JB Pritzker Reveals The Talk Show Stunt Trump Wanted In Exchange For COVID Equipment

[FreeinChrist]

JB Pritzker Reveals The Stunt Trump Wanted In Exchange For COVID Equipment

The Illinois governor said Wednesday that the president agreed to send his state lifesaving equipment under one condition.

www.huffpost.com

Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker (D) says President Donald Trump “proved who he really is” in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic — as Trump allegedly agreed to send the state lifesaving equipment only if Pritzker showed him fealty on national television.​

​

Pritzker recalled Wednesday at an event for the Center for American Progress that U.S. companies at the time were price-gouging governments, hospitals, police and fire departments as people were dying — and said the president didn’t seem to mind.​

​

“He could have fought for us,” Pritzker said onstage. “He really could have. Instead, he made self-serving deals. He would send life-saving equipment if only we would agree to praise him on the Sunday talk shows. That is literally a deal that he put in front of me.”​

​

“I was desperate,” he continued. “My hospitals were filling up. And time was of the essence, so I agreed that I would do that if he sent me what we needed. Because my job at the time was to do virtually anything to get the White House to help us save lives.”​

​

​

Trump does not care about anyone but himself. He'd let people die to get fealty. Pathetic.


The story was also written about here, by a different reporter:

Illinois Governor Says Trump Wanted to Trade Life-Saving Equipment for Praise on TV During Pandemic

"He would send life-saving equipment if only we would agree to praise him on the Sunday talk shows. That is literally a deal that he put in front of me”

www.mediaite.com

Pritzker attacked Trump’s character and accused him of being a “kleptocrat” who is in government not to help Americans, but instead to help himself. He also accused Trump and his allies of viewing “people’s lives as a game” and recalled a story from the Covid-19 pandemic to illustrate his point.​

​

Trump “could have fought for us. He really could have,” Pritzker said of the early days of the pandemic when masks and ventilators were in short supply for healthcare workers and patients.​

 

[Fantine]

A battle between two billionaires--one a servant leader, the other self-interested and unmoved by the suffering of others.

 

[probinson]

In related news, the vast majority of this ostensible "lifesaving equipment" ended up unused in scrap heaps.

Over the last few weeks, 18-wheelers pulled up again and again to the City of New York’s huge supply warehouse in Queens to pick up dozens of unopened cartons containing what, during the depths of the pandemic, City Hall proclaimed would be lifesaving miracle devices known as “bridge vents.”​

​

...​

​

Taxpayers paid $12 million for the devices.​

​

...​

​

A junk dealer from Long Island picked up the entire $12 million, 500,000-pound kit and kaboodle — for only $24,600. It took the dealer 28 truckloads to cart the stuff away, auction records state.​

​

That’s just over $8 per device, way less than a penny back for every taxpayer dollar spent. ​

​

And that’s just the beginning.​

​

https://www.thecity.nyc/2023/02/21/covid-bridge-vent-ppe-auction/

​

I realize the above is from New York and not Illinois, but the bottom line is that this "lifesaving equipment" ended up in scrap heaps all over the world. Canada is another example.

The $28,250 CAE device compared to $23,730 for one produced by Baylis Medical of Montreal, $22,600 by StarFish Medical of Toronto and $18,993 by Thornhill Medical of North York.​

​

None of the CAE devices were known to be used in any medical setting and documents show that of the 8,200 CAE ventilators delivered, 8,180 were “slated for sale as scrap metal” as early as 2021.​

​

Feds paid $231M for ventilators that mostly became scrap metal: Report

Records show taxpayers had to foot the bill for about $231.7 million worth of Quebec-made ventilators that later became scrap metal.

torontosun.com

​

​

Now, 5 years later, we have politicians talking about how this "lifesaving equipment" was withheld from them, but failing to acknowledge that they wasted HUNDREDS OF MILLIONS OF TAXPAYER DOLLARS on "lifesaving equipment" that was never used and ultimately sold for scrap metal at way less than a penny for every dollar spent.

 

[Fantine]

Think how much could have been saved if there weren't so many who ignored health precautions because the president set a terrible example, ignored science, and held contagion fests despite the danger of large crowds.

 

[probinson]

Think how much could have been saved if there weren't so many who ignored health precautions because the president set a terrible example, ignored science, and held contagion fests despite the danger of large crowds.

