
Cuomo forced nursing homes in his state to accept COVID-19 patients, knowing those facilities could not treat them. His recklessness infected the most vulnerable populations in the state with the deadly virus and was in direct violation of the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services guidance. The CDC directed nursing homes to only admit COVID patients if “the facility can follow CDC guidance for Transmission-Based Precautions” and to keep only those COVID-infected patients for which they could safely care for.
CMS Administrator Seema Verma on May 21 noted, “In the guidance, CMS urged nursing homes to dedicate a specific wing to patients moving to, or arriving from, a hospital, where they could remain for 14 days with no symptoms.”
That didn’t happen in New York, where, per Cuomo’s order, “No resident shall be denied re-admission or admission to the [nursing home] solely based on a confirmed or suspected diagnosis of COVID-19.” That was the case whether or not a nursing home had a wing for COVID recoveries.
While official state counts suggest about 6,500 died in nursing homes, it is suspected thousands of more residents died in hospitals after being transferred from their nursing homes. Now Cuomo has quashed attempts to investigate his handling of the crisis, particularly as it relates to the true number of his nursing home death sentences. It is incontrovertible that thousands of patients died because Cuomo did exactly the wrong thing in contravention of the CMS and CDC guidelines.
President Trump had a much more effective response by comparison. Under the president’s orders, the USNS Comfort arrived at New York Harbor on March 30 to assist with patients who were not COVID-19 afflicted. The USNS Mercy was similarly stationed in Los Angeles in anticipation of a hospital emergency that never came. The president set up military field hospitals to assist local hospital systems that were stressed.
In addition, the president invoked the Defense Production Act to ensure enough ventilators would be available to the American people. The fact is that due to the swift and aggressive actions of President Trump, no American had to do without a ventilator if he needed one, the hospital system did not overflow, and the curve was flattened.
Early on, the president directed the Food and Drug Administration to find ways to fast track coronavirus therapies. The Coronavirus Treatment Acceleration Program is using every available method to move new safe, effective treatments to patients as quickly as possible.
Today, the federal government is collaborating with McKesson Corporation, a central distributor of future COVID vaccines and related supplies needed to administer the vaccinations, to rapidly distribute a coronavirus vaccine as soon as one is approved. There are currently three candidates in phase-three clinical trials and are on pace to have more than 100 million doses of a vaccine ready before the end of the year and 500 million doses very shortly thereafter.
By September, the Strategic National Stockpile inventory, badly depleted during the Obama-Biden years, is on track to contain over 300 million N95 respirators and surgical masks, over 4.5 billion gloves, and more than 190,000 ventilators.
Second-guessing about the increase in cases ignores the reality that, with the exception of south Texas where American ex-patriots living in Mexico are stressing the system, our medical system is holding up well, PPE has been produced and distributed in record numbers and a variety of tests have been approved and distributed broadly across the nation.
While Democrats were making stuff up about the president’s connection to Ukraine to obscure their current nominee’s corrupt hand in dealing with that country in the past, President Trump mobilized the best and brightest minds to combat the virus both from a health and economic perspective.
Hundreds of thousands of Americans are alive today as a result of Trump’s valiant COVID response. It is sad that the Democrats, like Biden, were so quick to criticize and slow to come up with solutions. When they did, their solutions often mirrored steps the president had taken earlier in the fight.
The record is clear. The only reason anyone in America thinks that the federal government response was not aggressive is that the left-stream media hid the truth from them.