How Jared Kushner's Secret #CORONAVIRUS Testing Plan "Went Poof Into Thin Air"

[riversedge]

The White House and Trump are Mean, cruel, uncaring Selfish Stupid etc

This article is long but very readable.



“The political folks believed that because it was going to be relegated to Democratic states, that they could blame those governors, and that would be an effective political strategy.”

Link to tweet

?s=20



How Jared Kushner’s Secret Testing Plan “Went Poof Into Thin Air”

This spring, a team working under the president's son-in-law produced a plan for an aggressive, coordinated national COVID-19 response that could have brought the pandemic under control. So why did the White House spike it in favor of a shambolic 50-state response?

By Katherine Eban July 30, 2020




.......................And it proposed establishing “a national Sentinel Surveillance System” with “real-time intelligence capabilities to understand leading indicators where hot spots are arising and where the risks are high vs. where people can get back to work.”

By early April, some who worked on the plan were given the strong impression that it would soon be shared with President Trump and announced by the White House. The plan, though imperfect, was a starting point. Simply working together as a nation on it “would have put us in a fundamentally different place,” said the participant.

But the effort ran headlong into shifting sentiment at the White House. Trusting his vaunted political instincts, President Trump had been downplaying concerns about the virus and spreading misinformation about it—efforts that were soon amplified by Republican elected officials and right-wing media figures. Worried about the stock market and his reelection prospects, Trump also feared that more testing would only lead to higher case counts and more bad publicity. Meanwhile, Dr. Deborah Birx, the White House’s coronavirus response coordinator, was reportedly sharing models with senior staff that optimistically—and erroneously, it would turn out—predicted the virus would soon fade away.

Against that background, the prospect of launching a large-scale national plan was losing favor, said one public health expert in frequent contact with the White House’s official coronavirus task force.

Most troubling of all, perhaps, was a sentiment the expert said a member of Kushner’s team expressed: that because the virus had hit blue states hardest, a national plan was unnecessary and would not make sense politically. “The political folks believed that because it was going to be relegated to Democratic states, that they could blame those governors, and that would be an effective political strategy,” said the expert.

That logic may have swayed Kushner. “It was very clear that Jared was ultimately the decision maker as to what [plan] was going to come out,” the expert said.

On April 27, Trump stepped to a podium in the Rose Garden, flanked by members of his coronavirus task force and leaders of America’s big commercial testing laboratories, Quest Diagnostics and LabCorp, and finally announced a testing plan: It bore almost no resemblance to the one that had been forged in late March, and shifted the problem of diagnostic testing almost entirely to individual states.

Under the plan released that day, the federal government would act as a facilitator to help increase needed supplies and rapidly approve new versions of diagnostic-testing kits. But the bulk of the effort to operate testing sites and find available labs fell to the states.

“I had this naive optimism: This is too important to be caught in a partisan filter of how we view truth and the world,” said Rick Klausner, a Rockefeller Foundation adviser and former director of the National Cancer Institute. “But the federal government has decided to abrogate responsibility, and basically throw 50 states onto their own.”
THE SUMMER OF DISASTER....................................

[underpants]

1. Astounding and incredible reporting. Read it here last night HIGHLY recommend it

What I posted previously


First, the procurement system and professionals worked as designed.
Second, nothing else did.

The scope of work should have required refrigeration. That’s a huge error that doomed the whole process of receiving testing material.

Jared is consistent. He sucks. For some reason he seems to think he more than a potted plant.

I was not aware of the extent of the Rockefeller involvement. I’ve heard almost nothing about them in this whole thing. I had heard of Penn being involved (nice tease at the beginning of the article) due to an appearance he made on Fallon where it was mentioned.

They made a political decision with people's lives? I’d read early on that it was Jared who advised Trump that it was nothing and to treat it like bad PR. Trump realized it was blowing up in his face and was furious with Jared.

This is some really good reporting I hope Katherine Eban is recognized for it.

[kacekwl]

2. All trumps plans go poof. Other than tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans I can't

think of any plan economic, forgien policy, healthcare, etc. that hasn't gone poof.

[NCDem47]

10. Still waiting two weeks later...

...for that beautiful healthcare plan from Trump.

NOT!

[Mike 03]

3. Kicking

[niyad]

4. F'n murderers.

[ffr]

15. +1 They are participating in the practice of eugenics

As mentioned in another thread.

They are at war. They want no prisoners. You're either with them and carry human traits they see as desirable. Or you are against them or carry human traits they don't find desirable. In that case, they are moving heaven and earth to make sure that you and anyone like you do not receive assistance. Period.

Vote and encourage others to vote as if their lives depended upon it.

[Chemisse]

5. This is stunning! "Political people" need to go to prison over this!

That they actually had a plan and chose to drop it so the Democratic states would look bad is incomprehensible.

I would bet this was Trump's decision, not Jared's. He's so stupid he would not foresee that it would spread to red states eventually.

[KPN]

6. Wow. A long but must read.

If the reporting is accurate, there needs to be indictments of those at the highest level when the GOP is swept aside. With this kind of reporting and a targeted Congressional investigation around this between now and November, I have no doubts the GOP will be (provided we have a secure election).

[unblock]

7. It's Reagan's aids playbook

Republicans decided to ignore the aids crisis because unlike in other countries, the first American victims were gay. And because aids was not so readily contagious, it spread primarily through the gay community and iv drug users.

