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A Chinese state-controlled newspaper has blamed the Trump administration's mishandling of the COVID-19 pandemic to cause the spread of the virus to go "completely out of control."
Describing the disease as a "U.S. epidemic", the paper warned that the administration's failure poses a threat to the rest of the world. "Lies are dominating US society's recognition of the epidemic," the Global Times wrote.
The dramatic spike in the numbers of US COVID-19 infections continues this weekend. New coronavirus cases in Florida on Sunday exceeded 10,000 in a day for the third time in the past week, after the state posted a record high of 11,458 the previous day. And Texas on Saturday reported 5,815 more coronavirus cases, the state's sixth straight day above 5,000
In a Friday, July 3, 2020, editorial titled, "Rampant US epidemic to hurt the world" China's Global Timeswrote:
The US set another record for novel coronavirus cases on Thursday. Reuters reported that the country confirmed more than 55,000 new COVID-19 cases that day, which is "a new daily global record" for the pandemic.
Earlier this week, US epidemiologist Dr. Anthony Fauci warned that the US may soon see as many as 100,000 new cases of COVID-19 a day if the current trajectory of the outbreak is not changed.
Scott Gottlieb, a former commissioner for the US Food and Drug Administration, even suggested the true number of US daily infections is between 400,000 and 500,000, though there is not enough testing to find them all.
The current epidemic in the US is completely out of control. However, the US federal government still insists that the rapid increase in infection figures is due to more testing. Data released by the US Labor Department on Thursday showed the country added 4.8 million jobs in June. The White House soon boasted about its economic achievements. But people doubt whether the US government is making utmost efforts to rein in the virus and save more American lives.
Lies are dominating US society's recognition of the epidemic. Political parties have put their interests in campaigning in the first place, which has distorted the society's attention and allocation of resources. The US fight against the virus is paralyzed. There is no national strategy to alleviate the epidemic. Political calculations have stunted the battle against COVID-19.
Americans are not willing to temporarily sacrifice their freedom for the fight against the virus. The federal government has not corrected the attitude. Worse, it used the sentiment to promote the resumption of economic activities in a risky manner. It is making ordinary people responsible for the out-of-control epidemic.
The US economy has slightly recovered, yet the price it is paying is too high. It will surely become a burden for the US' future economic development. The US government's approach seems to be shaping US society's greater tolerance toward the virus, making people less afraid of being infected.
As the only superpower, the US can shape global public opinion as it wishes. The country has manipulated the understanding over the novel coronavirus in many societies worldwide. It has not contributed to the global fight against the crisis. On the contrary, it is setting a terrible example.
No matter how the virus surfaced, the US plays the most negative role in making sure the novel coronavirus spreads fast across the globe, and we are far from ending it.
Can anyone in the world recall of outstanding contributions the US has made to the global efforts against COVID-19? The only thing people can remember is the US' repeated accusations against China, apart from its astonishingly large number of infections and deaths. Washington has distracted the world's attention.
The US is supposed to lead the world in establishing a global anti-pandemic front. But it continued to criticize the World Health Organization (WHO), and announced it would sever ties with the body.
As long as its epidemic continues to spread, the global anti-virus fight can hardly take a fundamental turn for the better.
In the coming fall and winter, the US epidemic will likely run rampant, and more countries and regions will be forced to suffer because of the US.
Meanwhile, Donald Trump's top trade adviser Peter Navarro pushed several COVID-19 conspiracy theories on MSNBC Friday. Navarro said China deliberately allowed hundreds of thousands of people infected with coronavirus to leave the country "to seed and spread the virus" abroad.
At one point in the interview, MSNBC's Ali Velshi had to ask, "What are you talking about?"
"They spawned the virus, they hid virus, they sent hundreds of thousands of Chinese nationalists over here to seed and spread the virus before we knew," Navarro said. He claimed the virus "probably" came from a Chinese lab and argued, "this looks like a weaponized virus" and that the "Chinese communist party" is responsible for forcing Americans to "stay locked in our homes and lose our jobs."
