Independent News

This post was originally published on this site

Education Secretary Betsy DeVos is suddenly a big fan of the deep state. In a message to Education Department career employees, DeVos noted that most of them would be staying on into a Biden administration, and gave them a charge: “Resist.”

“Let me leave you with this plea: Resist,” DeVos said. “Be the resistance against forces that will derail you from doing what’s right for students. In everything you do, please put students first—always.”

To DeVos, “what’s right for students” is privatized education, at Christian schools where possible, with those schools having the right to discriminate against LGBTQ kids. In higher education, it’s expanded protections for alleged rapists and fewer protections for victims, as well as weaker oversight of for-profit colleges and universities.

That’s what she’s asking the career employees of the Education Department to “resist” on behalf of. 

In between DeVos stepping down—whether that happens before or on Inauguration Day—and a new education secretary being confirmed, the acting education secretary will be Phil Rosenfelt, a career employee who performed the same role in 2017.

This post was originally published on this site

What’s the use of a crisis if big corporations and wealthy people can’t use it to make more money, preferably at the expense of those with less than them? I ask you! 

Well, by that standard, the coronavirus pandemic has worked out quite well. A large majority of the biggest publicly traded companies were profitable between April and September, but more than half laid off workers. Meanwhile, they watched small business revenue crash and many small businesses go under. 

According to a Washington Post analysis, it breaks down like this: “45 of the 50 most valuable publicly traded U.S. companies turned a profit,” with an average of 2% revenue growth through the first nine months of the year. But at least 27 of those 50 firms had layoffs, leading to more than 100,000 people losing their jobs.

At the same time, small business revenue dropped 12%, with at least 100,000 small businesses closing.

To add insult to injury for the workers laid off by these large, profitable companies, many entered the pandemic with rah rah rhetoric about protecting their workers. Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff pledged “not to conduct any significant lay offs over the next 90 days.” He kept that promise. But about two months after that 90 days was up, Salesforce laid off 1,000 workers despite big profits.

This is 21st century corporate capitalism in action. Every disaster is an opportunity for more profit, and responsibility to the workers that make your company run is a meaningless concept. It’s one more reminder that claims about corporate tax cuts—like the ones the Republicans passed in 2017—meaning job creation should never, ever be believed. The tax cuts and the pandemic alike saw companies doing huge share buybacks to benefit the already wealthy, while workers reaped no benefit to speak of.

This post was originally published on this site

If you are going to write the most terrible op-ed column of the year, everyone knows you should do it in December. That’s award season, and you want your steaming pile of sociopathic crap to be fresh in the judges’ noses when discussing the past year’s contestants. Bush-era torture advocate Marc Thiessen must have had that consideration in mind when he piped up with one of The Washington Post opinion page’s hottest possible takes. To unite the nation, says Theissen, Joe Biden should assign credit for the herculean worldwide efforts to rapidly develop a COVID-19 vaccine to … Donald Trump.

Yes. Let us not bicker about who set nation on a path to a half million pandemic deaths. Let us instead seek to heal the nation by declaring that it is conservatism’s greatest hero, rich lying tax-dodging bank-frauding rape guy, the man who spent the entirety of the pandemic dismissing pandemic deaths and fomenting now-violent public contempt for officials attempting to curb those deaths, who should be crowned Hero of the Pandemic. Because f–k everything, apparently.

The argument used is not particularly deep, because of course it’s not. Donald Trump allocated other people’s money to attempt to find a vaccine, or at least did not actively block his administration from doing so when they recommended it. Since he could conceivably have not bothered to do even that in the face of an economy-wrecking mass death event, he should therefore get the most credit for the vaccine’s production and be celebrated for his role. It is the perfect conservative argument, after all: The true hero here is the guy who signed the checks. Without the checks, none of you expertise-having peons could have done squat.

When it comes to the column’s details, claims like “The genius of Operation Warp Speed was the decision to run the vaccine development process in parallel rather than sequentially” show that the American Enterprise Institute is still rigorously devoted to inanities. Yes, attempting several approaches at once—if only the world’s medical and scientific giants had been privy to such notions before the real estate tycoon appeared on the scene to say okay, sure, do that. And Trump truly is the master of attempting several approaches at once: From hydroxychloroquine to his soliloquy on what if we, like, figured out how to irradiate people’s insides, Trump has seized on every possible miracle cure that might post-justify his declarations that he needed to do nothing in particular to keep Americans from dying. He was perhaps only inches off from being declared hero of the pandemic due to the devoted efforts of the MyPillow guy.

