updated edition with a new Afterword. Originally published 2004.
“Afterword”
As horrific as the disease itself was, public officials and the media helped create that terror -- not by exaggerating the disease but by minimizing it, by trying to reassure. … If there is a single dominant lesson from 1918, it’s that governments need to tell the truth in a crisis. … You don’t manage the truth. You tell the truth.
In 1918 the lies of officials and of the press never allowed the terror to condense in the concrete. The public could trust nothing and so they knew nothing.
Those in authority must retain the public’s trust. The way to do that is to distort nothing, to put the best face on nothing, to try to manipulate no one.
…………………………………………………..
Too bad Trump did not heed this advice. Instead he led with lies which he possibly thought were reassuring. But his attempts at reassuring were merely efforts to fend off criticism of his lack of leadership.
Trump’s Lies About
the Coronavirus
Much of this info is from The Atlantic, 11/02/2020.
Trump’s words are in the quotation marks.
February 27, 2020 - The outbreak would be temporary: “It’s going to disappear. One day, it’s like a miracle—it will disappear.”
February 2020 - “Now the Democrats are politicizing the coronavirus.” The outbreak is “their new hoax.”
March 2, 2020 - Pharmaceutical companies are going “to have vaccines, I think, relatively soon.” The first vaccine in the U.S. was given December 2020.
March 6 and May 11, 2020 - “Anybody that needs a test, gets a test. We—they’re there. They have the tests. And the tests are beautiful” and “If somebody wants to be tested right now, they’ll be able to be tested.” The U.S. did not have enough testing.
March 26, 2020 - This kind of pandemic “was something nobody thought could happen … Nobody would have ever thought a thing like this could have happened.” Experts both inside and outside the federal government sounded the alarm many times in the past decade about the potential for a devastating global pandemic.
May 8, 2020 - The coronavirus is “going to go away without a vaccine … and we’re not going to see it again, hopefully, after a period of time.”
May 11, 2020 - America has “developed a testing capacity unmatched and unrivaled anywhere in the world, and it’s not even close.” The United States was still not testing enough people and was lagging behind the testing and tracing capabilities that other countries had developed.
May 2020 - “Coronavirus numbers are looking MUCH better, going down almost everywhere,” and cases are “coming way down.”
June 17, 2020 - The pandemic is “fading away. It’s going to fade away.”
July 2, 2020 - The pandemic is “getting under control.”
July 4, 2020 - “99%” of COVID-19 cases are “totally harmless.” The WHO has said that about 15 percent of COVID-19 cases can be severe, with 5 percent being critical.
Multiple times - America is “rounding the corner” and “rounding the final turn” of the pandemic.
Multiple times - “What happens is, you get better” after being sick with COVID-19. “That's what happens: You get better.” Also, “You get better and then you’re immune.”
Trump finally declared a national emergency more than seven weeks after the first domestic COVID-19 case was reported, in Washington State.
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