\u201cAs I watch the Pandemic spread its ugly face all across the world, including the tremendous damage it has done to the USA, I become more and more angry at China. People can see it, and I can feel it!\u201d— Donald J. Trump (@Donald J. Trump) 1593557522
\u201cWith a population of 21 million, Florida announced 10,109 new covid cases today.\n\nWith a combined population of 2.6 billion, China, Japan, Korea, Vietnam, Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia, the Philippines, Australia, and the European Union are averaging 6,760 new cases.\u201d— Matt O'Brien (@Matt O'Brien) 1593703241
\u201cDaily Covid-19 case count in Florida, Texas, and New York since 6/1.\n\nNew York is the green one.\u201d— Jesse Damiani (@Jesse Damiani) 1593971221
Conservative governors are now openly at odds with epidemiologists as plans move ahead for more than half the states to loosen social distancing and permit many businesses to re-open this month despite none of them meeting White House Coronavirus Taskforce guidelines.
Unlike re-openings in China, Hong Kong and South Korea where new cases fell rapidly after aggressive containment efforts, the United States, with nearly 1.4 million cases and over 81,000 COVID-19 deaths (as of May 11), must follow a different model.
Many critics blame the Trump Administration's laggard scale-up of testing for the dilemma. But studies of past emerging disease epidemics have taught us that testing alone will not prevent new outbreaks. To re-open the economy we must undertake the most massive effort to trace and isolate new infections in history.
Ironically, the states moving most rapidly to restore commerce--eg. Georgia, Texas, and Florida--not only have regions with high case loads, but also inadequate public health workers to contain new outbreaks, according to a study by Politico. In the Midwest, despite high case loads per capita in Iowa and Nebraska, officials are jumping ahead of federal criteria calling for two weeks of falling cases before relaxing stay-at-home rules. Robert Redfield, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), warns that re-opening requires not only ramped up testing, but "very aggressive" contact tracing of new cases. Such disease tracking, together with testing, was critical to controlling spread of the virus in South Korea, New Zealand, Germany and China.
An April 27 letter released by former public health officials, including Andy Slavitt, who ran Medicare and Medicaid in the Obama administration, and Scott Gottlieb, a former Food and Drug Administration chief under President Trump, estimated 180,000 contact tracers are needed to re-open the economy. Tom Frieden, who directed the CDC from 2009 to 2017, extrapolated from experiences in Asia to estimate that up to 300,000 such workers may be needed across the country. At present local health departments and the CDC have only about 2,200 professional "disease detectives," although other health staff often assist during a contagious outbreak.
Until early May, federal officials and the media have tended to ignore contact tracing despite the critical role it has played in every infectious disease outbreak. The labor-intensive nature of the task is probably why. Our chronically underfunded, and now overwhelmed, public health departments have no capacity for such a massive scale up without significant new funding.
A recent NPR survey and follow-up report on 44 state health departments turned up a total count of 11,142 workers trained in contact tracing. As a point of contrast, at the height of China's viral crisis it took 9,000 contact tracers in Wuhan alone to contain the outbreak. Officials in state health departments surveyed described a variety of plans to expand capacity, some relying on volunteers, with the goal of scaling up to 66,197. Most will need federal aid for the new hires.
Unfortunately, there is no federal health workforce or emergency fund up to the task. The closest we have to a US rapid response team might be the Medical Reserve Corps (MRC), which matches over 175,000 volunteers with public health and medical assistance needs across the country. Thousands of MRC volunteers are now deployed in call centers or administering tests during the coronavirus crisis. Some may be trained as contact tracers in coming months.
We also entered into the COVID-19 crisis with a shortage of nurses and primary care doctors. The Chinese government sent 42,000 health workers to the Wuhan from other parts of the country. Despite the likelihood that many new hot spots will crop up here as we re-open, the United States lacks a coherent mobile medical corps of professionals who can be deployed rapidly. Given the perpetual shortages of physicians in US rural areas, another program that deserves to be scaled up is the underfunded "National Health Service Corps" which ties medical school loan forgiveness to commitments by new doctors to practice for two years in underserved areas.
Our urgent need to scale up infectious disease control is not unlike the impetus for the Green New Deal (GND) jobs & infrastructure proposal to support a just energy/climate transition.
Our urgent need to scale up infectious disease control is not unlike the impetus for the Green New Deal (GND) jobs & infrastructure proposal to support a just energy/climate transition. Both ideas draw inspiration from President Franklin D. Roosevelt's response to mass unemployment in the Great Depression by creating the Works Progress Administration which hired millions of unemployed people over an eight-year period for public works projects.