But the true message of the op-ed, and message that Marc Thiessen and every last one of modern conservatism’s pundits return to after every incident of mass destruction, mass death, newly institutionalized cruelty, world-shaking crime, near-Great Depression, or whatever else has last proven a movement core belief to have catastrophic consequences when actually carried out, is that for the unity of the nation we must let bygones be bygones. That is the truth of truths, the be all and end all of conservative thought. The public cannot handle the stress of holding those that ordered war crimes accountable for those crimes—it would tear the country apart. The nation must not dwell on whether the Reaganites or the Bushites engaged in a bit of illegal crookery here or there for the sake of a good patriotic war that the movement specifically advocated for for years or decades; truly, it would damage the very soul of the nation to ask too many questions about such things.

Over and over. Every time. Thiessen’s particular conservative class of alumni base their most fervent premises on an all-encompassing theory that holding anyone accountable for the Iraq War and the absolute and indisputable destruction of every conservative theory as to why the war was justified, how it would unfold, and what the aftermath might be would result in the destruction of our very republic. The papers are absolutely littered with conservative demands that the real-world results of every past experiment with tax cuts with the wealthy, to use one very pointed example, be absolutely ignored because they did not count and will absolutely be reversed in the next demanded iteration.

To cut to the chase: All of punditry consists of incompetent blundering well-heeled cowards insisting that there be absolutely no repercussions for pundit-demanded actions that ended in mass ruin or mass death. That is all. The job description is to spout ideology with impunity, and sociopathic amorality with absolute confidence. The omnipresent threat used to keep the walls of consequence from being breached is the claim that if any professional price is paid for horrific wrongness ending in calamity, any at all, it is America that will suffer.

Like herpes outbreaks, these “unity” columns arrive in clusters after every powerful conservative’s tenure. They are the herpes of punditry—a rash that spreads through conservative ranks, an itch that demands scratching, that appear shortly after the incubation period of the latest worst decision.

Do we want unity, then? Do we want to heal the country, after the most dishonest, incompetent, and violence-stoking president in modern history acted with thick-headed apathy as a natural disaster struck? And does it fall on that malevolent flounderer’s opponents to provide that unity even as his supporters take up arms to intimidate local governments into abiding by his own demands for pandemic apathy, and to demand that a United States election be thrown out, simply thrown out, so that their figurehead be appointed its true winner? That is the requirement?

And this is best done by declaring that Dear Leader, not scientists or professionals, is the true reason the vaccine has been so quickly gifted to this nation and all others? That will cause Trump’s gun-toting allies to stand down, and cause malevolent conservative propagandists to stop spreading toxic and dangerous lies against all whose duties might tangentially brush up against the malignant narcissist’s own delusions of grandeur?

Fine. Then we will take Thiessen’s proclamations seriously, but adjust them so as to better achieve his intended result. I propose that there be two vaccines. One vaccine will be for Trump supporters. The other will be for the rest of America.

The two vaccines will, in fact, be identical. Same factories, same delivery protocols, same boxes. One will be the vaccine as prepared. The other will be the exact same vaccine, but in a vial with the TRUMP logo prominently affixed.

The Trump version of the vaccine will cost $200 a dose, and be available only to his devoted acolytes. His supporters will eagerly pay it, and launch the most vitriolic of invective at anyone who does not follow, and they will be inoculated against COVID-19 while paying appropriate homage to the true hero of the pandemic, Apathetic Adulterous Real Estate Television Guy.

The other vaccine will be free. Anyone who wants it can get it—if you are willing to be injected with a vaccine that does not carry Trump’s own branding or celebrate his own heroism.

There. Now all will be satisfied. Those who either believe the vaccine should not be made into a political toy for fraudulent conservative self-redemption or who simply do not care can get the unbranded version; all those who insist that we would not be here today without Donald Trump—and boy howdy is that one on-the-nose—can get vaccinated for Dear Leader, by Dear Leader, and at the free market markup that pays proper tribute to Dear Leader.

