A conservative friend sent me an email with a link to a Forbes article from a few days back:
Another thing no one hears about.
Hi,
I thought you’d like this:
600 Physicians Say Lockdowns Are A ‘Mass Casualty Incident’ – Forbes
From the article:
More than 600 of the nation’s physicians sent a letter to President Trump this week calling the coronavirus shutdowns a “mass casualty incident” with “exponentially growing negative health consequences” to millions of non COVID patients.
“The downstream health effects…are being massively under-estimated and under-reported. This is an order of magnitude error,” according to the letter initiated by Simone Gold, M.D., an emergency medicine specialist in Los Angeles.
“Suicide hotline phone calls have increased 600%,” the letter said. Other silent casualties: “150,000 Americans per month who would have had new cancer detected through routine screening.”
The response I began to write but decided to blog is this –
Oh, I’ve heard several variations on these arguments, actually.
But none of them are made by epidemiologists, but instead by just everyday doctors who don’t have relevant training or research experience.
So why pay attention to them?
Actually, there’s a very good reason: because they, by implication, condemn President Trump. He should be leading, which means communicating to us how to handle all these things. To tell people that when they are worried about a different health problem, go in and see your doctor. Just take precautions.
But has he?
Instead, we get these poor victims, and then we get all the idiots who decided Memorial Day weekend was for partying down, endangering themselves, their families, their colleagues and co-workers, and their friends. We get wicked lies about Trump’s rival, Joe Biden; ridiculous accusations that Morning Joe co-host Joe Scarborough, former Republican, former Republic member of Congress, murdered a junior aide; recommendations to take medications based on nothing more than a badly done study; musings on ingesting bleach; and threats against Michigan, Nevada, and North Carolina.
These are the actions of a President?
I think just about everyone, those who voted for him, those who voted against him, those who abstained from voting because of outrage at the candidates, even those who didn’t vote from simple political apathy, knew that it was going to be Amateur Hour at the White House when his Electoral College victory was confirmed, against the will of the popular vote. Those who voted against him feared what this could mean; those who voted for him hoped and even expected Trump and his people to grow into their jobs, learning day in and day out.
But now we know, don’t we? Now we know that it’s still Amateur Hour, that Trump never improved, that he was incapable of learning, of leading, of inspiration. And that it’s cost us lives, our morale, and our cohesion.
The Forbes columnist, Grace-Marie Turner, probably thought she had found a devastating critique of the approach we’re taking to a pandemic. She was wrong. Those 600 physicians, as much as they may believe they’re condemning a plan to slow the spread of the coronavirus, are actually silent accusers. By their actions, they accuse Trump of being a failure in an hour of great American – and world-wide – need. He should have been a partner to the epidemiologists, a guide translating their recommendations, a leader.
Instead, all he could do was think about reelection, and in the least effective, coarsest terms.
That group of physicians, whether they realize it or not, has condemned Trumpian leadership for the sheer fakery that is – or should be obvious – to all.
