Kellyanne Conway Flubs Basic Science On Live TV & Is Embarrassed Again

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Caleb Newton
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The people in charge of responding to the Coronavirus pandemic in the U.S. don’t appear to understand basic facts about the nature of that pandemic. This week during an appearance on Fox & Friends — which might as well be considered an official arm of the Trump administration at this point — longtime Trump adviser Kellyanne Conway seemed to suggest that because the current Coronavirus pathogen has been designated “COVID-19” rather than, say, “COVID-1,” the World Health Organization should have been better prepared. Problem is: the 19 doesn’t refer to a place in a list of viruses; it refers to the year 2019, in which this pathogen emerged.

Nevertheless, Conway self-confidently insisted:

‘The president took decisive and immediate action at the end of January to shut down flights from China. That was criticized by the WHO; it was criticized by other people as xenophobic and racist and travel bans don’t work — well this one sure did. So we have every right to know.’

Is success what she calls the tens of thousands of Americans who are dead after Trump spent weeks refusing to take the Coronavirus seriously beyond the single, solitary step of restricting travel from China, where the virus first emerged? The restriction wasn’t even a “shut down.” Reportedly, tens of thousands of people still flew from China to the U.S. after its implementation.

Conway continued:

‘Some of the scientists and doctors say there could be other strains later on this, this could come back in the fall in a limited way. This is Covid-19, not Covid 1, folks. You would think that people charged with the World Health Organization facts and figures would be on top of that.’

Watch below:

One observer suggested that Conway actually knows that the 19 stands for the year 2019 but is choosing to wheel out this line anyway because it sounds good.

Media Matters for America’s Bobby Lewis commented:

‘the “19” stands for 2019, the year it was discovered, not that this is the 19th time that this virus has appeared. kellyanne conway probably knows this; she’s just serving dumbass lines that sound good because it gets the base riled up. what was that about putting politics aside?’

These gaffes have a real relevance because the president announced just this week that he’d be suspending U.S. funding for the WHO amidst a review of their operations. He has accused the organization of favoring China amidst their response to the pandemic. To be clear, in the early days of the outbreak, Donald Trump himself touted the Chinese perspective and indicated that he trusted Chinese President Xi Jinping. Trump got made a fool of by a dictator, again, and now he’s trying to deflect the blame onto someone else — while the pandemic is still raging. Startlingly low Chinese official counts of cases and deaths appear, according to U.S. intelligence reports, to be false representations of the actual situation.

Anyone expecting self-reflection from the White House amidst this crisis would be disappointed. At a recent press conference, Trump went so far that he claimed — wrongly — that he has “total authority” over governors’ actions.



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