Last May, I wrote an article about Passive Eugenics. In it, I questioned why the death rate due to COVID19 was up to 64,000. Didn’t it matter that over half of the victims were people of color? Why had almost half of the victims been nursing home residents? After 5,000 meat packing plant workers had been infected, mostly Latinos and blacks, why did Trump order them to go back to work or risk losing their unemployment benefits? Why were farmworkers ordered back to work, after so many had
already died? I concluded the article by calling it “Passive Eugenics”, or genocide a.k.a. crimes against humanity.
This was genocide that was deliberately being committed against very vulnerable populations. Why didn’t the Trump administration formulate a national plan to protect Americans from the virus? Well, now we know the answer. It was because of decisions made by people in the White House, including the President. Their decisions were criminal.
We recently learned that a national plan to control the virus was conceptualized and partially drafted, early on. On March 13, a meeting was held at the White House with the CEOs of major retailers and pharmaceutical companies regarding a national testing strategy. A big announcement followed. Trump laid out the framework, consisting of a federal testing program, a national database of testing results, a tracing program, and a website to provide vital information and the locations of potentially 32,000 testing sites.
For six weeks, Trump’s team waited for him to give the word. The word never came because, as one team member stated, “The political folks believed that because [COVID-19] was going to be relegated to Democratic states, that they could blame those governors, and that would be an effective political strategy.”
So the pursuit of a national plan evolved into a deadly and potentially criminal political strategy. The administration abdicated its role and responsibility and left it to the states to formulate their own plans, resulting in 50 state-based plans, devoid of presidential leadership. This, of course, shielded the administration from any blame for the impending disaster that would claim many lives in blue states like New York, Illinois, and California. It made the governors responsible for acquiring whatever PPE, ventilators, masks, and swabs they needed. The federal government obstructed their efforts by intercepting their deliveries to create their own stockpiles, forcing the states to scramble to find more equipment and supplies, and pay exorbitant prices. Our national response to the virus turned into absolute chaos, as infections and the number of deaths soared.
Now, four months later, 4.6 million Americans have caught the virus,
Today, one American is dying every minute of the day. This is the result
Dr. Juan Andrade, Jr.President
United States Hispanic Leadership Institute, Inc.
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