Peter Navarro is White House trade adviser. He now serves as the national Defense Production Act policy coordinator to secure Covid19 supplies.
Navarro challenged 60 minutes on pandemic efforts under the Bush and Obama administrations. 60 Minutes accepted the challenge and made Navarro look foolish with 2005 and 2009 footage including Dr. Anthony Fauci.
https://twitter.com/ChrisAlbertoLaw/status/1249544218063908864
Out of His League
Please consider Peter Navarro, a pugilistic China hawk, takes on a key coronavirus response role for Trump. Critics say he’s out of his league
Peter Navarro, a 70-year-old economist who’s spent years darkly warning of the dangers of Chinese economic hegemony, recently leapt headfirst from his previous portfolio of tackling trade issues into the White House’s at times chaotic and overdue efforts to respond to the coronavirus outbreak.
Late last month, President Trump tapped Navarro to coordinate use of the Korean War-era Defense Production Act to assist, prod, and even compel US industries to make masks, respirators, gowns and other protective equipment that hospitals say they desperately need to treat coronavirus patients. But Navarro has attracted more attention for loudly siding with Trump in a behind-the-scenes battle with the nation’s top infectious disease expert, Dr. Anthony Fauci, over an experimental and still unproven treatment for coronavirus called hydroxychloroquine.
“My qualifications in terms of looking at the science is that I’m a social scientist,” Navarro said in a boisterous CNN interview, when asked last week why Americans should take his advice on the effects of the anti-malaria drug over Fauci’s. “I have a PhD and I understand how to read statistical studies.”
Fauci has urged caution on hydroxychloroquine, while Trump and Navarro have taken a more optimistic note on the trials that are underway. (One such trial was recently halted altogether after patients taking a higher dose of the drug started displaying irregular heart rates.) Navarro’s critics blasted his defense of the treatment as unscientific and potentially dangerous, and suggested he embodied an overall disregard for science emanating from Trump and some of his top aides. On Sunday, Trump shared a Tweet critical of the doctor with the hashtag FireFauci, further escalating tensions inside the administration.
“A head of supply chain from Walmart or Proctor and Gamble or wherever, they’d do 100 times better than Navarro,” said Yossi Sheffi, an MIT professor who specializes in global supply chains. “You need to understand how an international supply chain works. You need personal connections in ports.”
Birds of a Feather
Senator Mazie Hirono tweeted that she understood why Trump liked Navarro so much. “Both spread dangerous misinformation not based on fact and science during a pandemic. Birds of a feather flock together,” said Hirono
Navarro is still around only because he shares Trump’s views on ridiculous trade wars all of which have backfired.
And not only is Navarro still around Trump elevated a self proclaimed “social-scientist” to head up a global supply chain procurement effort.
Mike “Mish” Shedlock
I can no longer with any conscience support the US government with my labor.
Mish,
You don’t seem to address the headline very much.
The CDC took $8bb of our money for years. They seem to have little in the way of actual preparation for this. Where are the stockpiles? Where is the understanding of how to ramp up production? Where is the coordination and preparation for hospitals. Some is happening no doubt, but it seems less than impressive.
Testing? For people who spent their lives on this, they don’t seem to have much of a plan here. They don’t seem to have game planned anything at a deep level. They were studying gun violence and other left wing nonsense.
But why criticize the people who for years took our money and told us how important they are? More important for you is to criticize a guy who joined politics and had to deal with all these people. Even as poorly as he does that sometimes, I dont see it as the biggest issue here.
The complete and utter failure of our wise public health overlords is. Exactly the sort of rot he at least makes a half hearted attempt to go after. And for that was relentlessly attacked for three years.
the cd”c” is as incompetent as the trump government.
I have never supported a strong Federal government. I support the Old American Republic. I am guessing you have been the opposite… advocating for constant centralization, then blaming others when it fails.
Ironic how the CDC worked fine under other administrations. We’ve had risks of pandemics before with SARS, H1N1 and MERS and even Ebola. In the end the responsibility goes back to the current administration. You don’t get to blame CDC when they did okay with other similar global pandemics. SARS, H1N1 and MERS were more lethal.
SARS and MERS were more lethal, but don’t spread as easily. H1N1 wasn’t as deadly, and spread rapidly. If it had been as deadly as Covid-19, then we would have had the pandemic then. CDC wasn’t competent, they were lucky.
