So by aggressive response I am going to guess she means Federal lockdowns? Again, I am not convinced any Republican would have done that so if you are going to fault Trump for it you would really need to fault the entire Republican party and constituency.vnatale wrote: ↑Wed Aug 18, 2021 10:52 pm
Dr. Deborah Birx, who stood alongside Trump at his supposed press briefings and frequently defended the administration's pandemic policies, told the network that she believes the vast majority of the nearly 500,000 deaths could have been prevented with a more aggressive response.
"I look at it this way: The first time, we have an excuse. There were about 100,000 deaths that came from that original surge," she said. "All of the rest of them, in my mind, could have been mitigated or decreased substantially."
Birx said later in the interview that the federal government "did not provide consistent messaging" on the pandemic.
"That was fault No. 1," she said.
For the consistent messaging, I am not sure exactly what she means by that since the CDC and WHO themselves were very inconsistent in the early days of the virus. I suppose she could mean that Trump underplayed the seriousness of the virus, leaving citizens to not be as vigilant as they could have been. That could be a fair point although I don't know how you can attribute 400,000 deaths to simply his messaging. Certainly him saying back in Feb that the virus was nothing and would pass in a few weeks was not a smart thing to say given that you could see how seriously Europe was taking it. A more consistent message of telling people to be vigilant, wear a mask, distance etc. could possibly had make some small amount of difference but again I would not call that "gross mishandling".
Which brings up another question. When Biden took office we were told that 400,000 deaths were on Trump's hands. Well now we have 624,000 deaths. Are those extra 224,000 on Biden's hands? Where does the cutoff start or end? Certainly if Trump's inaction and poor messaging was responsible for some then Biden's has to be as well correct? Shocking that I have not heard any media pundits attribute Covid deaths to Biden since he took office.