Trump Likely Killed Healthcare Workers By Siphoning Off Billions In PPE Funds

[Kid Berwyn]

Jason Easley
Politicus, March 2, 2021

The Trump administration secretly moved ten billion federal dollars that were supposed to go to hospitals for PPE into vaccine development and likely killed hospital workers.

STAT reported:

The Trump administration quietly took around $10 billion from a fund meant to help hospitals and health care providers affected by Covid-19 and used the money to bankroll Operation Warp Speed contracts, four former Trump administration officials told STAT.

“ Hospitals in need of the funding would be outraged to know that some of the money was siphoned off, even for important uses, because Congress was clear that this money was for providers and clinicians,” said Chip Kahn, CEO of the Federation of American Hospitals.

The Trump administration could have easily gotten the money from Congress for vaccine development, but they intentionally chose to take PPE away from hospitals because they were trying to rush vaccine development so that Trump could win reelection while minimizing the pandemic itself.

Source: https://www.politicususa.com/2021/03/02/trump-hospitals-ppe-funds.html

The writer also asks how many healthcare workers have died in the COVID-19 pandemic?



2,900 per KHN and The Guardian

https://khn.org/news/article/more-than-2900-health-care-workers-died-this-year-and-the-government-barely-kept-track/

Better call Jared. As the next witness.

[RobertDevereaux]

1. He is a mass murderer in so many ways.

May massive amounts of shit rain down upon him and his broken family and every last blasted one of his enablers, toadies, and sycophants these coming months and years.

[Kid Berwyn]

11. Would 'Gross Criminal Dereliction of Duty' be unpardonable?

Trump KNEW and did less than nothing — for most all of his actions made the situation worse.

[underpants]

2. Yep that's definitely Jared.

God they sucked.

[Kid Berwyn]

12. Remember when the governors had to mislabel PPE shipments?

Team Jared had to get paid.

https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2020/05/how-the-federal-government-took-control-of-the-ppe-pipeline

[underpants]

18. I'd missed that Vanity Fair article. Thanks.

I hope that guy who found the contact in China didn’t make sales off what he thought was coming in. I work in purchasing and I was scrambling to find stuff all over.

I subscribed to Vanity Fair due to their outstanding in-depth reporting over the last year. I only wanted a digital subscription but I keep having the magazine delivered with Gal Gadot and Billie Eilish on covers. It’s a running joke with my wife and daughter.

[mucifer]

3. It's like government leaders in so many wars. The dead don't matter and they get away with it.

No one ever goes to prison for this kind of murder.

[Kid Berwyn]

16. Perhaps a case can be made...

Last edited Wed Mar 3, 2021, 12:08 PM - Edit history (1)

Trump’s Indifference Amounts to Negligent Homicide

The president’s behavior may not meet the term’s legal definition, but it captures the horror a government is visiting upon its people.

James Fallows
The Atlantic, NOVEMBER 20, 2020

Excerpt...

Many terms that have legal connotations can be useful in their plain everyday sense as well. Not everything we’d call an assault matches the state-by-state standards that define that crime. Not everything we call theft—or blackmail, or even rape—would count as such in an indictment or could be proved in court. Similarly, when removed from their courtroom and legal implications, terms like negligence and manslaughter and, yes, homicide are useful right now. They give us a way of assessing the horror a government is visiting upon its people.

More than a year ago, I argued in these pages that if Donald Trump held virtually any other position of responsibility in modern society, he would already have been removed from that role. The article was called “If Trump Were an Airline Pilot,” and the examples ranged from CEOs to nuclear-submarine commanders to surgeons in an operating room. If any of them had demonstrated the impulsiveness, the irrationality, the vindictiveness, the ceaseless need for glorification that all distinguish Trump, responsible authorities would long ago have suspended them. The stakes—in lives, legal exposure, dollars and cents, war and peace—would be too great to do otherwise.

At the time of that comparison, the main case against Trump involved his temperamental, intellectual, and moral unfitness for the job. But since then we’ve moved into the realm of manslaughter. Yesterday nearly 2,000 Americans died of COVID-19. By Thanksgiving Day, another 10,000 to 15,000 will have perished. By year’s end, who knows? And meanwhile the person in charge of guiding the national response does nothing.