The "heath precautions" you're referring to were not in any way scientific. We've known since 2007 from the Cochrane Review that masks are ineffective at preventing respiratory infections. Fauci admitted under oath that the six-foot social distancing rule "sort of just appeared". In fact, they asked Fauci if there had been any studies done on six-feet of social distancing. His response:

"Just an empiric decision that wasn't based on data or even data that could be accomplished. But I'm thinking hard as I'm talking to you. … I don't recall, like, a discussion of, ‘Now, it's going to be’ — it sort of just appeared, that 6 feet is going to be the distance."​

Lockdowns were a foolish, untested method that did nothing to slow the spread and came with immense collateral damage.

One of the great mysteries of the pandemic is why so many countries followed China’s example. In the U.S. and the U.K. especially, lockdowns went from being regarded as something that only an authoritarian government would attempt to an example of “following the science.” But there was never any science behind lockdowns — not a single study had ever been undertaken to measure their efficacy in stopping a pandemic. When you got right down to it, lockdowns were little more than a giant experiment.​

​

COVID Lockdowns Were a Giant Experiment. It Was a Failure.

A key lesson of the pandemic.

nymag.com

​

​

I don't know who think was "ignor[ing] science", but none of the "health precautions" that were mandated upon the whole of society had any scientific backing whatsoever.

Ventilators were no different. Early in the pandemic, there were doctors that were warning of the dangers of ventilation as a treatment for COVID. Yet they were ignored, censored, silenced, and canceled for their "contrarian" concerns. Perhaps if scientific discourse would have been permitted freely throughout COVID, we could have mitigated the impact and not wasted so much time and effort on ineffective measures and treatments.

But then we wouldn't have Pritzker talking about fealty over ventilators, which weren't needed in anywhere near the quantities we were told.

 

[probinson]

Also, I think we're being quite generous calling ventilators "lifesaving equipment" as it pertains to COVID. A paper published in JAMA early in the pandemic found that nearly 90% of COVID patients put on ventilators died.

Now five weeks into the crisis, a paper published in the journal JAMA about New York state’s largest health system suggests a reality that, like so much else about the novel coronavirus, confounds our early expectations.​

​

....​

​

A total of 1,151 patients required mechanical ventilators. Of the 320 for whom final outcomes are known (either death or discharge), 88 percent died. That compares with about 80 percent of patients who died on ventilators before the pandemic, according to previous studies — and with the death rate of about 50 percent that some critical-care doctors had optimistically hoped for when the first cases were diagnosed.​

​

https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2020/04/22/coronavirus-ventilators-survival/

​

 

[Pommer]

Also, I think we're being quite generous calling ventilators "lifesaving equipment" as it pertains to COVID. A paper published in JAMA early in the pandemic found that nearly 90% of COVID patients put on ventilators died.

Now five weeks into the crisis, a paper published in the journal JAMA about New York state’s largest health system suggests a reality that, like so much else about the novel coronavirus, confounds our early expectations.​

​

....​

​

A total of 1,151 patients required mechanical ventilators. Of the 320 for whom final outcomes are known (either death or discharge), 88 percent died. That compares with about 80 percent of patients who died on ventilators before the pandemic, according to previous studies — and with the death rate of about 50 percent that some critical-care doctors had optimistically hoped for when the first cases were diagnosed.​

​

https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2020/04/22/coronavirus-ventilators-survival/

​

Dealing with a novel virus means that tried-and-true methods of dealing with respiratory diseas might not be efficacious; they had a learning curve. But you know this, and made a point that is both moot and laughably arrogant.

 

[probinson]

Dealing with a novel virus means that tried-and-true methods of dealing with respiratory diseas might not be efficacious; they had a learning curve.

Baloney.

There were plenty of people warning that these measures would not be efficacious at the time, but they were censored. Also, I'd like to point out that the paper I quoted was done a mere 5 weeks into the pandemic. Yet we had people saying they needed this "lifesaving equipment" long after there was evidence that it was no such thing. And the foolishness resulted in ventilators being sold for less than a penny on the dollar to scrap dealers.

But you know this, and made a point that is both moot and laughably arrogant.

The arrogance was displayed by these who insisted that we "follow the science" and the useful idiots that propagated the non-scientific nonsense that was propagandized and shoved down our throats. The result was a decimation of the trust in public health entities, doctors, and ultimately, a decreased uptake in childhood vaccination rates.

Let's not pretend that we didn't know these things wouldn't work and that this would be the result. There were myriads of pandemic preparedness plans that were ignored. Here is just one that was published by the ACLU in 2008, 12 years before the pandemic.