Clearly the need to address the climate crisis remains urgent, but first we have to get out of the house safely. Jeremy Brecher, of the Institute for Policy Studies, has called for such an emergency GND that includes health. Such a new health corps could offer a win-win solution to our two acute (and simultaneous) dilemmas: record levels of unemployment and a vital need for more feet-on-the-ground to reduce our viral case load.
At present, many political observers predict that after the pandemic, citizens will demand more investment in health care and disease surveillance. Thus, a plan to strengthen health staffing--including new professional and community health workers--could address future needs as well as our current emergency. Besides containing new infections and providing vital paychecks to our unemployed, like other "essential" workers, new health workers would spend their funds into the economy boosting demand for goods and services.
Dr. Frieden argued in early May that lockdowns, while effective at stopping spread, are blunt tools that cause unemployment and bankruptcies. Instead, he said, "we have a sharper tool, (a strategy) to stop chains of transmission by widespread testing, isolation of cases, contact tracing and quarantine of contacts."
Frieden, who now directs the non-profit Resolve to Save Lives, gained extensive experience overseeing responses to the H1N1 influenza, Ebola and Zika epidemics while running the CDC. But the importance of contact tracers was brought home to him many years earlier in New York City. I did post-doctoral research in 1999 comparing two epidemics of resurgent multi-drug-resistant tuberculosis (MDR-TB) - one in New York City and one in Lima, Peru. I learned that Frieden, while working in the CDC's Epidemic Intelligence Service in 1991, helped demonstrate that MDR-TB was widespread in many poor neighborhoods of New York City, a finding that spurred the mayor to replace city health officials who had ignored mounting signs of the epidemic.
Frieden was appointed to lead the city's tuberculosis division and later credited for innovative policies thar brought the deadly outbreak under control. One key initiative was the hiring and training of community health workers (who did not have professional degrees) to do outreach, track cases and administer doses of anti-TB drugs, effectively cutting the chain of contagion and drug-resistance.
Community health workers were also the key to controlling MDR-TB in Peru. TB drug resistance was first identified in a barrio of Lima in the late 1990s by the Boston-based non-profit Partners in Health (PIH). Drs. Paul Farmer and Jim Yong Kim, who directed PIH, built a program at an urban clinic in Lima to address the deadly outbreak using a similar strategy of outreach and treatment with lay workers doing home visits and social programming with patients. In both the New York and Lima epidemics, a training staple for successful community outreach was cultural sensitivity and a willingness to establish relationships and trust with patients and their families. PIH's Peru work helped established a model for treating MDR-TB outbreaks in low-income countries.
PIH is now applying that experience to COVID-19 in Massachusetts where the health department recently contracted with PIH to hire 1,000 fulltime community health workers as half of a 2,000 person contingent who will do contact tracing statewide. Another model may be California which has invested in a well-designed disease tracking system, and now aims to combine hired staff and volunteers to ramp up to 10,000 contact tracers.
Since April 1 new US cases per day have exceeded 20,000 on every day except one, and have ranged as high as 38,000. Epidemic models predict the infection will continue to spread across the country in the months ahead, producing not hundreds of thousands, but millions of new infections, especially in places where social distancing is lax. Many states project using new electronic tracing systems for COVID-19 exposure which have been heavily hyped by tech companies, such as Google and Apple. But even if the serious privacy concerns raised by these apps are resolved, such systems will only be an aid, not a replacement for humans who follow-up with contacts exposed to the virus.
The work of a contact tracer, ideally hired from the same area where he or she would serve, starts with interviewing infected patients and following leads to find people that person was recently in contact with. These workers then help arrange testing for new contacts, advise them on self-isolation, and assist those who become sick with treatment and access to humane quarantine options like hotel rooms or other facilities for patients in crowded households so as to avoid infecting immune-compromised or elderly members. Support for patients in quarantine would include food and daily follow-up on medical needs. This level of support is the only way to prevent super-spreader events--such as the widely reported outbreaks at funerals or nursing homes that contributed to the US having a quarter of all reported cases globally.
When locally-based and trained well, community health workers are also the ideal outreach personnel to educate others on coronavirus prevention and treatment, including advice on chronic problems that contribute to high COVID-19 mortality rates in Latino and Black families. In the long run such a workforce could help address the long-standing shortage of primary care in the United States--including community-based programming to assist families with preventive health, nutrition, exercise, chronic diseases and mental health needs.
