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Comment by arkitaip | Hacker News Reader

He's only been in power for a month - what do you expect, a miracle?

And in that month, Biden's already gave the thumbs up to bombing Syria, killing 17 people.

So complain to Biden, no one is saying we shouldn’t stop bombing people in other countries. It’s also not a shock to anyone in the US that Biden is effectively a conservative to every other western nation. I didn’t put my hopes on him fixing things. I wanted the clown in chief to stop breaking things for four years. If Biden keeps breaking things I’ll vote him out too. I just won’t do it to the benefit of more far right demagogues.

Exactly. I'm a libertarian who had never voted for a major party federal candidate and yet I found myself voting for the conservative option of Biden this time around. I want to go back to hating the government a normal amount. The military-industrial-surveillance complex is evil, but at least it has a vested interest to not wantonly kill half a million Americans.

I personally think Trump is dumb, indecent, and a liar - but it's not fair to suggest he's responsible for killing half a million Americans. The US seems to have had a somewhat typical response and outcome to the virus with fewer per capita deaths than Germany, France, UK, Spain, and others[1]. Surely all these countries weren't also run by regimes trying to kill their population.

Trump's opponents didn't seem to be suggesting noticeably better strategies to deal with the virus and Democrat led states don't seem to be handling the virus much better than Republican led states [2].

1 - https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/data/mortality

2 - https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/data/mortality

I agree with saying that Trump can't be blamed for the existence of the corona virus and a lot of deaths related to it - but there were expert suggestions to shut down travel much earlier and more aggressively than what Trump did and, honestly, the US per-capita deaths are quite high - we're somewhere in the top ten globally - so I don't know if it's fair to say that Corona virus' extreme impact is entirely disconnected from Trump either.

I prefer to focus on more concrete and demonstrable failures but I think in a few years when we can really parse this data we'll find that Trump's actions directly led to hundreds of thousands of avoidable deaths... but, I'm not certain.

The biggest failure I think we pretty clearly made in handling the virus was not quickly building up some nationalized vaccine production facilities. If ever there was a time for some good old state capitalism it was this pandemic and a few hundred million invested in setting up facilities we know we'll eventually need would have paid off handsomely.

Germany has 80 million people, 70.000 died through covid. US has 320 million (so roundabout 4 times as much), 500k died of covid (so roundabout 7 times as much). Thus, more people per capita died in the US than in Germany. https://gisanddata.maps.arcgis.com/apps/opsdashboard/index.h...

Germany, and Europe as a whole, have lower rates, but over 160 million people live in European countries with higher per capita death rates than the US, specifically:

  Gibraltar
  San Marino
  Belgium
  Czechia
  Slovenia
  UK
  Italy
  Portugal
  Montenegro

(from https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/)

And, do you really think that Belgium has all of whatever bad characteristics you like to apply to the US government? Or is it maybe more a consequence of being a small and densely populated area that people travel a lot to and from, like NYC? It's not as simple as good policy response meaning lower deaths.

Responsibility is shared jointly. If you merely drive the getaway car for a bank robbery in which a bank guard is killed, you yourself are fully on the hook for murder. If Trump had taken Covid seriously and advocated common sense mitigations like wearing masks, socially distancing, and refraining from unnecessary activities, our position would be significantly better. As a public figure, downplaying the problem while advocating irresponsibility is at the very least gross negligence. This puts him on the hook for the entire outcome. I agree many other politicians are responsible for their part as well, but that's besides the point.

While you cannot attribute every single death to the Trump administration, it remains true that in the most critical time period of the virus emerging, they were actively hostile to taking the necessary actions. They continued to be actively hostile to scientific consensus about the virus until removed from power.

The administration was overtly spreading misinformation and speaking against straight up correct medical advice. They made overt statements in national media that assistance vs the virus would be treated as a quid pro quo for political loyalty. They threatened governors that criticized the administration with denial of federal resources in a (&()^) epidemic. You cannot whitewash the blood on their hands.

It was craven politics born of an early idea that the virus would be worst in left leaning coastal cities, and hence would help Trump for re-election. Obviously a virus doesn't give a crap about political parties, so it didn't go that way.

It's entirely reasonable to believe that the number of covid deaths in the US would have been an order of magnitude less with more sober decision making.

You probably mistaken my comment as anti Biden instead of anti involvement. I predict the Biden administration as the Obama administration did, will in fact escalate every conflict we are currently engaged in. Lets wait a little and see what happens, I hope I'm wrong.

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