Lessons from History​

​

American history contains vivid reminders that grafting the values of law enforcement and national security onto public health is both ineffective and dangerous. Too often, fears aroused by disease and epidemics have justified abuses of state power. Highly discriminatory and forcible vaccination and quarantine measures adopted in response to outbreaks of the plague and smallpox over the past century have consistently accelerated rather than slowed the spread of disease, while fomenting public distrust and, in some cases, riots.​

​

The lessons from history should be kept in mind whenever we are told by government officials that “tough,” liberty-limiting actions are needed to protect us from dangerous diseases. Specifically:​

​

• Coercion and brute force are rarely necessary. In fact they are generally counterproductive—they gratuitously breed public distrust and encourage the people who are most in need of care to evade public health authorities.​

​

• On the other hand, effective, preventive strategies that rely on voluntary participation do work. Simply put, people do not want to contract smallpox, influenza or other dangerous diseases. They want positive government help in avoiding and treating disease. As long as public officials are working to help people rather than to punish them, people are likely to engage willingly in any and all efforts to keep their families and communities healthy.​

​

• Minorities and other socially disadvantaged populations tend to bear the brunt of tough public health measures.​

​

https://www.aclu.org/sites/default/files/pdfs/privacy/pemic_report.pdf

As we know, the powers-that-be did not heed any of these lessons from history, and the results were entirely predictable as they were spelled out for us in this paper published more than 12 years before the pandemic.

 

[FreeinChrist]

Think how much could have been saved if there weren't so many who ignored health precautions because the president set a terrible example, ignored science, and held contagion fests despite the danger of large crowds.

The initial virus was very deadly. A friend of mine got it in April of 2020 and is stil on oxygen. It destroyed part of his lung. He was a very healthy person, no chronic condidtions. In the Detroit area, where I was during that time, folks were dying left and right in nursing homes and elsewhere. It was bad like in New York. My mother was in a senior center and I was staying with her, and we were quarrenteed to her apartment. Quite a few died in that time. The virus has mutated now.

The point of the OP is that when life-saving equipment was needed, Trump held back until he got fealty, like some dictator or king. That is parthetic.

 

[probinson]

The point of the OP is severely undermined by the fact that a paper published just 5 weeks into the pandemic demonstrated that nearly 90% of patients placed on ventilators died. This was nearly 10% HIGHER than the rate of around 80% prior to the pandemic, and FAR above the optimistic (or some might say, delusional) prediction of 50%. One must deny reality to pretend like this was "life-saving equipment", and this was known just a little over a month into the pandemic.

If scientific discourse were permitted at that time, perhaps this finding would have received more attention and we may have come to realize sooner the damage that ventilators were doing to people. But alas, the people that dared to speak out against this protocol were demonized and censored, and ventilators became just another politicized talking point for people who should have known better.

 

[FreeinChrist]

The point of the OP is severely undermined by the fact that a paper published just 5 weeks into the pandemic demonstrated that nearly 90% of patients placed on ventilators died. This was nearly 10% HIGHER than the rate of around 80% prior to the pandemic, and FAR above the optimistic (or some might say, delusional) prediction of 50%. One must deny reality to pretend like this was "life-saving equipment", and this was known just a little over a month into the pandemic.

If scientific discourse were permitted at that time, perhaps this finding would have received more attention and we may have come to realize sooner the damage that ventilators were doing to people. But alas, the people that dared to speak out against this protocol were demonized and censored, and ventilators became just another politicized talking point for people who should have known better.

The point of the OP is exactly what I wrote. I AM the OP.

Gov. Pritzker said that when he was trying to get more ventilators for hospitals, which did need them at the time, Trump insisted on fealty in order to send them to Illinois.

That was pathetic to the extreme.

 

[FreeinChrist]

Dealing with a novel virus means that tried-and-true methods of dealing with respiratory diseas might not be efficacious; they had a learning curve. But you know this, and made a point that is both moot and laughably arrogant.

Yep.

 

[probinson]

The point of the OP is exactly what I wrote. I AM the OP.

I know what the point of the OP is. It's a link to a highly partisan HuffPo article.

I said that the point of the OP is severely undermined by the fact that it was known that ventilators were highly ineffective as a treatment for COVID very early in the pandemic.

Gov. Pritzker said that when he was trying to get more ventilators for hospitals, which did need them at the time,

Why? So that a higher percentage of people placed on ventilators would die than before the pandemic? What exactly was the "need" there?

 

[probinson]

Yep.

So I'm curious, once there was evidence that ventilators were NOT efficacious (as demonstrated in the paper I linked that was published just 5 weeks into the pandemic), why did everyone continue asking for them and using them as a political football? Don't you think the smart thing to do would have been to look at the findings of that study and go, "Gee, these ventilators are causing MORE people to die than usual. Maybe we should rethink our protocols for treating patients"?

I'll grant a brief learning curve. But the bottom line is our health authorities completely and utterly failed to adapt to new evidence as it became available to them.

