How Jared Kushner’s Secret Testing Plan “Went Poof Into Thin Air”

This is absolutely infuriating. There was actually an honest attempt being made by Kushner and a group of assembled people to develop and implement a national, federal strategy and response to COVID. Securing enough tests, materials, equipment. Engaging in a robust contact tracing and testing program that would roll up through a national database so as to prioritize equipment, services, and assistance as hot-spots and outbreaks occurred.

And it was all shot down because of politics and out of concern for Trump’s re-election. These are sick, sick people. They have blood on their hands because of their failures and decision to place partisanship ahead of the lives of America and its people.

This spring, a team working under the president’s son-in-law produced a plan for an aggressive, coordinated national COVID-19 response that could have brought the pandemic under control. So why did the White House spike it in favor of a shambolic 50-state response?

Inside the White House, over much of March and early April, Kushner’s handpicked group of young business associates, which included a former college roommate, teamed up with several top experts from the diagnostic-testing industry. Together, they hammered out the outline of a national testing strategy. The group—working night and day, using the encrypted platform WhatsApp—emerged with a detailed plan obtained by Vanity Fair.

Rather than have states fight each other for scarce diagnostic tests and limited lab capacity, the plan would have set up a system of national oversight and coordination to surge supplies, allocate test kits, lift regulatory and contractual roadblocks, and establish a widespread virus surveillance system by the fall, to help pinpoint subsequent outbreaks.

As it evolved, Kushner’s group called on the help of several top diagnostic-testing experts. Together, they worked around the clock, and through a forest of WhatsApp messages. The effort of the White House team was “apolitical,” said the participant, and undertaken “with the nation’s best interests in mind.”

Kushner’s team hammered out a detailed plan, which Vanity Fair obtained. It stated, “Current challenges that need to be resolved include uneven testing capacity and supplies throughout the US, both between and within regions, significant delays in reporting results (4-11 days), and national supply chain constraints, such as PPE, swabs, and certain testing reagents.”
The plan called for the federal government to coordinate distribution of test kits, so they could be surged to heavily affected areas, and oversee a national contact-tracing infrastructure. It also proposed lifting contract restrictions on where doctors and hospitals send tests, allowing any laboratory with capacity to test any sample. It proposed a massive scale-up of antibody testing to facilitate a return to work. It called for mandating that all COVID-19 test results from any kind of testing, taken anywhere, be reported to a national repository as well as to state and local health departments.

And it proposed establishing “a national Sentinel Surveillance System” with “real-time intelligence capabilities to understand leading indicators where hot spots are arising and where the risks are high vs. where people can get back to work.”

This next part should piss every last one of us off. This is maddness.

Most troubling of all, perhaps, was a sentiment the expert said a member of Kushner’s team expressed: that because the virus had hit blue states hardest, a national plan was unnecessary and would not make sense politically. “The political folks believed that because it was going to be relegated to Democratic states, that they could blame those governors, and that would be an effective political strategy,” said the expert.

On April 27, Trump stepped to a podium in the Rose Garden, flanked by members of his coronavirus task force and leaders of America’s big commercial testing laboratories, Quest Diagnostics and LabCorp, and finally announced a testing plan: It bore almost no resemblance to the one that had been forged in late March, and shifted the problem of diagnostic testing almost entirely to individual states.

Under the plan released that day, the federal government would act as a facilitator to help increase needed supplies and rapidly approve new versions of diagnostic-testing kits. But the bulk of the effort to operate testing sites and find available labs fell to the states.

“I had this naive optimism: This is too important to be caught in a partisan filter of how we view truth and the world,” said Rick Klausner, a Rockefeller Foundation adviser and former director of the National Cancer Institute. “But the federal government has decided to abrogate responsibility, and basically throw 50 states onto their own.”

This is a long read. But for anyone here who cares about this country, cares about its people, and believes our elected officials need to be held accountable for their actions, and inactions, then it is necessary.

What are your thoughts?

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My thought?

Nepotism in the White House is cool. :sunglasses:

If Kushner can solve the Middle East conflict, he can do anything.

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His plan was actually pretty solid here. But they abandoned it because at the time COVID was only impacting the Blue States. So instead of going forward with a strategy that would actually have helped the entire nation, they put Trump’s lust to remain in power ahead of everything else and scrapped the plan that could have saved tens of thousands of lives.

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This shows once again that Kushner has the worst political acumen of anyone alive.

If the Administration has been able to get the pandemic under control, the President would be a shoe in for re-election.

It would have shown competence.

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■■■■■■■ embarrassing that’s what it is.

Democrat lives matter :fist:

Absolutely. He has failed upwards his whole life. Just like Trump. But these failures now have real world consequences for everyone else now.

Putting politics ahead of American lives. Unconscionable.

Every last one of these people need to go! The choice is stark in November. America or Trump. I’m choosing America.

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So they were planning on doing what everyone has been saying we should be doing.

But blue states suffering, so do nothing.

And look where we are now.

:smiling_imp:

Amen brother. We are on our way towards 250,000 dead Americans by the end of the year. And rather than take this crisis head on, they decided if Americans in Blue states die, that’s better for their re-election hopes.

Exactly. This in a nutshell.

Strange rationale though. One would have had to believe that they had the election in the bag without attempting to expand the base with more voters. A calculated move where it was believed that owning the libs was better for his reelection chances than including them in the pandemic relief.

I wonder which little birdie convinced President Trump that, cause surely he isn’t cruel enough to determine that on his own.

Right…?

You seem to be 100% sure that’s what happened. Based on one Vanity Fair article?

My thoughts are that there is nothing in this to convince me to switch to socialism.

1918 Pandemic- 675k America deaths

COVID19- 250k deaths by the end of 2020

250k deaths are inexcusable with all of the current advancements in science and technology.

Not in the bag. But an outbreak in Michigan that can be pinned on the Democratic Governor versus on Trump could lead them to believe they can take MI again in the election. The same with Pennsylvania.

And you bet you backside Trump is every bit that cruel and self-absorbed.

Is socialism the topic of this OP?

They were given the plans from someone working on Kushner’s team. They have been seen personally. The very steps proposed are exactly what most every other first world nation in Earth implemented, which resulted in a flattening of the curve.

Do you believe re-election hopes and partisanship would be beneath Trump in this crisis?

A national testing program is socialism.

The plans, not the reason they weren’t implemented.

One Vanity Fair article claiming causation. Not very scientific.

If this is true, it shifts the character of Trump and his administration from “merely” corrupt liars into blatantly evil. What in the genuine hell?