Don’t be such a maudlin little dipshit, Mr. Thiessen. The notion that Trump’s cadre of incompetent hyperconservative bunglers, a crew that shunned all expertise in order to proclaim that America did not need to follow the same pandemic guidelines that were used successfully to limit deaths elsewhere, the crew that to this day continues to ponder whether getting all of America infected at once, burying the dead in mass graves, and cleaning up the rest afterwards, should get participation trophies for not f–king up one response while catastrophically bungling all the others? That goes too far. At least have the decency to stand behind the products of the latest hyperconservative administration’s latest nation-shaking failures.

There are 300,000 dead, and it is because conservatism and its punditry demanded we abandon social distancing and masks in favor of something-something and freedom. There will soon be half a million dead, because when Trump defended his apathy towards pandemic preparedness with declarations that it would all vanish without his help, all of conservatism rushed to promote his delusion with allied proclamations that most of the deaths would be among the unproductive classes, or that doctors and nurses were lying, or that the pandemic only existed because Trump’s invisible enemies wanted to make him look bad, or a hundred other inanities, and intentionally promoted Trump’s notion that the public need not protect itself too diligently from a rampantly spreading and deadly disease.

If there is a participation trophy for that, let it come in the form of one last suckering of the people you and your allies have shown such grotesque contempt for. Squeeze the people doing the most dying for that one last dime, and call it honoring the dead. Call it unity.

And then tuck your murderous tails between your legs and simper out your latest warnings that we mustn’t look back, or assign blame, and by God must not prosecute anyone for anything. Go ahead, we’re used to it. That is what conservatism does. It kills people in astonishing numbers, it promotes poverty, it doles out cancers and calls them freedom, and then it scuttles back into its own infected colon and declares that next time it will work out better, just you wait.

This post was originally published on this site

Vaccinate Trump first!

This post was originally published on this site

The coronavirus pandemic has already killed more than 300,000 people in the United State, with an unknown—but frighteningly large—number yet to come. It’s also hollowed out the public health departments trying to keep people safe now, leaving us more vulnerable to the next public health threat. An investigation by the Associated Press and KHN details the damage.

Local public health officials were already desperately overworked and underpaid—“per capita spending for state public health departments had dropped by 16%, and for local health departments by 18%, since 2010. At least 38,000 state and local public health jobs have disappeared since the 2008 recession.” It was also likely to get worse, with nearly half of public health workers in one survey saying they planned to retire or leave the field within five years.

That trend is accelerating, and it’s not just the pandemic as a natural disaster. It’s specifically because of Donald Trump’s politicization of basic public health measures, which has turned the underpaid workers trying to protect the public into targets. During the nine months of the pandemic, at least 181 state or local public health leaders have left their jobs—whether they resigned, retired, or were fired. That includes 20 top state officials. It doesn’t include lower-level staffers who are essential to executing things like COVID-19 testing and contact tracing.

In some cases, public health leaders have resigned after their efforts have been undercut by state or local governments. “You value the pressure from people with special economic interests more than science and good public health practice,” Shawnee County, Kansas, health officer Dr. Gianfranco Pezzino wrote to county commissioners after they loosened restrictions. “In full conscience I cannot continue to serve as the health officer for a board that puts being able to patronize bars and sports venues in front of the health, lives and well-being of a majority of its constituents.”

Public health officials—many of whom, in Republican areas, are themselves Republicans—have also faced the violent protesters who’ve been egged on by Trump, with loud displays intended to intimidate them outside their offices and homes. 

In at least one case, the resistance to safety has hit even closer to home. The AP/KHN investigators interviewed Linn County, Kansas, public health administrator Tisha Coleman, who has begged people in her community to wear masks and take other precautions. Not only has she been attacked—even called a Democrat, a serious insult in her community—but her husband refuses to require customers to wear masks in his hardware store. It gets worse, though: Coleman’s husband refuses to take that step despite her mother’s recent death from COVID-19.

This is Donald Trump’s United States of America in a nutshell.

This post was originally published on this site

The Electoral College formalized Joe Biden’s status as president-elect on Monday, but that’s not stopping Donald Trump’s base—including some Republican lawmakers. In fact, some are responding by urging an outright coup.

North Carolina state Sen. Bob Steinburg, insisting that the Supreme Court ruled against Trump’s efforts to overturn the election result because “somebody’s got something” on the justices (all of them, apparently!), called on Trump to “declare a national emergency,” “invoke the Insurrection Act,” and suspend habeas corpus. A coup, in other words, although Steinburg claims that he’s fighting an actual coup.

Virginia state Sen. Amanda Chase, who is currently running for governor, is looking for similar action, posting on Facebook that Trump should “declare martial law as recommended by General Flynn.” Also a coup.

