Dr. Robert Redfield
When Republicans are in charge, you’re expendable.
The GOP’s pandemic policy was to keep businesses open at all costs.
Faced with the Covid-19 crisis, Republicans were willing to sacrifice Americans’ lives for business profits. They opposed workplace safety measures, such as closing meat processing plants where workers got sick and died, and a GOP elected official in Texas even argued that vulnerable senior citizens should be willing to die for the economy (see story here).
In Florida, GOP Gov. Ron DeSantis sent an armed police SWAT team to the home of a state employee who blew the whistle on his administration’s efforts to cover up the body count from his deadly “reopen” policies (details here).
The Republican impulse to conceal the reality of Covid-19’s threat to your and my survival extended into the bowels of the Trump administration, which also prioritized business profits over saving human lives.
Dr. Robert Redfield (photo above), who ran the CDC then, testified to House investigators that Trump appointees in the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) “repeatedly blocked his public health experts from briefing the American public.” (See story here.)
Even before Redfield testified, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) released a report “detailing accusations from staffers of political interference against the agencies within HHS, including the CDC, the Food and Drug Administration, the National Institutes of Health, and the Office of the Assistant Secretary for Preparedness and Response.” That report also documented “alteration” and “suppression” of scientific findings, citing specific incidents.
Republican leaders impugned government agencies, attacked scientists and medical experts, and lied to the public. The consequences fell most heavily on their own supporters, who stubbornly resisted medical advice to mask up, get vaccinated, and avoid gatherings, and paid for it with their health or lives. To date Covid-19 has killed 993,730 Americans, and many of those deaths could have been prevented.
The GOP has fundamentally changed. I remember when they claimed to be a party of freedom and responsibility (although that was always a bit spurious). Now, they’re unabashedly the party of freedom from responsibility, whose overarching governing impulse is selfishness.
In the case of Covid-19, their selfishness manifested itself in a grim determination to keep businesses’ doors open, and keep cash registers ringing, while people were dying. Making money was the only thing they cared about. They didn’t care whether you lived or died.