Coronavirus Update 13

Faking the coronavirus pandemic data & lying to the American people: 
“the federal data continue to be unreliable”

A New York Times article reports that experts believe that coronavirus data is being manipulated. In July the president ordered data collection, analysis and reporting to be taken from the experts at the CDC and done by private sector political hacks the HHS hired. Since that time, the infection data veered off the course it was on and infection numbers started to decrease. That was especially true for some red states where the pandemic had spun out of control. The NYT comments:

“Nearly three dozen current and former members of a federal health advisory committee, including nine appointed or reappointed by the health secretary, Alex M. Azar II, are warning that the Trump administration’s new coronavirus database is placing an undue burden on hospitals and will have ‘serious consequences on data integrity.’ 

The advisers, all current or former members of the Healthcare Infection Control Practices Advisory Committee, issued their warning in a previously unpublished letter [shown above] shared with The New York Times. 

The letter was made public as both hospital officials and independent data experts around the country were reporting kinks in the new system, which critics say is undermining the government’s ability to understand the course of the pandemic. The Covid Tracking Project, a respected and widely used resource, identified “major problems” with the new Department of Health and Human Services system in late July, and reported this week that ‘the federal data continue to be unreliable.’”

Once again, an administration with no respect for truth or honesty with the American people is desperately trying to convert real reality into a fake reality. When that happens, as it is right now, reality becomes fake and fake becomes real.

Coronavirus provides weak cover for a major attack on democracy

One possible long-term effect of the pandemic could be a permanent loss of voting rights for democrats and many independents. A Washington Post article, Trump says he’s blocking Postal Service funding because Democrats want to expand mail-in voting during pandemic, comments:

“Trump said Thursday he does not want to fund the U.S. Postal Service because Democrats are seeking to expand mail-in voting during the coronavirus pandemic, making explicit the reason he has declined to approve $25 billion in emergency funding for the cash-strapped agency.

‘Now, they need that money in order to make the Post Office work, so it can take all of these millions and millions of ballots,’ Trump said in an interview on Fox Business Network’s Maria Bartiromo. He added: ‘If they don’t get those two items, that means you can’t have universal mail-in voting, because they’re not equipped.’”

In view of how blatant this move to suppress voting is, the president, the political right and the GOP appear to have given up on even trying to appear to be pro-democracy. To them, single-party rule is the goal. There is no obvious reason to think that after the president leaves office, assuming he ever does, that the radical right will ever go back to actually supporting free and fair elections. To the radicals, the new model of democracy is single party rule. The pandemic appears to have flushed this long-term radical right authoritarian goal into the open.

That the postal service needs additional money is entirely the fault of the GOP. The GOP has been financially crippling the postal service for years because it wants postal service to be privatized. The New Yorker commented in a May 2020 article: “For the past forty years, Republicans have been seeking to starve, strangle, and sabotage the U.S. Postal Service, hoping to privatize one of the oldest and most important public goods in American history.”

An anecdote: We pay some bills by checks in the mail. It is now taking a few days longer for the checks to arrive. Since the president has already specifically targeted mail-in ballots for slower delivery, it appears that all mail is slowing down as part of the authoritarian assault on elections. Time will tell if the anomaly this month constitutes a new normal.