In their public letter, Drs. Gottlieb and Slavitt called for $46 billion in national support for states to trace contacts and isolate infected patients, with an additional $4.5 billion for quarantine facilities, including rental of otherwise vacant hotel rooms. While the last Congressional stimulus package (HR 266) contained $25 billion for state health departments, the bulk of those funds were aimed at scaling up testing, with only a small slice likely to be spent for tracing contacts.
To re-open safely, the country needs a more comprehensive approach. One promising bill, introduced by Sens. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.) and Michael Bennet (D-Colo.), would allocate $55 billion a year for a new "Health Force"--training and hiring hundreds of thousands of new public health workers to do testing, contact tracing and eventually vaccinating the population. The Senators even cite FDR's Great Depression work program as an inspiration.
It is clear that re-opening alone will not rapidly reduce unemployment, and federal stimulus efforts to date to keep working people afloat are woefully inadequate. The country needs to look beyond welfare solutions. There is much work to be done. Why not hire the unemployed to find and stem new viral outbreaks so we can reopen without recurring waves of deadly outbreaks? Until we have an army of disease detectives, the virus will continue its massive crime wave.
It's become a truism, almost trite, that with the coronavirus crisis, "we're all in this together."
But not everyone agrees.
A small but highly influential group of billionaires, executives and right-wing pundits have a different view: Some of them urge that we must "normalize" the economy as soon as possible, implicitly - and in some cases, explicitly - accepting that this would mean sacrificing lives. Others, apparently, just don't care about those risks, or conveniently believe against evidence that they are not real or overblown
Proponents paint this callous approach as the kind of "tough" decision that strong leaders must make. They have had a dangerous influence on policy. And although their recommendations have been shunted aside for now, there's a great risk that save-the-economy-and-let-the-chips fall-where-they-may chorus again gains the president's favor, with potentially horrifying consequences.
On March 16, the Trump administration announced its "15 Days to Slow the Spread" initiative. Surgeon General Jerome Adams conceded 15 days would likely not be enough time. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said to expect social distancing measures to last at least through late May or mid-June.
Less than a week into the "15 Days" initiative, Trump posted a tweet that seemed to signal his growing impatience with social distancing and frustration with its impact on the market.
Two days later, the president and Vice President Mike Pence reportedly huddled with billionaire Wall Street executives including:
According to CNBC reporter Kayla Tausche, Vice President Mike Pence's former chief of staff arranged the call and was "running backchannel" between the White House and corporate America.
\u201cNEW, as reported on @CNBC -- Former Pence chief of staff Nick Ayers has been running backchannel between WH and corporate America, stressing dire impact of a long-term shutdown.\u201d— Kayla Tausche (@Kayla Tausche) 1585092358
\u201cAyers has been instrumental in the White House's messaging shift after Trump last week suggested the economy could be shutdown until July.\u201d— Kayla Tausche (@Kayla Tausche) 1585092358
After the meeting, Trump held a press conference to announce he intended to push for a hastened end to the social distancing measures, saying "America will again -- and soon -- be open for business. [...] Very soon, a lot sooner than three or four months that somebody was suggesting. A lot sooner. We cannot let the cure be worse than the problem itself."
In the meantime, a chorus of corporate executives, free-market extremists and right-wing ideologues started backing the president's push to hasten the resumption of normal business activity.
When criticized for this reckless, aggressive timeline despite credible forecasts that millions could die absent aggressive measures, Trump doubled down and accused the experts pushing back on his Easter reopening date of being politically motivated. "I think there are certain people that would like it not to open so quickly [...] I think there are certain people that would like [the economy] to do financially poorly, because they think that would be very good as far as defeating me at the polls."
Dr. Anthony Fauci, the top federal authority on infectious diseases, pushed back against the president's arbitrary timeline on CNN: "And you've got to understand that you don't make the timeline, the virus makes the timeline. So you've got to respond, in what you see happen. And if you keep seeing this acceleration, it doesn't matter what you say. One week, two weeks, three weeks - you've got to go with what the situation on the ground is."