That’s two elected Republicans at a fairly high level—we’re not talking about the proverbial dogcatcher here—calling for a coup, one of them echoing Trump’s former national security adviser, who he just pardoned of crimes. This can’t be dismissed as a fringe issue. Even if the numbers of lawmakers saying these things remains fairly low, they are elected officials. And they are echoing the comment threads on a lot more far-right websites, as well as the violent protesters who swarmed Washington, D.C., over the weekend. To say nothing of the fact that, no, Donald Trump still has not conceded, and he’s tweeting stuff like calls to arrest Republican state-level officials who refused to overturn the will of the voters and, in the context of refusing to concede, “Republican Party must finally learn to fight. People are angry!”

Trump will push it as far as he thinks he can get away with. Steinburg and Chase are telling him he can get away with a full-on coup.

This post was originally published on this site

New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo has signed into law legislation blocking Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents from sweeping up immigrants at the state’s courthouses unless they have a warrant signed by a judge, a victory for families and advocates who have condemned the out-of-control agency’s cruel stalking of immigrants going to court for reasons as minor as a traffic violation.

“For years ICE has intimidated immigrant communities by conducting arrests in state courthouses, and using abusive tactics,” advocacy group Make the Road New York said. “They have aggressively lurked at or around courthouses, arresting immigrants who are showing up for their court appearances. This instilled deep fear in immigrant communities, deterred community members from trying to access the legal system and undermined due process across the state.”

The Protect Our Courts Act, passed by the state’s legislature this past summer, provides “the most protective regulations on ICE courthouse arrests in the country and ensure all New Yorkers—including those accused of crimes, survivors of domestic violence, and witnesses—are afforded due process and provided equal access to our judicial system,” legislators said at the time. 

The mass deportation agency’s actions have in fact been to the benefit of abusers. “In a national survey conducted by the ACLU and the National Immigrant Women’s Advocacy Project of judges, court administrators, attorneys, and law enforcement, more than half of judges surveyed reported that court cases in 2017 were interrupted because of an immigrant domestic violence survivor’s fear of coming to court,” the New York Civil Liberties Union (NYCLU) said.

ICE sweeps at state courthouses have been a years-long tactic that the agency escalated in the Trump administration, leading advocates to intensify their efforts to end the practice once and for all.

“ICE cannot be counted on to correct these abuses itself,” NYCLU continued. “Advocates have for years called on the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to add courthouses to its list of sensitive locations where ICE cannot make arrests absent exigent circumstances, but the agency has not done so,” and against the advice of dozens of retired judges.

This legislation now takes direct action to limit ICE’s abuses, codifying into law a court ruling from earlier this year calling ICE’s sweeps “illegal.” New York Attorney General Letitia James said at the time that “[b]y allowing federal agents to interfere with state and local cases, the Trump administration endangered the safety of every New Yorker, while targeting immigrants.”

“Today New York state made sure that our courthouses aren’t a target for ICE’s deportation machine, and sent a message that New York protects its immigrant families,” NYCLU Executive Director Donna Lieberman said in a statement received by Daily Kos. “ICE’s malicious practice of arresting people at courthouses was just one cruel part of the Trump administration’s anti-immigrant crusade. With this law in place, immigrant communities will be more able to seek justice and defend their rights without fear of profiling and arrest.”

This post was originally published on this site

As the nation faces the novel coronavirus pandemic, we’ve discussed how in the world restaurants—and most importantly, restaurant workers—are supposed to survive. Food service workers need proper personal protective equipment (PPE), adequate health insurance coverage, and, frankly, the ability to stay home and earn enough of an income to survive. Restaurant owners, too, deserve reliable and equal relief—especially small business owners of color. 

Throughout the pandemic, activist and chef José Andrés has stepped it up and led by example through his organization World Central Kitchen, helping hundreds of small restaurants safely reopen amid the early days of the pandemic, as well as converting his own shuttered restaurants into to-go kitchens to help people in need. Now, in a recent interview with Yahoo News, Andrés offers some advice to President-elect Joe Biden. His big idea? Introduce a “secretary of food” into the Cabinet—and he’s clear that this is a different vision than the role of the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA). Let’s break down what that might involve and whether Andrés sees himself as a prime pick for the position below.