Or worse than nothing. He tweets in rage. He fires anyone suspected of disloyalty. He encourages endless lawsuits that are tossed out of court one after another but that, one after another, do cumulative damage to confidence in elections and democracy. His cat’s-paw in charge of the General Services Administration does what none of her predecessors ever dared, pretending that the outcome of the election is still in doubt. Thus she blocks Joe Biden’s transition team from receiving the funding or cooperation it needs during the rapidly dwindling days until inauguration. (Rapidly dwindling from an incoming administration’s perspective, with so many plans to prepare and staffers to select. Moving like molasses from other perspectives.)

We’re beyond the range of my earlier comparisons to a leader of a museum “who routinely insulted large parts of its constituency” or a CEO “making costly strategic decisions on personal impulse.” The problem with finding analogies to illuminate the Trump administration’s reckless disregard for national welfare now is that all of them seem so extreme.

Continues...

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/11/this-is-trumps-fault/617159/

Perhaps a national campaign...a Go Fund Me...whatever it takes for justice to get done for the 515,000-plus who’ve lost their lives due to Trump’s intentional gross criminal negligence. I volunteer to conduct a citizen’s arrest. I almost wrote “mob.”

[Botany]

4. How much did Trump, Kushner, or Trump connected people skim off the top?

And I want to see the receipts for that 10 billion .... what did it buy and where?

[Kid Berwyn]

24. Great questions. Needs answers STAT...

The Trump administration quietly spent billions in hospital funds on Operation Warp Speed

By Rachel Cohrs
STAT, March 2, 2021

Excerpt...

“Hospitals in need of the funding would be outraged to know that some of the money was siphoned off, even for important uses, because Congress was clear that this money was for providers and clinicians,” said Chip Kahn, CEO of the Federation of American Hospitals.

Snip...

The Operation Warp Speed program was created by the Trump administration, not Congress, so officials pulled funding from existing pools of money. But by late summer last year, the Warp Speed accounts were running dry, a former senior HHS official said.

Officials didn’t want to slow down support of vaccines and therapeutics, so they scrambled to find more funds. The $175 billion fund lawmakers created to help health care providers recover from the pandemic proved a tempting target.

Snip...

“It is unfortunate the Trump administration preferred to divert billions of dollars from the Provider Relief Fund instead of submitting a request to Congress for the necessary funds,” House Appropriations Committee Chair Rosa DeLauro (D-Conn.) said in a written statement.

Snip...

A lack of clarity around funding streams for Operation Warp Speed is just the latest transparency concern about the program. NPR reported that some contracts are structured in a way that exempts them from public disclosure. Rep. James Clyburn (D-S.C.), chair of the Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Crisis, in August requested information about potential conflicts of interest in the program, saying the selection process for vaccine candidates was “opaque.”

Continues...

https://www.statnews.com/2021/03/02/trump-administration-quietly-spent-billions-in-hospital-funds-on-operation-warp-speed/

“Transparency and Trump,” like “integrity and imbecile,” have nothing in common apart from alliteration.

[Mc Mike]

5. A 9/11 level of death toll for US healthcare workers.

[colsohlibgal]

6. No Surprise

Trump has zero compassion and integrity, he is totally self centered.....and not very bright. I would guess most of us could have avoided bankruptcy had we inherited 40 some million dollars.

I like his chances to wind up in Prison.....where he belongs.

[SergeStorms]

21. Correction...

he inherited somewhere in the neighborhood of $400 million from Daddy Dearest, and they tried to work around Fred's death so they'd get the money before he actually died. That Trump family, nothing but class, huh?

[Hortensis]

7. Of course. Trum/McConnell and company own all the deaths by encouraging

spread of epidemic disease into a pandemic while also refusing all standard measures to stop it and lying that it didn't exist. We suspect but don't know WHY they did it, but we all watched the news reports of deaths and fears of heroic healthcare workers who were wearing garbage bags for protection.

They only cooperated with us to pass that first relief bill after months of claiming the pandemic wasn't real and actively encouraging its spread, and 100,000 deaths. (They'd packed it, though, with enormous giveaways to big business that we chopped way down, leaving enough to buy their cooperation.)