Several days later, Trump relented and postponed his aspirational reopening of the country to June 1 after his health advisors persuaded him the casualty cost could be massive. Trump ally Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) reportedly told the president he would own the deaths if coronavirus lockdowns are prematurely ended.
For the moment, Trump has decided to avoid the worst-case scenario and listen to public health experts instead of Wall Street billionaires.
But it's still a scandal that the profiteers' advice to the president - which could have cost millions of lives - was taken so seriously that the nation's top public health experts had to force a course correction in order to avert that catastrophe.
The heartlessness undergirding the advice to end or diminish social distancing is jaw-dropping. What's plain is that, despite a few members of the chorus saying they are willing to sacrifice themselves, purportedly to assist the younger generation, the proponents of a "return to normalcy" are treating coronavirus deaths as a statistical abstraction. They don't imagine that actual humans' lives are in the balance, or at least not the lives of anyone they know.
Perhaps the super wealthy believe that in their bubble they can protect themselves. This in fact may be true to some extent (the super rich are rushing to second homes in the Hamptons and elsewhere and some billionaires are opting to self-isolate on super-yachts). It's a certainty in our harshly unequal society that the coronavirus will take a far worse toll on lower-income communities.
But it's not just the callousness of the "return the economy to normal" advocates that is so shocking. So too is their blinkered outlook. The economic costs of lockdowns and social distancing are in fact severe, catastrophically so for many, and impose their own health costs. There is good reason to believe these costs could have been significantly ameliorated if the United States had responded far more aggressively to the coronavirus, including especially with scaled-up testing. Somehow, the billionaires and pundits who want to re-start the economy seem to ignore this point. They also seem oblivious to the stark reality that the economy cannot simply be re-started, no matter what Trump or anyone else decrees.
The real problem is the virus, not the restrictions. Loosening social distancing restrictions would spike the public health disaster we are facing and bring disastrous economic consequences almost surely as severe as what we now are experiencing. At some point in the future, it will be possible to loosen restrictions - but making sensible decisions on this score and being able to maintain a less restrictive environment requires adequate testing, which is still unavailable, as well as having in place a massive system to do contact tracing. People who are serious about doing everything possible about getting the economy going as soon as possible, without sacrificing hundreds of thousands of lives or more, would be demanding on these fronts and screaming about the administration's patent and ongoing failures.
Here is a sampling of those voices who recklessly pushed to suspend life-saving social distancing measures during the coronavirus crisis. Many are millionaires and billionaires with great influence in Washington, and with the Trump White House in particular. Some are more crass than others. A few of them come right out and admit that they are OK with seeing more deaths so that the economy can get going again. The milder voices call for partial social distancing suspensions - at best, a foolish undermining of medical advice. The worst peddle outright conspiracy theories that the lockdowns are politically driven. Generally, they couch their concern as helping everyday Americans avoid the real economic pain caused by social distancing, but it is very hard to avoid the conclusion that their concerns are with profit and an ideological zeal for unregulated markets.
Surely there is nothing patriotic about their call to sacrifice American lives during a global pandemic in a self-defeating effort to return to normalcy. This is not a normal time.
1. Lloyd Blankfein
Former CEO of Goldman Sachs
Net worth: $1.3 billion
\u201cExtreme measures to flatten the virus \u201ccurve\u201d is sensible-for a time-to stretch out the strain on health infrastructure. But crushing the economy, jobs and morale is also a health issue-and beyond. Within a very few weeks let those with a lower risk to the disease return to work.\u201d— Lloyd Blankfein (@Lloyd Blankfein) 1584928796
2. Gary Cohn
Former Goldman Sachs executive and former Trump administration economic advisor
Net worth: $252 million - $611 million
Reportedly spoke "for many on Wall Street arguing for a need to 'normalise' the economy. 'Decision will be difficult but it must be made,' he said. (Source: Financial Times)
3. Tilman Fertitta
Owner, Golden Nugget casinos, Houston Rockets, Bubba Gump Shrimp
Net worth: $3.2 billion
Feritta complains his company is "doing basically no business" wants authorities to let businesses reopen in a limited capacity by mid-April. (Source: Bloomberg News)
4. Tom Golisano
Founder and chairman of Paychex, Inc.