Andrés calls for Biden to create a new Cabinet position that would address food insecurity and hunger in the nation. In explaining how this new position would differ from the Department of Agriculture, Andrés told the news outlet: “Food is more than just all of the mechanics of a smart agricultural system.” He continued by describing food as immigration, health, job creation, economic growth, and even national security.

The chef described food insecurity as “a very important issue that sometimes falls between the cracks.” Given the enormous lines waiting outside of food banks we’ve seen across the nation, the number of families who face school lunch “debt,” and how many people are shoplifting food and toiletries to survive, that’s certainly true. And it certainly has to change.

Andrés is no stranger to helping those in need through food and community, even before the coronavirus pandemic. For example, he’s previously sent relief workers to assist with local groups working with asylum-seekers in Mexico, delivered thousands of meals a day to Hurricane Dorian survivors in the Bahamas, and, perhaps most famously, contributed an incredible amount of humanitarian aid to Puerto Rico and Haiti. You might remember that because his work actually nabbed him a “Humanitarian of the Year” award. More recently, he was featured in TIME magazine for his work amid the global pandemic. 

Perhaps the big question: Does Andrés see himself in the position? Not necessarily; he declined to clarify to Yahoo News whether he’d take it himself or not if it were offered to him. Though Andrés has a long history of food activism, he isn’t rushing to center himself in his new vision for the Cabinet. 

“If President Biden needs my help or the help of the other 350 million Americans I know, all of us, we will be there,” he told Yahoo News. For himself? He told the outlet he’s “there already, I don’t need to be called.”

This post was originally published on this site

At times throughout the spring, summer, and fall, Republicans pushed the idea that the only way to fight COVID-19 was to surrender. That is, to just let it infect Americans until the nation achieved “herd immunity.” The problems with this approach were … everything. First off, we still don’t know if mild or asymptomatic infection with COVID-19 provides long-lasting protection from the disease, meaning that herd immunity might not even be possible. Second, removing social distancing guidelines so that people would become infected more rapidly would result in massive overcrowding of hospitals across the nation, creating an epic healthcare collapse that drove the fatality rate of the disease through the roof. And finally, even trying for herd immunity on a nationwide basis would inevitably result in millions of deaths. 

That didn’t stop even people who should know better from returning and returning to this idea, under what seems to be a shared delusion that somehow it is possible infect tens of millions of people with coronavirus in a short time, while ignoring all the hospitalizations and deaths that cannot be avoided. The fact that this keeps coming up as a supposedly serious proposal is shocking.

But the fact that the fact that the man appointed as science adviser in Donald Trump’s HHS actively pushed for more Americans to be intentionally infected to bring on herd immunity … is not as shocking as it should be. 

Here’s a fun statistic: As we’ve learned more above COVID-19 over the last ten months, the case fatality rate in many nations has dropped from around 3.5% to 1.5%. That improvement comes partially from increased knowledge about how to treat patients undergoing prolonged intubation and the use of anti-inflammatory steroids in the treatment of patients receiving breathing assistance. But the biggest reason that number has changed is simply that testing has, in many areas, finally reached numbers that are almost adequate. More mild and asymptomatic cases are being added to the total of positive cases. We’re not getting better at treating COVID-19, so much as we are getting better at finding cases that didn’t require treatment.

At the same time, what all that increased testing is showing is that early speculation about the number of mild and asymptomatic cases was wildly wrong. Estimates right up until recent months have often suggested that the “true” fatality rate of COVID-19 is somewhere below 1%, on the assumption that there were five or even ten, undetected, asymptomatic cases for every case that was showing up on the radar. This was false.

We now have more than enough large population tests to know that this is not the case. Cases of COVID-19 so mild as to be either asymptomatic or pass as sniffles attributable to something like seasonal allergy make up about 15-25% of cases, not the 90%+ some early sources suggested. Test as you like, but there is no massive number of undetected cases out there. When North Dakota’s data says that 11% of the people in that state have tested positive for COVID-19, it’s probably because about 11% of people in that state have had COVID-19. Not 50%. Certainly not 100%. Very likely not even 20%. And that’s in spite of testing that is still decidedly inadequate.

The herd immunity types are correct in saying that the great majority of current fatalities are among the elderly. However, despite all apparent advances, the fatality rate for untreated COVID-19 remains around 10%, essentially the same as the disease’s hospitalization rate. In other words, about 85% of those hospitalized for COVID-19 will survive. Those same people, deprived of hospitalization, will die.

