The herd market for immunity was also about denying every American a mask in March

Crimes against humanity by needless deaths, because sending Americans a check with his name on it obligated a vote. Trump needed anti-masking reactionaries and antivaxxers to merge in order to foment some naïve idea of herd immunity such that wanting to get more people infected was more important to the Trump administration even if it meant 3 million dead. God apparently will not sort them out. Willful negligence.

Trump’s repeated downplaying of the virus, coupled with his equivocations about masks, created an opening for reckless behavior that contributed to a significant increase in infections and deaths, experts said.

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NEWS: The White House nixed a plan to send face masks to every household in America because of Trump’s personal feud with USPS and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos.

Essential reporting from @AshleyRParker, @jdawsey1, @yabutaleb7 & @PhilipRucker https://t.co/91mizhUhzW

— Jacob Bogage (@jacobbogage) December 19, 2020

As the number of coronavirus cases ticked upward in mid-November — worse than the frightening days of spring and ahead of an expected surge after families congregated for Thanksgiving — four doctors on President Trump’s task force decided to stage an intervention.

[…]

On Nov. 19, hours after the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention advised against Thanksgiving travel, Vice President Pence, who chairs the coronavirus task force, agreed to hold a full news conference with some of the doctors — something they had not done since the summer. But much to the doctors’ dismay, Pence did not forcefully implore people to wear masks, nor did the administration take meaningful action on testing.

As for the president, he did not appear at all.

Trump went days without mentioning the pandemic other than to celebrate progress on vaccines. The president by then had abdicated his responsibility to manage the public health crisis and instead used his megaphone almost exclusively to spread misinformation in a failed attempt to overturn the results of the election he lost to President-elect Joe Biden.

“I think he’s just done with covid,” said one of Trump’s closest advisers who, like many others interviewed for this story, spoke on the condition of anonymity to candidly discuss internal deliberations and operations. “I think he put it on a timetable and he’s done with covid. . . . It just exceeded the amount of time he gave it.”

Now, a month later, the number of coronavirus cases in the United States is reaching records daily. The nation’s death count is rising steadily as well, this past week surpassing 300,000 — a total that had seemed unfathomable earlier this year. The dark winter is here, hospitalizations risk breaching capacities, and health professionals predict it will get worse before it gets better.

[…]

Then there was the issue of logistics. For months leading up to the pandemic, Trump had been attacking the U.S. Postal Service and airing grievances over its business relationship with Amazon. Some aides surmised that, for Trump, a private-public partnership involving the Postal Service as the distributor would be a nonstarter.

The mail-a-mask plan was killed. The Office of Management and Budget tried to cancel the contracts with the underwear makers, but the masks still were produced and distributed to health clinics, religious groups and states that requested them. Hanes did not respond to a request for comment.

Kadlec was so frustrated that he decided his time as preparedness and response chief was no longer best spent on preparing and responding, so he focused instead on vaccines and therapeutics.

Skepticism of masks became a hallmark of the Trump administration’s pandemic response. On April 3, when the CDC recommended that all Americans wear masks, Trump announced that he would not do so because he could not envision himself sitting behind the Resolute Desk with his face covered as he greeted visiting dignitaries. The president stressed that mask-wearing was “voluntary,” effectively permitting his legions of followers to disregard the CDC’s recommendation.

In the months that followed, Trump was only seen wearing a mask on rare occasions, instead following the advice of Stephen Miller, Johnny McEntee, Derek Lyons and other trusted aides to think of masks as a cultural wedge issue.

Pence covered his face with somewhat more regularity than the president, but after forgoing a mask during an April 28 visit to the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota, he drew a public rebuke from the hospital’s leaders. Short then yelled at a hospital official over it, a person with knowledge of the visit said.

“What the Trump administration has managed to do is they accomplished — remarkably — a very high-tech solution, which is developing a vaccine, but they completely failed at the low-tech solution, which is masking and social distancing, and they put people at risk,” Offit said.

www.washingtonpost.com/…

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This tells us a lot that is wrong with economics that led to complacency and a catastrophic response to COVID testing.

“We Think the Markets Will Sort It Out”: Could White House Action on COVID Testing Have Saved the American School Year? https://t.co/hsJvlFsOeM via @VanityFair

— Keston K. Perry (@kestontnt) December 18, 2020

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POLITICO: Emails show unvarnished truth. The massive scale of the outbreak in U.S. was intentional, at least according to one top Trump appointee advising HHS ‘We want them infected’: Trump appointee demanded ‘herd immunity’ strategy, emails reveal https://t.co/RUs7FW3ZYn

— Eric Lipton (@EricLiptonNYT) December 17, 2020