 

[FreeinChrist]

So I'm curious, once there was evidence that ventilators were NOT efficacious (as demonstrated in the paper I linked that was published just 5 weeks into the pandemic), why did everyone continue asking for them and using them as a political football? Don't you think the smart thing to do would have been to look at the findings of that study and go, "Gee, these ventilators are causing MORE people to die than usual. Maybe we should rethink our protocols for treating patients"?

I'll grant a brief learning curve. But the bottom line is our health authorities completely and utterly failed to adapt to new evidence as it became available to them.

The article does not exactly come to the same conclusion as you getting from it. A high percentage died because the initial infection and early variants were that bad. The patients would have died without ventilation. For many, the only chance they had to live was to put them on a ventilator and and to try to keep them alive. The increased death rate vs. more usual respiratory illness just shows how deadly the intial infection was.

Have you personally ever taken care of a patient with fulminating pnuemonia? Tried to keep their airway clear? You know when the patient gets on a ventilator that will still be a huge fight to keep the airway clear and keep them alive, but to not put them on it was to sentence them to death for sure. I have. We won many, but didn't win others. Sometimes the disease is just that bad.

To get back to the topic of the OP: Asking for fealty to get needed health equipment is absolutely pathetic.

 

[probinson]

The article does not exactly come to the same conclusion as you getting from it. A high percentage died because the initial infection and early variants were that bad. The patients would have died without ventilation.

Nearly 90% of them died WITH ventilation. When it became clear that their predicted survival rate of 50% with ventilation was noting but a pipe dream and the unexpected result was that the mortality rate was HIGHER than usual, what did they do to pivot? Anything? Because from what I recall, they just kept intubating people and blaming the Trump administration for not having enough ventilators (that would ultimately end up as scrap metal).

For many, the only chance they had to live was to put them on a ventilator and and to try to keep them alive. The increased death rate vs. more usual respiratory illness just shows how deadly the intial infection was.

Possibly. It could also show just how damaging ventilation was. There were doctors trying to warn of this in 2020. No one wanted to listen to them.

Have you personally ever taken care of a patient with fulminating pnuemonia? Tried to keep their airway clear? You know when the patient gets on a ventilator that will be a huge fight to keep the airway clear and keep them alive, but to not put them on it was to sentence them to death for sure.

The protocol for "treating" COVID was awful. Stay home. If you can't breathe, come to the hospital. Then we'll ventilate you and you'll have a slightly greater than 10% chance of survival. Some protocol.

Again, had we welcomed free and open scientific discourse, it's quite likely that we could have improved those treatment protocols and improved patient outcomes. But we'll never know, because the government and public health agencies thought they knew best and anyone who dared to question anything was censored or worse.

To get back to the topic of the OP: Asking for fealty to get needed health equipment is absolutely pathetic.

I'm just happy you've finally spelled the word "pathetic" correctly.

 

[Fantine]

So I'm curious, once there was evidence that ventilators were NOT efficacious (as demonstrated in the paper I linked that was published just 5 weeks into the pandemic), why did everyone continue asking for them and using them as a political football? Don't you think the smart thing to do would have been to look at the findings of that study and go, "Gee, these ventilators are causing MORE people to die than usual. Maybe we should rethink our protocols for treating patients"?

I'll grant a brief learning curve. But the bottom line is our health authorities completely and utterly failed to adapt to new evidence as it became available to them.

Perhaps President Trump would have had a faster "learning curve" if he had paid attention to our (soon-to-be-former, sigh) allies in Europe, whose contagion and death rates per capita were substantially lower than ours (ours, in case you've forgotten, were the highest in the developed world.)

And it was very hard for President Trump to acquire that "learning curve" when he listened to promoters of quack cures instead of the public health officials who had guided our country successfully through multiple health crises, including the HIV epidemic and Ebola--like Drs. Fauci and Birx,

 

[probinson]

Perhaps President Trump would have had a faster "learning curve" if he had paid attention to our (soon-to-be-former, sigh) allies in Europe, whose contagion and death rates per capita were substantially lower than ours (ours, in case you've forgotten, were the highest in the developed world.)

Have you tracked excess mortality in those places? You maybe should. I often said throughout the pandemic that we weren't "saving lives" but that we were trading them to other causes. I know that there was a myopic focus on COVID, but people die from other causes. People in nursing homes literally died from loneliness. What a cruel imposition on someone at the end of their life all in the name of "protecting" them.

