There can be NO question that, no matter what else one might think of Donald Trump as President, he failed when it comes to the pandemic. He intentionally used false facts and misled the American people in their healthcare decisions. Trump, to his credit, made available to the research community both finances and other resources needed to develop the vaccines to stem the spread of Covid-19, without which the country could not have had any hope of ever controlling the pandemic.
However, it is more likely that another president may have treated the pandemic more seriously and taken every precaution to avoid doling out disinformation as Mr. Trump consistently did. The first chapter of Your Health Is at Risk reviews the role of his intentional disinformation campaign that damaged the country’s ability to handle the pandemic and led to hundreds of thousands of unnecessary deaths. And now CDC officials are revealing what was going in in the early days of the pandemic in Trump’s White House.
The Washington Post recently reported that “Trump appointees oversaw a concerted effort to restrict immigration at the U.S.-Mexico border during the pandemic, change scientific reports and muzzle top officials at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, according to emails, text messages and interviews gathered by a congressional panel probing the pandemic response.”
The article goes on to share that “Clyburn’s panel has spent more than two years investigating the Trump administration’s pandemic response, issuing reports that detailed White House pressure on the Food and Drug Administration to authorize unproven coronavirus treatments, such as the antimalarial drug hydroxychloroquine, and its efforts to overrule public health officials on coronavirus guidance for churches; and exploring how its focus on challenging the 2020 election outcome distracted from the virus response, among other findings.”
This does not surprise me. Through its messaging, the president’s disinformation strategy seriously minimized the virus threat, perhaps in an effort to create the impression that he was fully capable of taking the necessary initiatives to control the pandemic. However, by pretending to assume authority over medical science, Trump set the absolute wrong tone and prevented others within his administration from telling the truth about the virus, despite being well aware of the true nature of the risk. No one was allowed to contradict Trump publicly, and thus the government’s official policy on the pandemic was driven by Trump’s ego.
Trump relied on extensive and constant disinformation about the origin, spread, and severity of the virus. He exaggerated claims or openly released false information about every issue of importance to the American public regarding how to stay alive and protect one’s family and business from the virus: the use of masks, social distancing, virus therapies, vaccinations testing, and incidence and death statistics. His false statements were regularly amplified by members of the Trump family, cabinet secretaries, Republicans in Congress, as well as thousands of local Republican community leaders and numerous key media personalities.
Your Health Is at Risk
In 2020, there were over 122 million people in the U.S. diagnosed with elevated blood glucose, 34 million with the diagnosis of Type 2 diabetes, and 88 million diagnosed with prediabetes, yet their hope for healthy living is thwarted by medical dogma, disinformation, misinformation, and missing information.
Disinformation, Misinformation, and Missing Information, which is abbreviated “DMMI”, fuels growing health illiteracy and unhealthy lifestyle choices. This drives not only increases in Type 2 diabetes but also cancer, cardiovascular diseases, COVID-19, and other illnesses considered lifestyle diseases.
As described in my 5th book, Your Health Is at Risk, a literate person in today’s world is aware that the traditional media and social media are swarming with intentional disinformation about many topics, from politics to finances, to health advice and diet plans. Literacy, critical thinking, and a tolerance for reading scientific material are absolutely necessary to detect such disinformation.
