Joe.My.God. LGBT News
Vanity Fair reports:
The prospect of launching a large-scale national plan was losing favor, said one public health expert in frequent contact with the White House’s official coronavirus task force.
Most troubling of all, perhaps, was a sentiment the expert said a member of Kushner’s team expressed: that because the virus had hit blue states hardest, a national plan was unnecessary and would not make sense politically.
“The political folks believed that because it was going to be relegated to Democratic states, that they could blame those governors, and that would be an effective political strategy,” said the expert.
Mediaite reports:
Katherine Eban reported on the group’s secret testing plan in a new report, which included the revelation that the team, led by Jared Kushner, bought 3.5 million Covid-19 tests for $52 million from an Abu Dhabi–based artificial intelligence company. They were never used, deemed “contaminated and unusable.”
Kushner’s team created a report designed for President Donald Trump to read aimed at fixing challenges like “uneven testing capacity and supplies throughout the U.S., both between and within regions, significant delays in reporting results (4-11 days), and national supply chain constraints, such as PPE, swabs, and certain testing reagents.”
Read the full article.
So the White House made the explicit decision that it was a better political call to let people die in the blue states and blame the governors then try to fix the testing situation. https://t.co/1fKA5vhfWa
— Josh Marshall (@joshtpm) July 30, 2020
A public health expert in contact with Trump’s COVID task force said that, early on, a member of Jared Kushner’s team felt that because the virus had hit blue states hardest, a national testing plan was unnecessary and would not make sense politically. https://t.co/nnhK1clWTo
— Kyle Griffin (@kylegriffin1) July 31, 2020
As with many recent policy calamities, this one begins with Jared Kushner https://t.co/KPQiu3eT39
— New York Magazine (@NYMag) July 31, 2020