Despite ample warnings over more than a decade of the likelihood of global pandemics, and with the experience of near-misses like SARS, MERS and the H1N1 flu, there was no serious advance preparation by the American bourgeoisie, or any section of the capitalist class around the world.
The response to the statements by Dr. Birx has been an attempt to bury her admissions beneath a deluge of "happy talk" about likely breakthroughs in testing, therapeutic treatments and vaccines, in which the White House has been aided by a servile and compliant media.
At the White House press briefing late Monday afternoon, there was a clear effort to change the "optics" of the event, as Trump and Pence walked out alone, separated by six feet, without the usual backdrop of aides and experts. Pence sat down as Trump took the microphone alone, to announce that more than one million people had been tested in the United States.
Trump said nothing about the rise in the number of positive tests to more than 160,000, or the 20,000 new cases in America, or the nearly 600 deaths, by far the worst day for mass casualties in the United States since the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. The cumulative US death toll from the coronavirus has now surpassed the nearly 3,000 deaths on 9/11.
But instead of taking note of this grim milestone, and proposing any serious measures to mobilize the vast resources of the American economy and working population against the pandemic, Trump expressed his satisfaction with as many as 200,000 American deaths. He amused himself with a series of childish photo ops, called on several of his own health officials to give servile statements thanking him for his leadership, and invited a group of corporate CEOs to take bows and pledge the assistance of their companies for the fight against the coronavirus. One business executive had the gall to draw the conclusion from this ongoing tragedy that the American people needed to "turn back to God."
The response of the Democratic Party and its media allies to the statements by Dr. Fauci Sunday and Dr. Birx Monday has been virtually total silence. Former Vice President Joe Biden, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, called on Trump to stop squabbling with Democratic governors in Michigan, Washington and other states, and to base federal policy on the advice of Fauci and other experts.
"They should let Dr. Fauci and the experts run the show, speak more. Let them lay out exactly what's happening," he told MSNBC Monday afternoon. But he said nothing about the massive death toll estimated by Fauci and Birx, nor did he suggest that anything could be done to prevent it.
Similarly, the New York Times published a lengthy editorial under the headline, "How America Can Reopen," which made no mention of the historic levels of casualties projected by the Trump administration or how to forestall such a catastrophe. Instead, the editorial chided the White House for rushing to reopen the US economy before adequate preparations could be made, and suggesting -- echoing New York Governor Andrew Cuomo -- that US workers should be systematically tested so that those who are not infected by the coronavirus can be sent back to work at once.
The main concern of all sections of the American ruling elite is to reestablish the process of extracting profits from the labor of tens of millions of American workers, regardless of the impact on their health.
Meanwhile, the dimensions of the economic crisis triggered by the pandemic were underscored by an estimate by the St. Louis branch of the Federal Reserve Board, the US central bank, that 47 million workers could lose their jobs and the unemployment rate could rise to 32.1 percent in the coming months.
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