There is a time and a place for political bickering, but up to your neck in a global pandemic is not it.
Right now, America is on pause. We’re holding. We’ve pushed the proverbial snooze button for the month of April, in order to stave a nasty viral disaster that has already killed more Americans than 9/11.
Americans across the nation are coming together, figuratively at least, in order to keep everyone fed and housed until this thing blows over.
On Capitol Hill however, tempers were still flaring.
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) said during a live Q&A on Wednesday that President Trump is displaying an “epic level of negligence and incompetence that is costing human lives” during the coronavirus pandemic and suggested that people are dying because the president ignored scientists.
Ocasio-Cortez took questions from social media users on Wednesday and used the opportunity to criticize the Trump administration’s response to the pandemic. The outbreak in the United States, she seems to believe, would not be as severe if Trump and Republicans took it seriously and listened to scientists.
“Someone said, ‘Do you think if we took precautions earlier than we did our numbers would be lower than it is now?’ Yes,” Ocasio-Cortez answered.
She explained:
“I think that if Trump took this seriously, if Republicans took it seriously, I think that if if we decided to listen to scientists early more than we listen to, you know, people who care more about profit than human lives, we would have taken precautions much earlier and we would have saved lives. We either would have gone into lockdown earlier in some circumstances or we would have started producing these damn ventilators way earlier than we are now. We would have invoked the Defense Production Act, but because Trump didn’t do that early enough, now we’re scrambling. And everything that is happening is happening late. And every decision that we make late means that people are dying unnecessarily.”
Of course, it should be noted that the partisan bickering led by Ocasio-Cortez certainly isn’t expediting anything.
