Rachel Maddow called out Donald Trump and Mike Pence on Thursday for straight up lying to the American people by claiming that medical masks are widely available for doctors and nurses on the front lines of the coronavirus pandemic.
“The vice president today at the White House and the president both gave a very cheery presentation about how millions of masks are available,” the MSNBC host said. “Everything’s fine with the masks. Yeah, millions of masks coming online.”
“Yeah, ask at the hospitals,” she said.
Maddow gave a rundown of how medical professionals all across the country are being forced to use tainted or expired masks while treating patients, all as the Trump administration says there’s no problem at all, nothing to see here.
Video:
Maddow said:
The vice president today at the White House and the president both gave a very cheery presentation about how millions of masks are available. Everything’s fine with the masks. Yeah, millions of masks coming online. Yeah, ask at the hospitals. Here’s the headline in the New York Times tonight. Quote, it feels like a war zone. Doctors and nurses plead for masks on social media. Quote, as supplies have dwindled, doctors and nurses have improvised ways to make their stock last. An intensive care nurse in Illinois was told to make a single-use mask last for five days. An emergency room doctor in California said her colleagues had started storing dirty masks in plastic containers to use again later with different patients. A pediatrician in Washington state trying to make her small stock last has been spraying each mask with alcohol after use until the masks break down. Here’s a second story on the same fricking problem. Doctors and nurses plead for masks and other equipment. Quote, the open cities community health center in St. Paul, Minnesota, is considering shutting its doors because of a dwindling supply of face masks. Doctors at Barnes Jewish Hospital in St. Louis have been forced to perform invasive procedures with loose-fitting surgical masks rather than the tight respirator masks recommended by health agencies. At one Los Angeles emergency room, doctors examining a suspected coronavirus patient were given a box of expired masks. When they tried to secure them to their faces, the elastic bands snapped. With cases soaring, doctors, nurses and other front-line medical workers across the U.S. are confronting a dire shortage of masks, surgical gowns and eye gear to protect them from the virus. At a White House briefing today, President Trump said millions of masks were in production and that the federal government had made efforts to address the shortages but he said that it was largely up to governors to deal with the problem.
In times of crisis, the American people deserve a president who will be honest with them about the challenges facing the country. After all, if you can’t truthfully diagnose a problem, you’ll never be able to fix it.
At every turn throughout this global health emergency, Donald Trump has sought to cover up the truth for his own personal benefit, whether it was downplaying the outbreak last month or gaslighting the country about medical masks earlier today.
With a dishonest and incompetent president of the United States at the helm, the American people are flying completely blind through this crisis.
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