Guideline Subversion
Claudewell S. Thomas, MD, MPH, DLFAPA, is an established psychiatrist who is currently retired ,, He received his medical degree in 1956 at SUNY Downstate College of Medicine and specializes in social psychiatry, public health psychiatry, and forensic psychiatry. Dr. Thomas was board certified by the American Board of Psychiatry... more
The lifting of severe restrictions on movement and enterprise is a state responsibility according to the White House. There is no overarching USPHS authority to set priorities and to address triage in the event of a dramatic worsening of the pandemic. Therefore, the politicization of information resources at federal, state, and local levels magnifies U.S. unpreparedness and death likelihood. Steps to be followed according to The New York Times were developed by the CDC months ago, but were not approved by the Trump administration which put the report in the limbo of "in preparation."
The head of the CDC is at risk of being fired and having his agency further savaged by incompetent political responders. This scenario is being reenacted in many red states. The undermining of WHO relationships with the insistence of incompetence, the withholding of allocated funds to WHO, accusations of Chinese weaponization of either a naturally occurring SARS virus or the laboratory creation of one is another isolation of Americans from the truth, substituting instead a cocoon of anger, fear and dependency on a strongman's vision and certainty. The immediate price that we will pay is unnecessary death. The greater price could be the conversion of liberal democracy into a fascist state. The intermediate steps are the four horsemen of the apocalypse. We will not have the luxury of choosing which horsemen to entertain.
