Mods: Going to keep this as short as I can
DoubleLintendre wrote:snip
Thanks for the polite response.
1. Peter Navarro is not a medical expert. He is known as someone who dislikes China. If Navarro can say something bad about China or make doomsday predictions about China, he will. That's just his reputation. He's a "China hawk." But no one is going to Navarro for advice on medical matters. He's simply not qualified to give that advice. Navarro is a Ph.D. in economics and has a Masters of Public Affairs
2. Azar, not a medical expert. He's a lawyer.
At the time of the Navarro and Azar input, the Virus Task Force had just been formed (I think January 29). Fauci was on it (Birx would come later). At that point, Fauci was "the guy" giving medical advice, it appears. He would be the person that everything would run though, I would imagine, rather than Azar, Navarro or anyone else.
We saw what Fauci said in the video above. The remarks he made at the start of that briefing were in response to the 2nd NYT article you cited, I believe, and in response to an interview he gave the day previous that took from that article (the "advisors decided on strategy in late Feb" piece).
What Fauci said, I think slightly before the 5:15 prompting I suggested so people can see that Fauci said Trump took the recommendation to mitigate as soon as it was offered, was that the medical experts were talking among themselves about what should be the next step. The information apparently never got to Trump. Should it have? I don't know, but obviously Fauci didn't make that move and when Birx came on they didn't feel they had to make the move until, it seems, the devastation in Europe began and things looked clearer about how bad the virus was.
Could Fauci (and Birx) be lying? I guess. I don't think they are, but who knows?
One thing I'll say about them both is that I'm sure both of them have significant egos. I don't mean that in a bad way, either. What I mean is that they are supposed to be "the guys" on infectious diseases. And they would look like heroes had there ended up being, say, 1000 USA deaths rather than maybe 70,000. And, in their minds, it appears, they feel that what was not told to them interfered with their being in a position to make the right call at the right time. They are basically on the hook, if you will, if things went wrong in the USA.
Fauci always has struck me as something of an innocent, naive kind of guy. I don't take him for a liar.
As I did say above, however, if Fauci and Birx knew the risks early on and did not act, they're negligent. I really don't think either one of them wants to be in that position, or wanted to be. So my guess is they acted as soon as they felt they had to.
On the WHO warning, that for sure was key. The only problem is that there apparently was a scarcity of data to back it up. In other words, you can warn the world a tornado is coming. But is it a Category 1 tornado or a Category 5 tornado? Preparations will vary depending on the assumed severity.
What I realize now, after looking over this stuff a bit, is that what Birx (and I'm guessing Fauci) seems to be most concerned with (or, if you will, angry about) is not having the transmissibility information. R-naught, I think it's called. She mentioned that specifically in the interview from yesterday I cited.
And I get why that is, now. Because if you know the thing is super transmissible, you go to hard mitigation faster. Because mitigation is intended to reduce spread. But if you don't think the thing is very transmissible, you don't worry about hard mitigation as much, possibly.
What seems to have taken place here, as Birx says, is that the lack of information (hard data) from China combined with the good success of South Korea, Taiwan and other Asian nations lulled the USA experts into a false sense of security (or, to be fair, they were in the dark and did not know) about what the virus really was. That's what Fauci seems to be suggesting in his later remarks in the video I posted. You can see he had one concept of the virus, then that got shattered and replaced with another concept. And the "true" nature of the beast, so to speak, only really showed itself when it hit Europe. At least for experts who didn't have the China hard data.
There are quotes from Fauci saying on March 9 that it's ok to go on cruises if you're young and healthy. And he said on March 10 that not all schools in the USA needed to be shut. These don't seem to be the comments of someone who fully appreciated what the virus was at that time. But the carnage in Europe soon after apparently altered his mind considerably. If you look at the death curve in Italy, it began in earnest around March 11:
https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/italy/Just so you know, I do not, as an American, see China as some Epitome Of Evil Enemy or anything like that. Same on the WHO. Accidents happen, disasters happen, and things can domino from there. Sometimes people have no bad intentions and things just get out of hand. When they do, sometimes people don't react well in the moment. But that doesn't mean they're "evil" or any of that stuff. Look, the USA CDC botched the early testing kits. Were they trying to do so? No. But it still happened. Things can and do happen, in negative ways, sometimes. Hopefully people handle them well when they happen.
REFERENCES:
Fauci on March 9: "I think if you’re a healthy young person that there is no reason; if you want to go on a cruise ship, to go on a cruise ship"
https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2020/04/13/nolte-fauci-okayed-campaign-rallies-cruise-ships-healthy-march-9/Fauci on March 10: Don't need to close all USA schools
https://thehill.com/policy/healthcare/486910-fauci-to-public-you-have-to-start-taking-seriously-steps-to-slow
