Rock bottom

Google News brought me this headline from Newsweek this morning:

TRUMP SAYS HE WANTS TO KEEP PEOPLE OFF VENTILATORS IN FAVOR OF UNPROVEN DRUG COMBINATION.

And I'm thinking, please don't tell me that I just read that. We are going to drop a long standing tradition of clinical trials and testing in this country because our great leader has a hunch? Now hydroxychloroquine may be the next best thing to mother's milk, I don't know. But that is not the way things work, are supposed to work, or used to work in this country. We listen to doctors and scientists, not lay despots with absolutely no training in medicine who happen to have a hunch.

One who thinks he knows better than the whole medical establishment, and his own experts for that matter, because Hannity and the right wing media machine has been on a bender of late extolling the virtues and efficacy of this unproven drug coupled with azithromycin. The conservative troops think there is a grand conspiracy in place to deny them a cure. The administration's top expert and point man, Dr. Fauci, says, not so fast.

On Friday, the federal government's top virologist, National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Director Dr. Anthony Fauci, specifically warned what further studies are needed to determine whether the drugs touted by the president will work against COVID-19."We still need to do the definitive studies to determine whether any intervention, not just this one, is truly safe and effective," Fauci said during an appearance on Fox News.

It shows how desperate we are. and how utterly unprepared we were for a pandemic of this nature, and there were repeated warnings. Trump himself admits that he is not certain that his hunch is correct.

"So I want to keep them out of ventilators, I want to keep them -- if this drug works, it will be not a game changer because that's not a nice enough term. It will be wonderful, it'll be so beautiful, it'll be a gift from heaven if it works, because when people go into those ventilators, you know the answers, and I'm glad you don't write about it."

So he's willing to gamble with the health of our nation, roll the dice and back off on ventilators in favor of a very big if, an untested drug combination. Very sad.

I honestly feel very helpless and hopeless that we have reached a place where we are listening to an uneducated madman instead of people who have trained and studied their whole lives in order to solve just these sorts of problems.

As I mentioned yesterday, there are a myriad of potential cures in the works, undergoing trials. I have no doubt that we will find an answer soon to this microbial crisis. But let's proceed scientifically and not on a sociopathic narcissist's wild hunch.