Cunning plan
Breathtaking. (Literally. I don’t think I’m the only one who finds herself holding her breath for several seconds when reading an exceptionally foul news item.)
The White House is seeking to discredit Dr. Anthony Fauci, the country’s leading infectious disease expert, as President Donald Trump works to marginalize him and his dire warnings about the shortcomings of the U.S. coronavirus response.
As a pandemic soars out of control thanks to the malevolent incompetence of the people in the aforementioned White House.
In a remarkable broadside by the Trump administration against one of its own, a White House official said Sunday that “several White House officials are concerned about the number of times Dr. Fauci has been wrong on things.” The official gave NBC News a list of nearly a dozen past comments by Fauci that the official said had ultimately proven erroneous.
Lots of things “ultimately prove erroneous,” dumbfuck, because circumstances change and knowledge is cumulative. Nobody knew everything there was to know about the virus on January 1 or March 1, and nobody does now, either, but Fauci at least tried to get it right. Trump and his goons just make shit up.
It was a move more characteristic of a political campaign furtively disseminating opposition research about an opponent than of a White House struggling to contain a pandemic that has killed more than 135,000 people, according to an NBC News tally.
Naturally, because the White House isn’t struggling to do that, it’s struggling to convince us that Donald Trump isn’t a pool of toxic sludge in an ugly suit who will kill us all.
In recent days, Fauci has deviated from Trump by disputing that the U.S. is “doing great” and by faulting the decision in some states to reopen too quickly and to sidestep the task force’s suggested criteria for when it’s safe to loosen restrictions. In a particularly alarming prediction, Fauci said he wouldn’t be surprised if the U.S. [were] soon adding 100,000 new cases a day — a figure that would reflect an abject failure to slow the spread.
…
Fauci, who has served in the federal government for decades, can’t be directly fired by the president, and there were no signs that Trump was seeking to get rid of him altogether. Rather, the White House salvo appeared aimed at undermining the public’s trust in the renowned immunologist in hope that Americans will be more inclined to believe Trump’s far more optimistic version of events as the November election marches closer.
And thus go back to normal life and thus increase the spread of the virus so that hundreds of thousands more of us will die so that Trump can get re-elected to slaughter even more of us.
Updating to add:
How about the number of times DJT “has been wrong” about “things”? I.e., almost 100% of the time.
JFC.
I know you all know this, but sometimes it’s worth reviewing what has happened in such a short period of time.
By the end of May, beginning of June we had settled into a stable pattern, that 25K number on 6/12 was not an aberration or a new high, in fact it had come off the peak of 35K on 4/24 because we had actually had at least partially locked the country down. Case numbers dropped a bit and then stabilized. This isn’t a flattened curve – case rate has to fall for that to happen (I know it’s counterintuitive). But the lockdown was beginning to work.
Reopening’s started happening and the case rate went up. Exactly one month ago, the new case rate in the USA was ~25K per day. Now it is 65K. Let that sink in. Tony’s right, we’ll reach 100K easy, and not very far in the future. It’s not just the rate of change, it’s the rate of change of the rate of change (second-order derivative or d2y/dx2) that’s scary.
I should have known that html code wouldn’t work. It should have been:
d2y/dx^2
In other words the acceleration is accelerating. Disastrous. What’s the current fatality rate sitting at? Does the administration not consider that the consequences of the USA being one of the worst hit countries in the world will be a weakening of your military and industrial base? Not to mention the willingness and resilience of the population as a whole to endure additional pressures and crises. Not exactly the path to MAGA I would have thought.
Or as Trump would say: Who ya gunna b’lieve? Me, or the endless convoys of hearses?
Actually, this has to be good news for the hearse manufacturers and funeral industry. Their only concern will be about where to put the bodies once they’ve filled all the cemetaries.
This. I’ve been trying to explain that to my husband. He is a historian, not a scientist, and doesn’t do statistics unless they are attached to baseball, but it seems so obvious to me. Okay, so I am a scientist and I do statistics (but not if they are attached to baseball), but still…trust me, okay?
OT for Claire #3 — an Internet search for superscript generator finds web pages that let you enter 2 and get ² in Unicode. Then you can copy and paste to make d²y/dx². The only problem is those Unicode characters may appear very small. But they make me look smart, which I find more important than being legible.
lol
#7 Dave
OGM doctor handwriting makes so much sense now!
About time, I say! I mean really, how many times did Fauci show us a COVID case map where he altered the data with a sharpie so as to never look wrong – oh, right, somebody else – never mind.
Handy dandy 1:1 mapping:
Total cases: location. (function of time)
Change in total cases, per day: velocity. (first derivative)
Change in total cases, per day, per day: acceleration. (second derivative)
Change in total cases, per day, per day, per day: jerk. (third derivative)