Net worth: $3 billion
"The damages of keeping the economy closed as it is could be worse than losing a few more people." Golisano has subsequently apologized for his comments. (Source: Bloomberg News)
5. Charles Koch and Americans for Prosperity
Chairman and CEO of Koch Industries; founder and funder of Americans for Prosperity
Net worth: $40.3 billion
While Charles Koch has personally been silent on the pandemic, the organization he heavily backs, Americans for Prosperity, has forcefully pushed back against governors ordering the closures of non-essential businesses. Emily Seidel, the group's CEO, released a statement opposing the closures and arguing that, "Rather than blanket shutdowns, the government should allow businesses to continue to adapt and innovate to produce the goods and services Americans need, while continuing to do everything they can to protect the public health."
The group's state chapters have followed suit, with both the Pennsylvania and Michigan state directors opposing state closures of nonessential businesses.
Unlike millions of frontline workers, Americans for Prosperity employees, it should be noted, can work from home, as the organization reportedly has gone "totally remote" in light of social distancing requirements. (Source: The Intercept)
6. Dick Kovacevich
Former CEO and chairman of Wells Fargo & Co.
Compensated more than $188 million over last five years at Wells Fargo (2002-2007)
Regarding requiring workers aged 55 and younger to return to work: "We'll gradually bring those people back and see what happens. Some of them will get sick, some may even die, I don't know. [...] Do you want to suffer more economically or take some risk that you'll get flu-like symptoms and a flu-like experience? Do you want to take an economic risk or a health risk? You get to choose." (Source: Bloomberg News)
7. Elon Musk
CEO, Tesla, SpaceX
Net worth: $32 billion
Musk has repeatedly downplayed the coronavirus pandemic in an email to employees on March 13, comparing the death toll to the death toll from car crashes.
Since March 21, Musk seems to have taken a turn, and has subsequently distributed 1,000 ventilators from China to Los Angeles and pledged to repurposing Tesla factories to produce ventilators. (Source: Buzzfeed News / Vox)
8. Michael Saylor
CEO of MicroStrategy
Net worth: Once worth $7 billion and dubbed "the richest person in Washington, D.C.," Saylor famously lost $6 billion in one day when the tech bubble burst.
In a March 16 email to 2,000 MicroStrategy employees saying he expected them to keep coming to the office despite public health warnings, Saylor said:
[T]he "economic damage" of social distancing and quarantines was greater than "the theoretical benefit of slowing down a virus" and suggested that it would make more sense to "quarantine the 40 million elderly retired, immune compromised people who no longer need to work or get educated" and described "the absolutely worse case" as "the overall life expectancy worldwide would click down by a few weeks ... Instead of 79.60 years to live we would have 79.45 years to live. 1 out of 500 people will pass on a bit sooner, or not, or die from a celebrated disease instead of just old age."
After numerous media outlets reported on the email, Saylor sent another message to employees allowing them to work from home.
(Source: The Guardian / The Wall Street Journal)
9. Barry Sternlicht
Founder of investment firm Starwood Capital Group and donor to South Bend, Ind., Mayor Pete Buttigieg's presidential campaign
Net worth: $3 billion
"I kind of agree with the president, frankly, because you cannot kill the economy, the largest economy in the world. We don't have enough money to fix it, and it's not fixable. It's a balance, is all I'm saying. I've never seen a counter of deaths every day of my life. I've never seen that. And if I saw it for the flu, I'd probably freak out, for regular flu I'd probably be freaking out too. [...] To say we're going to shut the economy down for two years or 18 months is just ridiculous. I mean it is a flu. It will pass. [...] Let's get on with it." (Source: CNBC)
10. Mark Wilson
President and CEO of the Florida Chamber of Commerce
Led the Florida Chamber of Commerce's effort of lobbying Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis against a statewide shutdown of nonessential businesses. "We're recommending that the governor continue to do what he's doing [...] I don't think the data says we need to do a statewide shutdown." Gov. DeSantis was among the governors holding out against announcing a statewide shutdown of nonessential businesses until finally relenting on April 1. (Source: Tampa Bay Times)
1. Glenn Beck
Former Fox News Channel host and CEO of The Blaze
Net worth: At least $100 million
"I'm in the danger zone. I would rather have my children stay home and all of us who are over 50 go in and keep this economy going and working, even if we all get sick, I would rather die than kill the country. 'Cause it's not the economy that's dying, it's the country." (Source: Media Matters)
2. John Cardillo
Newsmax TV host
3. Sean Davis
Co-founder of The Federalist, former staffer for Texas Gov. Rick Perry and Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.) On Twitter, Davis attacked Dr. Scott Gottlieb, a physician, former pharmaceutical executive and FDA commissioner under President Trump until 2019.
