COVID-19 Slaughter, CDC Tragedy, and One U.S. Authority without Blood on His Hands

Image by: Felipe Esquivel Reed (CC BY 2.0)

It is easy for progressives to blame the staggering calamity of U.S. COVID-19 deaths solely on Trump. Yes, Donald Trump is a self-serving liar, and his vice president, Mike Pence, as chair of the President’s Coronavirus Task Force and Trump henchman, has blocked life-saving guidance from scientific authorities. There is smoking-gun evidence (some of which I will discuss) that convicts Trump and Pence, but if progressives blame only the Trump administration and not politically-intimidated scientific authorities, they will be guilty of failing to prevent another disastrous response to the next pandemic.

While anti-authoritarian progressives should have expected nothing less from Trump and Pence, cavalier clowns from the theocratic/pre-Enlightenment wing of the corporatocracy, they should have expected more from scientists at the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), whose compromising of science was chronicled by ProPublica (“Inside the Fall of the CDC”) and noted by the Center for Infectious Disease and Research Policy (CIDRAP). Both the ProPublica and the CIDRAP reports will be discussed here.

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Bruce E. Levine, a practicing clinical psychologist, writes and speaks about how society, culture, politics, and psychology intersect. His most recent book is A Profession Without Reason: The Crisis of Contemporary Psychiatry—Untangled and Solved by Spinoza, Freethinking, and Radical Enlightenment (2022). His Web site is brucelevine.net

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