Here’s a table first put together back on March 6.

Despite the 311,225 deaths tallied at WorldOMeters, the data shows that only 5.8% of the population has tested positive for COVID-19. That means that, ten months later, the United States still has not entered the range of infection listed in the chart above. And thank god for that, because at the current case fatality rate of 1.8%, even touching a 10% infection rate nationwide would mean 602,000 deaths.  

Only reaching 10% nationwide would not mean 602,000 deaths, because reaching 10% infection rate could not be done in anything less than another ten months without exploding the healthcare system. The death rate wouldn’t be 1.8%. It wouldn’t even be 3.5%. The more cases there are, and the more rapidly they come in, the closer the rate of death would approach the current hospitalization rate. Just getting to a nationwide 10%, unless it took place over a period as long as it took to get us where we are now, would result in millions of of deaths. Millions. And that’s still not even close to herd immunity.

What would pushing for intentional herd immunity do? It would so overload the national healthcare capacity that within a very short period the 924,107 hospital beds in the United States would barely be a blip compared to the numbers struggling with simultaneous infection.

Forget the chart above. The real price of reaching herd immunity in anything less than a decade, would be ten of millions of deaths. And of course, no one expects that immunity to COVID-19 would last for decades so … congratulations. We’ve just walked through all the steps again to show why reaching herd immunity isn’t just a bad policy, but an impossible policy that cannot help but kill millions without ever reaching the described goal.

And now … Paul Alexander.

Paul Alexander was a senior advisor for Health and Human Services assistant secretary for public affairs Michael Caputo. He has previously appeared at Daily Kos for his starring role in attempting to censor statements from Dr. Anthony Fauci, and for putting a lid on scientists at the CDC who attempted to share genuine information with the public. 

But, as Politico reports, it turns out that Alexander did far more than just kill Americans by depriving them of the information they needed to keep themselves and their families safe. He also pushed for killing more Americans directly.

In a series of emails, Alexander declares “there is no other way” to deal with COVID-19 than pushing Americans to get infected so that we can achieve herd immunity. “Infants, kids, teens, young people, young adults, middle aged with no conditions etc. have zero to little risk….so we use them to develop herd…we want them infected…”

We want them infected. To pick on deaths alone, here’s what Johns Hopkins shows in the data for COVID-19. While the rate of deaths is certainly much greater in the oldest cohorts, it’s far from zero in any group. Those under 24 make up about 1% of all deaths. Apparently Alexander is ready to let them go. Those under 55 make up about 6%. That’s a sacrifice that Alexander was obviously willing to make.

But just like the rate of deaths, those numbers would not remain the same if Alexander’s “we want them infected” plan was carried out. As CDC numbers show, the differences in the rate of death by age group is much higher than the rate of hospitalization. So are the rate of ICU admissions. In fact, 1 in 3 children hospitalized with COVID-19 were eventually admitted to the ICU, which is the same rate seen in adults. It’s only that final stage, surviving the ICU, that really makes the difference. That’s why someone at age 60 may be only 4 times more likely to be hospitalized for COVID-19 than an 18 year old, but they are 30 times more likely to die.

Now … follow Alexander’s suggestion and flood the nation with COVID-19, resulting in ICUs filled to the brim coast to coast. That doesn’t just mean that tens of millions will die who might have lived, it means that most of those who will die will be the younger people who would have survived hospitalizations. What herd immunity would do most effectively would be to help level the playing field, by making the rate of deaths among younger patients much closer to that of older patients.

Alexander was hand-picked to head HHS communications, not by Roger Stone protégé Caputo, but by Donald Trump. He was repeatedly allowed to alter recommendations from the CDC, including changing guidelines on CDC’s website, because it was well understood that he had Trump’s support. Alexander was key to pushing false information that pushed schools and businesses to open, or to stay open, despite an obvious threat. And he did it all because that’s what Trump wanted. There’s no reason to believe that “we want them infected” was not also Trump’s personal command.

In September, Caputo took an abrupt leave of absence after accusing scientists of “sedition” for refusing to suppress mortality figures and warning that “left wing hit squads” were on the loose. That was also Alexander’s cue to exit stage far right after yet another batch of emails showed that he was fighting to hide information on the risk to children because it “hurt the President.” 

Donald Trump has killed hundreds of thousands of Americans who didn’t need to die in this pandemic. But it seems that he didn’t kill nearly as many as he wanted.