…It’s been good when you had our back, but now, in #COVID times, it’s America First. So get out of our way!
President Donald, or his staff, or whoever, ordered 3M to stop shipping masks to Canada and Latin America, and hijacked a shipment of 200,000 masks from China to Germany.
Take that, Canada! Sucker punch, Germany! We forget that, in the end, the world is only as strong as the weakest link, with this virus that knows no borders. We must, indeed, all hang together, or, as Ben Franklin liked to say, we will most assuredly hang separately.
Please share widely!
Thank you for posting this. Why is the mainstream media ignoring this? Why is nobody in the mainstream talking about the related question of the continuing scarcity of tests?
Surely MSNBC, CNN, the New York Times, and the Washington Post have the resources to investigate the supply chains for tests, masks, and other PPE. Why aren’t they?
For example, within the past few days there have been high-profile reports of MILLIONS of masks being privately purchased and distributed by the billionaire owner of the Brooklyn Nets and by Robert Kraft.
Why are two wealthy old white men able to simply buy MILLIONS of these masks while tens of millions of regular Americans are at risk because of their scarcity?
When I buy a six dollar headphone adapter from Amazon, I am able to track it every step of the way from warehouse to my front door. I’m able to get real-time notifications of progress and map its trajectory on Google maps.
Are we really supposed to believe that the same isn’t true for the hundreds of millions of tests and masks that are needed?
We have been hearing government spokespersons assure that this desperately needed equipment is “on the way”. We hear simultaneous reports from across the nation that none of this equipment is being delivered.
The banner above-the-fold headline on this morning’s Sunday edition of the New York Times is “After Wuhan Disclosure, 430,000 Flew to the U.S.” Aside from gossip-mongering and finger-pointing, there is absolutely ZERO useful information in this piece. Alongside that piece is a quarter-page above-the-fold picture of emergency room workers in another feature with the headline “A Brooklyn I.C.U. Fighting for Each Life”. The lead paragraph is another dark-and-stormy-night narrative that says nothing about what, if any, actual NEWS is in the piece. We already know that ERs and ICUs are in trouble. We’ve heard those alarm sirens non-stop for a month now.
America urgently needs to know whether this material actually IS being ordered, produced, shipped, and most of all — DELIVERED. Test kits are needed across America — do they exist? Has anybody ordered them?
Why are hundreds of thousands of test results backlogged in California because a single provider — Quest Diagnostics — is unable to keep up with the demand? What is being done to multiply test processing capacity?
Why are billionaires able to do what the government apparently cannot do?
Have suppliers been paid by the government? Which suppliers, where, and how much? Have suppliers shipped the material? From where? Using what carrier? Shipped to what destination? Is material sitting in warehouses and distribution centers, waiting for delivery?
We’ve had more than enough hysteria-mongering. More than enough “human interest” stories of arbitrarily selected people doing what all of us are doing. More than enough rehashes of press releases. More than enough video feeds of meaningless press conferences. More than enough retweets of twitter lies.
The first step towards removing a bottleneck is to identify it. If we don’t know where the obstacles are, we cannot effectively demand that they be removed.
Why is there such deafening silence about the real issues that actually matter right now right here?