The former acting director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) ripped President Donald Trump’s administration on Tuesday evening for signaling during the coronavirus crisis with its actions that only wealthy white people can do well in America.
In an interview with CNN’s Anderson Cooper, Dr. Richard Besser, who has also trained with the Epidemic Intelligence Service (EIS), said the Trump administration cannot ask “how much suffering is acceptable” until they have taken “every step possible to protect and preserve and save every life that you can.”
“Yes, I don’t think you can say ‘Well, how much suffering are you willing to bear in order to restart the economy?’ until you’ve done everything possible to ensure that every single person in America can take measures to protect their own health, the health of their families and the health of their communities, and that’s just not the case right now,” Besser said. “So, it’s a false question until we’re ensuring that every workplace has protective equipment. The front line workers who we’re considering essential, we didn’t consider them essential before this began, most of them weren’t even being paid a living wage. So, now they’re being forced to bare the brunt of this. We can’t accept that as a society. It’s not the America that we really believe we should have.”
After Cooper ripped the Trump administration for not backing its own guidelines on how to keep people safe while “encouraging people to violate those guidelines and backing protestors who are protesting against the very guidelines” that Trump put out, Besser said that during the the 2009 swine flu pandemic, former President Barack Obama told him that he wanted everything “to be based on the best public health science.”
“Without that there’s no way of knowing what things are being told for political reasons and what things are being done for good science reasons. As we’re seeing different populations around the country being affected in different ways–black Americans, Latinos, native Americans, just getting devastated by this. We need to understand what the government is doing to address those issues and protecting all front-line workers,” Besser said. “We haven’t scaled up the thousands and thousands of contact traces that we need, we don’t provide safe places for people to isolate or quarantine if they’re identified as either having an infection or being in contact. We are saying, ‘If you have money and you’re white, you can do well here. If you’re not, good luck to you.'”
Cooper said “all the inequities that existed before are exponentially higher in a pandemic like this.”
“Yes, a lot of the essential workers, a number of them are actually still vulnerable to deportation because they are undocumented and they’re working the fields and they’re working in these processing plants, which the administration now says they are essential ironically,” Cooper concluded.
Last week, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) said the corporatist Congress was ready to consider more progressive policies until the “racial data came out” and showed that the coronavirus was “disproportionately impacting working class people and black and brown people”:
Coronavirus presents an opportunity for the United States to actually catch up with the developed world, with the rest of the developed world in health care guarantees, in wages and jobs. But it is being squandered. When the stay at home orders were first issued, we saw a massive shift in the direction of progressive policy. You had Mitt Romney talking about a universal basic income. And then a couple of interesting things happened. It felt like once the racial data came out that showed that this was disproportionately impacting working class people and black and brown people, it was almost like within days a lot of those ambitions just fell. But when we didn’t know who it was going to impact, when all of us felt vulnerable, we were ready to change. And I think that, at the very least, should be a moment of reflection for our country.
Ocasio-Cortez said Congress and the Trump administration fought the coronavirus fire with “gasoline” instead of “water” once they saw the “racial data.”
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