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HARRIS: Injected Identity Politics into the COVID Pandemic
In May 2020, Senator Harris introduced the COVID–19 Racial and Ethnic Disparities Task Force Act, aimed at providing Congress and various federal agencies with “reports and recommendations related to racial and ethnic disparities in the COVID-19 response.”
In July 2020, Senator Harris introduced the COVID–19 Bias and Anti-Racism Training Act, a bill that that sought to require the Department of Health & Human Services to “award grants to health care providers, public health departments, tribal organizations, schools for social workers and health professionals, and other nonprofit entities, for bias and anti-racism training to reduce disparities in COVID-19 response efforts.”
WALZ: Permitted Nursing Homes to Admit COVID-Positive Patients
During the early weeks and months of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, Gov. Walz allowed nursing homes in Minnesota to admit COVID-positive patients; few other states in the nation permitted such admissions. Predictably, residents of Minnesota nursing homes who became infected with COVID constituted 81.9 percent of all coronavirus-related deaths statewide – a figure higher than that of any other U.S. state.
WALZ: Mask Mandate
On July 22, 2020, Gov. Walz announced a statewide mask order for Minnesotans, requiring all individuals to wear face-coverings in indoor public venues. “This is the quickest way to ending the COVID pandemic,” said Walz. “It is the surest way to getting us to the therapeutics and vaccines and with the least amount of impact on Minnesotans, and it is the absolute economic key to making sure that businesses are open and stay open.” This mask mandate would not end until May 2021, when the Minnesota executive council voted to lift it.
WALZ: Injected Race into the COVID Pandemic
As the deadly COVID pandemic continued to sweep across the United States, Gov. Walz, who had a great deal of influence over the Minnesota Department of Health (MDH) and was personally authorized to appoint the department’s commissioner, used his political clout to promote the use of racial preferences in MDH’s dispensation of highly coveted COVID therapeutics.
In compliance with Walz’s wishes, MDH instituted a policy that made monoclonal antibodies — a very effective coronavirus treatment that was in short supply and thus had to be rationed — more accessible for nonwhite people than for whites. Specifically, MDH devised a point system to help medical professionals determine which COVID-positive patients ought to qualify to receive the precious, relatively scarce antibodies. In that system — where 4 points were necessary to designate someone as a highest-need COVID patient — 2 points were automatically allotted to anyone who could be classified as “BIPOC” — i.e., Black, Indigenous, or People Of Color. This meant that a person’s BIPOC status alone would earn him or her just as many points as the presence of cardiovascular disease, obesity, or diabetes — co-morbidities known to dramatically increase the likelihood of negative outcomes for COVID patients.
On January 12, 2022, the conservative legal-advocacy group America First Legal (AFL) sent MDH’s then-commissioner, Jan Malcolm, a letter threatening to file a lawsuit if the department did not remove racial considerations – which AFL described as “blatantly unconstitutional, immoral and racist” — from its COVID scoring system. “The color of one’s skin,” the letter read, “is not a medical condition akin to hypertension, heart disease, or obesity, which are known to aggravate the risk of death or severe illness among those infected with COVID-19.” In response to AFL’s threat, MDH removed race as a factor to be considered in the rationed dispensation of monoclonal antibodies.
TRUMP: How He Dealt with the COVID Pandemic
As early as September of 2019, Chinese medical authorities first noticed a new, unfamiliar type of coronavirus in a number of patients in the city of Wuhan. But those authorities kept this discovery a secret for more than three months, during which time they continued to discover new cases of the virus on a regular basis. A University of Southampton study later estimated that the number of coronavirus cases worldwide could have been reduced by 95%, had China taken steps to contain the virus and to alert the rest of the world about it just three weeks sooner than it did.
On January 21, 2020, the U.S. confirmed its first known case of coronavirus in a young man who had recently traveled to Wuhan. On January 29, President Trump created a White House Coronavirus Task Force to coordinate the federal government’s response to the virus outbreak.
Congressional Democrats, meanwhile, had not held even a single hearing about the matter. Instead, they had spent the preceding four months entirely obsessed with one agenda item: impeaching President Trump and trying to remove him from office. The Senate impeachment trial, which had commenced on January 21, was still in high gear.
On January 31, President Trump formally declared coronavirus to be a public health emergency and became the first national leader in the world to implement a ban on incoming travel from China. There had not yet been a single known American death from the virus.
Joe Biden, however, depicted Trump as an anti-Asian racist because of his references to coronavirus as a “foreign virus” or a “Chinese virus.” “This is no time for Donald Trump’s record of hysteria and xenophobia — hysterical xenophobia — and fearmongering,” said Biden.
On February 24, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi visited San Francisco’s crowded Chinatown area and encouraged people to come and patronize its various shops and vendors, assuring the public that “everything is fine here” and “it’s very safe to be in Chinatown.” Within a few weeks, Pelosi would be claiming that President Trump — and not she — had failed to take the lethality of the virus seriously enough.
Meanwhile, President Trump announced further restrictions on incoming travel from certain global hot spots where coronavirus was becoming increasingly widespread — namely Iran (February 26), South Korea (February 29), and eventually, all of Europe (March 11 & 14).
On February 29, a patient near Seattle was believed to be the first person to die of coronavirus in the United States.
Over the next several weeks and months, President Trump and his administration worked around the clock to:
In March 2020, Dr. Anthony Fauci — a lead member of the Coronavirus Task Force and the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases — noted that “the very timely decision on the part of the president to shut off travel from China” had “absolutely” gone “a long way” toward limiting the number of coronavirus infections in the U.S. “We did it early,” said Fauci. Stating also that the Trump administration’s “coordinated response” to the crisis had been “impressive,” Fauci added: “I can’t imagine that, under any circumstances, anybody could be doing more.”
In early April 2020, the Trump administration launched “Operation Warp Speed,” a Manhattan Project-style effort to dramatically reduce the amount of time needed to develop a coronavirus vaccine. As Bloomberg News pointed out: “There is no precedent for such rapid development of a vaccine.”
Two separate vaccines – produced by Pfizer and Moderna — were authorized for use in late 2020, representing one of the fastest, most extraordinary achievements in the history of medicine. Distribution of the vaccines in the U.S. began in December 2020. The incoming Biden administration then made those vaccines the centerpieces of its fight against COVID, issuing numerous vaccine mandates targeting federal employees, federal contractors, federally-funded Medicaid-and Medicare-certified health care facilities, Head Start program facilities, and private companies with more than 100 employees.