Given that he actually labeled the coronavirus health
emergency as a “hoax” in his South Carolina reelection rally back in February
28, 2020, is President Trump perpetrating the world’s most dangerous hoax?
By: Ringo Bones
During one of his so-called reelection rallies in South
Carolina back in February 28, 2020, President Trump actually labeled the
coronavirus as a hoax and said Democrats are trying to use the coronavirus to
damage him – and called that “their new hoax”. And more recently, President
Trump even jokingly remarked that Hillary Clinton’s e-mails caused the
coronavirus pandemic. This was after a growing furor over the Trump
Administration’s lackluster response of a growing global public health
emergency declared by the World Health Organization after the disease spread at
an alarming rate from China near the end of January 2020.
Donald Trump has a long history of branding things he doesn’t
like as “hoaxes”. Trump used the word to dismiss the Russia collusion
investigation and the more recent impeachment as a hoax. Worse still, President
Trump enacted an executive decision to slash the budget of the Centers of
Disease Control and Prevention back in 2018 focused on eliminating the funding
of Obama era disease security programs and also of the Health and Human
Services. Back in 2018, the White House eliminated a position on the National
Security Council tasked with coordinating a global pandemic response.
During a federal government budget proposal meeting for the
2020 US Government Budget held back in 2019, the Trump Administration sought to
cut the CDC’s annual budget for the fiscal year 2020 by as much as 16-percent. On
average, the Trump Administration had been slashing the annual budgets of the
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, National Institutes of Health and
the Department of Health and Human Services by almost 15-percent on an annual
basis since 2018.