And it was very hard for President Trump to acquire that "learning curve" when he listened to promoters of quack cures instead of the public health officials who had guided our country successfully through multiple health crises, including the HIV epidemic and Ebola--like Drs. Fauci and Birx,

Fauci, who did such a great job that Biden had to grant him a pardon dating back to January 2014, around the same time that he was funding the risky research in Wuhan that almost certainly led to the creation of SARS-CoV2. Even the NYT now admits that we were "badly misled" (without acknowledging that they were tacit in the misleading).

Yet in 2020, when people started speculating that a laboratory accident might have been the spark that started the COVID-19 pandemic, they were treated like kooks and cranks. Many public health officials and prominent scientists dismissed the idea as a conspiracy theory, insisting that the virus had emerged from animals in a seafood market in Wuhan, China. And when a nonprofit called EcoHealth Alliance lost a grant because it was planning to conduct risky research into bat viruses with the Wuhan Institute of Virology — research that, if conducted with lax safety standards, could have resulted in a dangerous pathogen leaking out into the world — no fewer than 77 Nobel laureates and 31 scientific societies lined up to defend the organization.​

​

So the Wuhan research was totally safe, and the pandemic was definitely caused by natural transmission — it certainly seemed like consensus.​

​

We have since learned, however, that to promote the appearance of consensus, some officials and scientists hid or understated crucial facts, misled at least one reporter, orchestrated campaigns of supposedly independent voices and even compared notes about how to hide their communications in order to keep the public from hearing the whole story. And as for that Wuhan laboratory’s research, the details that have since emerged show that safety precautions might have been terrifyingly lax.​

​

Opinion | We Were Badly Misled About the Event That Changed Our Lives

Five years after the start of Covid, we still don’t know the truth.

www.nytimes.com

​

 

[FreeinChrist]

Nearly 90% of them died WITH ventilation. When it became clear that their predicted survival rate of 50% with ventilation was noting but a pipe dream and the unexpected result was that the mortality rate was HIGHER than usual, what did they do to pivot? Anything? Because from what I recall, they just kept intubating people and blaming the Trump administration for not having enough ventilators (that would ultimately end up as scrap metal).



Possibly. It could also show just how damaging ventilation was. There were doctors trying to warn of this in 2020. No one wanted to listen to them.

[/QUOTE]
No, not really. Are you a medical doctor?

The protocol for "treating" COVID was awful. Stay home. If you can't breathe, come to the hospital. Then we'll ventilate you and you'll have a slightly greater than 10% chance of survival. Some protocol.

Again, had we welcomed free and open scientific discourse, it's quite likely that we could have improved those treatment protocols and improved patient outcomes. But we'll never know, because the government and public health agencies thought they knew best and anyone who dared to question anything was censored or worse.

Again, no. Initial treatment was the best that could be done at that time. The virus was really bad.

I'm just happy you've finally spelled the word "pathetic" correctly.

I am glad I made you happy.

I will share something I tend not to share. When I was younger, I could type 70 words/min with greater than 95% accuracy and aced typing classes. But about 15 years later, I was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. In time, my typing, thanks to various relapses, really deteriorated. It takes me a prolonged amount of time now with many errors that need to be corrected because of spasticity or because some fingers get weak while others do not. It is one of the reasons l quote articles.

So thanks for commenting on my mispelling of pathetic. Hopefully it was not because you wanted to insult me or mock me. It is not Christlike to mock the disabled.

 

[probinson]

No, not really. Are you a medical doctor?

No.

Do you think you need to be a medical doctor to question someone that tells you they expect an efficacy of 50% when the efficacy is really 10%?

Again, no. Initial treatment was the best that could be done at that time.

It absolutely was not.

The virus was really bad.

I know you believe that with all of your heart. But the fact of the matter is, there was no scientific discourse. There was an approved protocol that was not to be questioned. Everything else was deemed "misinformation".

I am glad I made you happy.

I will share something I tend not to share. When I was younger, I could type 70 words/min with greater than 95% accuracy and aced typing classes. But about 15 years later, I was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. In time, my typing, thanks to various relapses, really deteriorated. It takes me a prolonged amount of time now with many errors that need to be corrected because of spasticity or because some fingers get weak while others do not. It is one of the reasons l quote articles.

So thanks for commenting on my mispelling of pathetic. Hopefully it was not because you wanted to insult me or mock me. It is not Christlike to mock the disabled.

I am genuinely sorry to hear of your struggles.

Now I'll share something that I don't share often. I am incredibly pedantic. Misspellings and improper grammar genuinely irritate me. I have an app that I use daily called "Elevate" that helps me "train" to make sure I'm using proper figures of speech, proper phrasing and proper spelling. It is something I strive to be excellent at. That's why occasionally you'll see posts that are edited by me long after I posted them. It's usually not because I am changing anything I wrote but because I find a grammatical or spelling error that I absolutely must fix.