Hopeful Layperson, Better Described as 'Idiot'

I pity Dr Anthony Fauci, the infectious disease specialist who has been playing the role of a hostage in Trump's daily press briefings about COVID-19. I imagine he's been tactful regarding the ignorance and apathy his boss displays daily because he doesn't want to be fired in a fit of presidential pique. He's the right man for the job, but his need for tact can be frustrating... such as when he characterizes the mendacious Trump as a 'hopeful layperson'. Trump's only hope at this stage is the hope of salvaging his ruin of a presidency. Dr Fauci, in mild terms, tried to put Trump's insistence that an untested drug cocktail be approved for COVID-19 treatment:


"Okay, Margaret, there's an issue here of where we're coming from. The president has heard -- as we all have heard -- what I call anecdotal reports that certain drugs work. So what he was trying to do and express was the hope that if they might work, let's try and push their usage. I, on the other side, have said, I'm not disagreeing with the fact that anecdotally they might work. But my job is to prove definitively from a scientific standpoint that they do work. So I was taking a medically, purely scientific standpoint and the president was trying to bring hope to the people. There's this issue of trying to separate the two of us. There isn't fundamentally a difference there. He's coming from it from a hope/layperson standpoint. I'm coming from it from a scientific standpoint."


Clinical trials are needed to determine if Hydroxychloroquine is actually effective against COVID-19, and if it is, what dosages are safe. The drug can have hazardous side-effects, as self-medicating Nigerians have discovered the hard way. Even worse, the drug is used to treat autoimmune diseases such as lupus and rheumatoid arthritis, and those afflicted with these conditions cannot get the drug because unscrupulous monsters are hoarding it. This is a hell of a lot more serious than toilet paper hoarding. I'm kinda taking this one personally, a woman I used to work with died all-too-young of lupus complications and another friend of mine, also a former co-worker, has been fighting lupus for years.

The combination of apathy, mendacity, idiocy, and an obsession with political calculus emanating from the White House is getting people killed, and not only COVID-19 sufferers will die. This country is the goddamned Demeter, careening toward the Whitby coast, and Stupid Dracula is at the helm. Hey, I know we're living in a horror narrative, but I figured I needed to give Poe a break.