He Went To Jared (And The Economy Collapsed And 150,000+ Died)

Vanity Fair seems to have the goods on the COVID-19 testing debacle that pale Peter Principle princeling Jared "Mr. Ivanka Trump" Kushner was heading up.  Jared seemed to have a testing plan ready in late March:

The plan called for the federal government to coordinate distribution of test kits, so they could be surged to heavily affected areas, and oversee a national contact-tracing infrastructure. It also proposed lifting contract restrictions on where doctors and hospitals send tests, allowing any laboratory with capacity to test any sample. It proposed a massive scale-up of antibody testing to facilitate a return to work. It called for mandating that all COVID-19 test results from any kind of testing, taken anywhere, be reported to a national repository as well as to state and local health departments.

But, then came April and the sense that political advantage could be gotten by certain malevolent sociopaths:

Most troubling of all, perhaps, was a sentiment the expert said a member of Kushner’s team expressed: that because the virus had hit blue states hardest, a national plan was unnecessary and would not make sense politically. “The political folks believed that because it was going to be relegated to Democratic states, that they could blame those governors, and that would be an effective political strategy,” said the expert.

That logic may have swayed Kushner. “It was very clear that Jared was ultimately the decision maker as to what [plan] was going to come out,” the expert said.

On April 27, Trump stepped to a podium in the Rose Garden, flanked by members of his coronavirus task force and leaders of America’s big commercial testing laboratories, Quest Diagnostics and LabCorp, and finally announced a testing plan: It bore almost no resemblance to the one that had been forged in late March, and shifted the problem of diagnostic testing almost entirely to individual states.

The entire article is worth a read and belongs near the front of any retrospective on how the Trump regime criminally bungled the COVID-19 response, resulting in tens of thousands of unnecessary deaths and economic devastation.  These bastards need a serious reckoning some day;  fumigating them out of the White (Supremacist) House starting November 3 is the starting point.