It is not known who funds The Federalist, which published an article declaring, "It seems harsh to ask whether the nation might be better off letting a few hundred thousand people die. Probably for that reason, few have been willing to do so publicly thus far. Yet honestly facing reality is not callous, and refusing even to consider whether the present response constitutes an even greater evil than the one it intends to mitigate would be cowardly."
4. Tom Fitton
President of Judicial Watch, a conservative activist group
Fitton has made numerous posts agitating for an end to the closure of nonessential businesses resulting from social distancing measures.
In another post, Fitton links to a blog post showing top epidemiologist Dr. Anthony Fauci praising Hilary Clinton with a video of himself saying, "Well isn't that interesting," fueling conspiracy theories that Fauci is seeking to undermine President Trump. (Source: The New York Times)
5. Rudy Giuliani
Personal attorney for President Trump and former mayor of New York City
Net worth: $45 million
Posted a tweet quoting Candace Owens, a former director of urban engagement for the right-wing group Turning Point USA, minimizing the number of deaths caused by the coronavirus outbreak.
\u201c\u201cApproximately 7500 people die every day in the United States. \n\nThat\u2019s approximately 645,000 people so far this year. \n\nCoronavirus has killed about 1,000 Americans this year. \n\nJust a little perspective.\u201d @RealCandaceO\u201d— Rudy W. Giuliani (@Rudy W. Giuliani) 1585241610
6. Ed Henry
Fox News Channel host
"The best estimate of the mortality rate is less than 1%, every life matters, and you don't want to minimize any of them, *but* when the mortality rate is that low, what is the balance" (Source: MediaMatters)
7. Brit Hume
Fox News Channel political analyst
"He is saying, for his own part, that he'd be willing to take a risk of getting the disease if that's what it took to allow the economy to move forward. And he said that because he's late in life, you know, that he would be perhaps more willing then he might've been and a younger age. Which seems to me to be an entirely reasonable viewpoint." (Source: MediaMatters)
8. Steve Hilton
Fox News Channel host and former advisor to David Cameron, Prime Minister of the United Kingdom
"You know that famous phrase, 'The cure is worse than the disease?' That is exactly the territory we are hurting towards. [...] You think it is just the coronavirus that kills people? This total economic shutdown will kill people. [...] "Save small businesses. Flatten the curve, but not the economy, and do it before it's too late." (Source: The Hill)
9. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.)
Net worth: Holds assets worth at least $10.8 million
"Every premature death is a tragedy, but death is an unavoidable part of life. More than 2.8 million die each year -- nearly 7,700 a day. The 2017-18 flu season was exceptionally bad, with 61,000 deaths attributed to it. Can you imagine the panic if those mortality statistics were attributed to a new virus and reported nonstop?" (Source: USA Today op-ed)
10. Charlie Kirk
Founder and president of Turning Point USA, a right-wing group that does on-campus organizing.
11. Dan Patrick
Lieutenant Governor of Texas
"No one reached out to me and said, 'As a senior citizen, are you willing to take a chance on your survival in exchange for keeping the America that all America loves for your children and grandchildren?' And if that is the exchange, I'm all in [...] My messages is that let's get back to work, let's get back to living. Let's be smart about it and those of us who are 70+, we'll take care of ourselves. But don't sacrifice the country." (Source: CNN)
12. Bill Mitchell
Host of a right-wing talk show YourVoice America ("We're all MAGA all the time!")
13. David McIntosh
President of Club for Growth
"We need to act to contain the virus, but at the same time more people would be hurt and have terrible health and life consequences if they don't reopen the economy," Mr. McIntosh said. "They have to put an end to the social distancing some time in the near future to restore economic activity." (Source: The New York Times)
14. Buck Sexton
Host of The Buck Sexton Show, a conservative talk show
Sexton posted and then later deleted a tweet that said, "America is going to have to go back to work very soon, even if that means there are more casualties from Covid-19 than would occur under this continued extreme shutdown[.] It's a hard thing to say, but it is reality and we need to accept and act on it."