Reagan and the republicans saw everything through a political lens and decided this was a community they didn't care to help, so they demonized they victims instead of seeing it as a health crisis affecting Americans.

it continued to spread, of course, and eventually affected more straight people than gay people, and also newborn babies and people who got tainted transfusions.


Donnie and the republicans saw COVID-19 once again not as a health crisis affecting Americans but as a political matter because the first victims here were mostly in blue states. So they once again chose to ignore Americans dying because they're so warped by partisan hatred they couldn't even grasp that a disease with a much higher rate of transmission would spread like wildfire. So of course, now it's affecting states they do care about.

[chwaliszewski]

8. Unfreakingreal...

[jaxexpat]

9. Unfortunately, Trump's minions won't-can't read or comprehend this data.

Been a problem from the start.

[bucolic_frolic]

11. They had no basis for thinking it could be contained to blue states

and no basis for thinking it could die out or mutate into something less lethal. They just thought it a bad flu. Hubris from the get to, they thought their own thoughts were grounded in reality. Typical overweaned garbage.

[AllaN01Bear]

12. this virus is a equal opertunity killer . dosent give a hoot, hoot , hoot ,

wether you are democratic . repubican , white and or black. man or woman nor child .it dosnt care. no mask , you die.

[mountain grammy]

13. The summer of disaster.

My son told me I’m hysterical and have too much anger. Right!

[niyad]

16. "If you aren't angry, you are not paying attention." We ARE paying attention!

[dlk]

14. Imagine that, a guy with zero public health experience fails spectacularly addressing a pandemic

Republicans are wholly unfit to govern, especially in a life and death crisis.

[Initech]

17. Jared turned a sprawling apartment complex into a rat infested shithole.

So yeah let's put him in charge, what could go wrong?

[IronLionZion]

18. The pandemic is hitting red states hardest now, is the GOP plan still to die quickly?

[Mersky]

19. Jamie Raskin brought up this article a few mins ago during questioning Dr Fauci

before the House Oversight and Reform Subcommittee on Select Coronavirus Crisis.

https://www.c-span.org/video/?c4896959/user-clip-rep-raskin-coronavirus-select-comittee-7312020

The VF article comes up about four mins into the video, but the whole clip is worth watching.

He starts by laying waste to 1st Amendment argument against limiting church gatherings for public health reasons by citing the 5-4 SCOTUS decision that found that imposed crowd size restrictions were no different for other large indoor gatherings. Then, he clearly lays out the differences in the public health threats and responses for rw protests against public health orders, and anti-maskers threatening the governor of Michigan versus the peaceful BLM protestors who do observe health precautions. Notably, he raised the issue of intentionally using chemical irritants to inflame protestors to coughing and sneezing. Finally, in outlining the VF article that details kushner’s hushed efforts, Raskin reveals that the reason the plan was scuttled was due to the depraved political calculation that the deadly virus should only effect largely Democratic voting areas.

[Judi Lynn]

20. Demands for Kushner to Resign Over 'Staggering' Level of 'Depravity' That Put Politics Before Public

Published on
Friday, July 31, 2020
by Common Dreams


"Holy hell. Jared Kushner reportedly abandoned a national testing plan because it was *politically advantageous* to sit back and let blue states be eviscerated by the virus."

by Jon Queally, staff writer

In the wake of devastating new reporting by Vanity Fair, a chorus of voices Friday called for the immediate resignation of Jared Kushner, a top White House advisor and the son-in-law of President Donald Trump, for disastrous—and deadly—failures by the administration that appear to have put the political desires of the president above the public health needs of the American people.

The Vanity Fair article takes an exhaustive look at decisions made and actions taken by a secretive task force led by Kushner that was charged with implementing an "aggressive, coordinated national COVID-19 response"—including a federal testing regime that would help stem the spread of the virus. What the investigation uncovered, according to reporter Katherine Eban, was an ultimately "aborted plan" for a far-reaching national testing strategy and a deliberative process that "began not with public health experts but with bankers and billionaires."

While the plan itself devised by the team Kushner put together was characterized as "imperfect" but "a starting point," the most shocking revelations have to do with why the strategy, which members of the unit believed would head straight to Trump's desk and then be rolled out nationwide with large fanfare in early April, suddenly seemed to disappear—like "poof into thin air," said one participant in the effort.

As Eban reports:

the prospect of launching a large-scale national plan was losing favor, said one public health expert in frequent contact with the White House's official coronavirus task force.

Most troubling of all, perhaps, was a sentiment the expert said a member of Kushner's team expressed: that because the virus had hit blue states hardest, a national plan was unnecessary and would not make sense politically. "The political folks believed that because it was going to be relegated to Democratic states, that they could blame those governors, and that would be an effective political strategy," said the expert.

That logic may have swayed Kushner. "It was very clear that Jared was ultimately the decision maker as to what [plan] was going to come out," the expert said.

On April 27, Trump stepped to a podium in the Rose Garden, flanked by members of his coronavirus task force and leaders of America’s big commercial testing laboratories, Quest Diagnostics and LabCorp, and finally announced a testing plan: It bore almost no resemblance to the one that had been forged in late March, and shifted the problem of diagnostic testing almost entirely to individual states.

. . .

Our work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License. Feel free to republish and share widely.

More:
https://www.commondreams.org/news/2020/07/31/demands-kushner-resign-over-staggering-level-depravity-put-politics-public-health