How is he going to kill me?

Earlier his week, I enjoyed getting reacquainted with explainer extraordinaire Michael Lewis on the Al Franken podcast. His book, The Fifth Risk, should be required reading for anyone who complains about the government. In the book, he recounts his journey through a series of departmental briefings that Trump's transition team never took – because there was no real transition team. He explains how he came to write the book in the first place (jump to 39:30 and listen to this little section):

As [Donald Trump] was walking up the White House steps, remember when the Obamas are waiting to let him in, greet him, and hand him the keys to the White House, I was in bed recovering from a surgery and I had opioids in me. And I hated them. I mean, I was vomiting. I was in a miserable state of mind. And the thought that crossed my mind was: how is he going to kill me?

Despite our moving to Portugal and gaining some distance, that question has been ricocheting around, intensely, inside my skull for about three days now. Looking back, before the start of the week, the sorry trail of startling techniques that Trump has dreamt up during the pandemic to threaten our existence included: by encouraging the 're-open' protests, by assuming 'total authority', by removing the IG at the DoD. and by claiming COVID-19 cases would peak by Easter.

In just the past three days, there are so many more to add to the list.

By removing the Director of BARDA 

On Tuesday night, I checked my iPad and saw a news notification that the Director of BARDA, Dr. Rick  Bright, had been 're-assigned'. This grabbed my attention because BARDA came up twice in my recent research and news-collecting: the first was when Dr. Perter Hotez mentioned them as a funding agency for the neglected efforts to develop a coronavirus vaccine, and second when the NY Times reported on BARDA's stalled efforts to replenish the Strategic National Stockpile with ventilators. Clearly, BARDA was a key agency, if not the most important point of coordination, in the US's efforts to develop countermeasures to COVID-19.

Dr. Bright has filed a complaint with the HHS IG and released a statement through his lawyers, hoping for a stay of his dismissal. While the news media has focused on his apparent accusations of 'politics or cronyism' for the removal, the line that got me was this:

While I am prepared to look at all options and to think "outside the box" for effective treatments, I rightly resisted efforts to provide an unproven drug on demand to the American public. I insisted that these drugs be provided only to hospitalized patients with confirmed COVID-19 while under the supervision of a physician.

His statement indicates that he resisted the approval of a program in which hydroxychloroquine would be made available to the public 'on demand' – at home, without a COVID-19 confirmation, without medical supervision.

That's deeply disturbing.

By contradicting the Director of the CDC

CDC director warns second wave of coronavirus is likely to be even more devastating (Washington Post headline, April 21)

'There’s a possibility that the assault of the virus on our nation next winter will actually be even more difficult than the one we just went through." (Dr. Robert Redfield, Director of the CDC, April 21)

"Totally misquoted; I spoke to him, he said it was ridiculous." (President Trump, April 22)

"I'm accurately quoted in The Washington Post as 'difficult'." (Dr. Robert Redfield, Director of the CDC, April 22)

Once we saw that BARDA headline, we switched on the news. We had seen clips of the Task Force Briefings on YouTube, but we had never seen them live, and we were definitely not prepared for the opening video we saw (above). Trump said Dr. Redfield was 'totally misquoted'; Dr. Redfield said he was not – but, he fine-tuned his language from 'worse' to 'complicated', and from 'devastating' to 'even more difficult'. They were just nitpicking words, Trump (no master of nuance) trying to wordsmith every expression of 'bad'.

Not satisfied with repudiating the idea that an autumn with two epidemics might not be a good thing, Trump went on to suggest that COVID-19 would not return at all:

We may not even have corona coming back, just so you understand.

By conning the Mayor of Las Vegas

Two weekends ago, Trump's 'LIBERATE' tweets fueled the re-open protests, which were essentially campaign rallies. Today, the Governor of Georgia re-opened his state, initially with Trump's approval, and then without it. But the most stupefying form the re-open movement has taken so far was Wednesday's nonsensical interview by CNN's Anderson Cooper with Mayor Carolyn Goodman of Las Vegas.

Mayor Goodman called to 'open up Las Vegas': hotels, casinos, restaurants, boutiques, sports venues. Though lacking the authority to override Nevada's stay-at-home orders, her statements could still incite business owners and others to take irresponsible action. She provided no guidance in terms of precautions, and left that up to the business owners. Shockingly, she got into a circular quarrel with Cooper over whether she wanted Las Vegas to act as a 'control group' for COVID-19 testing:

No, no, no. No, wrong. Absolutely wrong. Don't put words in my mouth. Excuse me, what I said was I offered to be a control group and I was told by our statistician you can't do that because people from all parts of southern Nevada come to work in the city. And I said, 'Oh that's too bad,' because I know when you have a disease, you have a placebo that gets the water and the sugar and then you get those that actually get the shot. We would love to be that placebo side so you have something to measure against.

It's like watching a Looney Tunes argument.

By asking a DHS Under Secretary to test disinfectant injections

Yesterday, he raised the lunacy to seriously dangerous levels. At the Task Force Briefing, Trump introduced the DHS Under Secretary for Science and Technology, William Bryan, as a doctor (he is not a doctor). After a presentation explaining how the SARS-CoV-2 might be killed on surfaces and in the air, Trump asked Bryan to investigate various treatment options:

So supposing we hit the body with a tremendous, whether it's ultraviolet or just very powerful light, and I think you said that hasn't been checked but you're going to test it. And then I said, supposing you brought the light inside the body, which you can do, either through the skin or in some other way? And I think you said you're going to test that, too, sounds interesting.

Right, and the I see the disinfectant, where it knocks it out in a minute, one minute. And is there a way we can do something like that by injection inside or almost a cleaning, because you see it gets in the lungs, and it does a tremendous number on the lungs? So it'd be interesting to check that.

In the wake of those requests most of today's news has been a series of doctors, health experts, government agencies, chemical suppliers, cleaner manufacturers, and poison centers all scrambling to tell the public not to ingest or inject disinfectants. Trump now claims he was asking 'sarcastically ... just to see what would happen'.

My. God.

The global total of COVID-19 cases is over two and three quarters million and the total of deaths is nearly two hundred thousand. The US total is one third of the global cases and a quarter of the global deaths. Portugal has over twenty-two thousand cases and over eight hundred deaths.

cases: 2,761,121 global • 903,098 USA • 22,797 Portugal

deaths: 193,671 global • 51,061 USA • 854 Portugal