There were ten years of pandemic talk. My ex-workplace produced pandemic safety guidance to businesses for years and years. It was super-hot between 2010 and 2014. Then it just fizzled. It started warming up with SARS and then hit the hot zone with West Nile. But the body count never got high enough to cause our company to make any more pandemic guidance products and they were all shelved. Same with the government. All that talk of FEMA body bags terrorized certain segments back in 2011. Some of us thought it was tied to Occupy Wall Street. That, and the FEMA prep campaign called “Beware the Zombie Apocalypse” where everyone was supposed to have a bugout bag handy in case the zombies attacked. It was cute and stupid and most everyone ignored it. Again, I interpreted zombies as meaning “OWS supporters”, especially if push came to shove came to Natl Guard opening fire on Zucotti Park. But there was some prep done for pandemics at the same time. Over all, the prep was not for lockdown in the manner we are seeing now. It ended up being just a pamphlet campaign.
Many reports suggest that this Corona Virus was known about in November, 2019. Even US intelligence appears to have known and had multiple briefings. This was ignored for 5 months. Precious time that could have been spent planning and preparing. It would have been far less damaging and much cheaper to prepare than it was to procrastinate.
Why didn’t the CDC do something? What were all our brilliant scientists doing? Trump took a break from fighting the Ukraine hoax in December to stop them???!
On the other hand… here is Pelosi grandstanding in Chinatown in late February. Could drop similar links all day.
Um, am I missing something here? If Bush or Obama ever said anything about a pandemic lying in wait it never showed up on my radar. If they did make such a statement then their preparations were piss poor:
97% of the antibiotics the US uses are made in China or have irreplaceable components made in China. That should have the US crapping its pants and points to the extreme irresponsibility of the one-sided trade relationship with China. If we went to some sort of half assed war with them, you’d have millions of Americans dying from what are now trivial illnesses. Even if China harbors no ill will, when a bacterial pandemic strikes you can hardly blame them if they kept all their antibiotics at home.
The US doesn’t even have enough surgical masks to deal with what is bottom line almost a trivial disease outbreak. Surgical masks are the kinds of things Girl Scouts make for craft projects when they’re not selling cookies. Again, they all come from China.
One can make other points, but these two stand on their own and justify Trump or any of his minions for trashing previous administrations on this point. There is simply no excuse.
Seems like there was some resistance to the idea of preparation. Wonder where that came from…
Trump has been President for 3 years. If he found a hole he should have fixed it. Stop all this blaming past administrations. This is pure BS.
Were you living under a rock for three years? What were your statements on the Russia Hoax? aka the biggest and most useless distraction in the history of the country.
If they were at all in support of it… never speak on these topics again.
And let’s say you forgive all his early mistakes – testing is going down! we can’t get released without more testing and tracking. Who’s working on that?
Things just got real for me. My wife lost an aunt and two uncles to covid yesterday.
Condolences. That’s almost unbelievable. Yes, stay safe.
Of all people. You’re my favorite commenter here Zardoz…that just plain sucks and you have my sympathy.
The lunatic is in my hall
The lunatics are in my hall
The paper holds their folded faces to the floor
And every day, the paper boy brings more
As regards treatment with hydroxychloroquine, I thought this link might be of interest. As for the rest of it, I decline to comment.
sooo, how is Phase 2 of China trade deal going …
Navarro should be exposed to the virus. After that, he can talk again with Fauci.
Alternative facts are more important than 15 year old footage showing The Shrub™ taking positive steps.
What positive steps did Bush take? He read a book on Spanish Flu then decided he needed a pandemic comittee, but then he refused to fund it so it never went anywhere. That was a couple billion he didn’t want to spend protecting Americans. Remind me how much he spent killing Iraqis and Americans in his stupid fake wars?
And why the heck would we need a committee anyway, we have the CDC!!! They are a standing committee and bureaucracy setup to fight pandemics! They are so pathetic and lazy we need to setup a committee to get them to do their job?
Can Left Wing Clown World do anything right? Even their hoaxes suck.
what does right wing clown world do right?
It doesn’t exist… it has a family and a job.
Generally whatever it is called… it’s good at losing, retreating, feeling bad about itself, not understanding how vicious and ruthless its enemies are. And if course like all of them… good at stealing from us.
This is a total destruction of the Publc Health PR Machine. Instead… Trump!