As for "next," I remember in the first wave Maddow and Williams both very briefly pointing out that the roles and culpability of Trump and Republican caucuses were documented beyond possibility of doubt and that, eventually, after the big battle to save lives was over, we had to, as you indicated, start calling witnesses.

We have general ideas of what, how, when, and where. Maybe some will explain why.

[Botany]

8. Trump should have known about C-19 and the coming pandemic in the fall of 2019 ....

.... We told Israel about it.

https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/intelligence-report-warned-coronavirus-crisis-early-november-sources/story?id=70031273

And what did Trump and Kushner do? They invested in HQC (hydroxycholorquine) and their own C-19 test kits
both of which were useless and failures and "the beast" that is C-19 took off and now has killed >500,000 Americans.

BTW I will die mad @ what they did to Hillary because there is no reason we and the world should be going
through this.

[Hortensis]

10. +1000 to that last. Enormous atrocities and crimes

have been committed. But it couldn't happen here... They're so sure their voters won't turn on them, and so far they're right.

[Botany]

13. Trump and company are guilty of murder, robbery, selling out the country, and grifting on a ...

.... massive scale.

[Hortensis]

19. Selling out the, by far, wealthiest and most powerful nation

on the planet. From inside.

Patience, right? Rescuing ourselves has to come first.

[area51]

9. And yet Trump still walks free.

[ananda]

14. Well, that's his MO... the entire GQP's actually.

They are absolutely a nazi-style death cult.

[IronLionZion]

15. MAGA killed these Americans, not COVID

The whole world has the COVID pandemic but it's been extra bad in the US where Trump administration put profit over people, deliberately lied to people, withheld PPE and other equipment, and seemed to be promoting the spread of the virus rather than stopping it.

[duforsure]

17. Just think of what trump would be doing now if he won re-election,

Sending out vaccines of saline solution , then pocketing the money? He would still be corrupting the system for personal profit for himself, and putting others at risk.

[BobTheSubgenius]

20. Being, as the article says, unnecessary, it makes the move sleazier than ever.

Lazy, impatient, craven, uncaring...etc? Pick any or all, or add your own. It was a dick move on a pretty grand scale.

"We've really screwed the pooch on this pandemic response. Let's put our heads together and see if we can't make it worse while still appearing to do something useful."

[dlk]

22. So much blood on his hands...

[LaMouffette]

23. Covid victims' families should slap Trump with wrongful death civil lawsuits, like Nicole Simpson's

and Ron Goldman's families did after OJ was acquitted of their murders.

From NOLO.com:

Question

O.J. Simpson was NOT guilty of murdering Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman as judged by criminal court jury. Yet a civil court jury held him legally responsible for their deaths. So, how is the civil court's determination different from the criminal? And is O.J. still NOT guilty of murder?

Answer

You are not alone in being confused about how a person acquitted of murder in a criminal trial can be held liable for a victim's wrongful death in a civil trial.

The first step to understanding this seeming contradiction is to know that a criminal prosecution involves different laws, a different court system, and different burdens of proof. Specifically, the definition of first degree murder in the context of the O.J. case requires that the act be done with malice aforethought and premeditation. And to convict in the criminal court, the case against the defendant must be proven beyond a reasonable doubt.

In a civil case for wrongful death, on the other hand, the plaintiffs had to prove only that the defendant ’s intentional and unlawful conduct resulted in the victims ’ deaths.. The burden of proof in the civil case was preponderance of the evidence -- a much lesser burden than is required in a criminal case.

So, while a criminal jury might reasonably fail to find guilt beyond a reasonable doubt and acquit an accused, a civil jury might also reasonably find by a preponderance of the evidence that a defendant ’s unlawful conduct results in civil liability.
Is the former football hero Orenthal James Simpson a murderer? A civil jury found it more likely than not that he caused the death of his ex-wife and her friend. A criminal jury was unable to find beyond a reasonable doubt that O.J. committed first degree murder. Legally, the outcomes do not contradict each other.

[link:https://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/question-civil-judgment-versus-criminal-conviction-28300.html|

[Blue Owl]

25. LOCK THAT GODDAMNED FAT FUCK PIECE OF SHIT UP.