After hundreds of thousands of deaths, Rep. Don 'Beer Virus' Young doesn't get it

Rep. Don Young said he would give the Trump administration a grade of B or B plus for its handling of the COVID-19 pandemic that has so far killed about 300,000 people in the United States, sickened many millions of others and devastated the economy.

But consider the source—a lifelong government employee and opponent of government employees who thinks that being uninformed and unable to use a computer are among his strengths. He told Alaskans in March that they had nothing to worry about from the virus.

“This beer virus I call it, the coronavirus, I call it the beer virus, I thought you’d like that,” Young boasted to senior citizens after fleeing Washington, D.C. so he could campaign in Alaska.

“And when you think about it how many flu epidemics we’ve had in America today? 169 cases. 169 cases. There’re going to be more, may be more. But I’d say the exciting part about if you just look even in China where this thing originated, it peaked and it’s going down. It will happen here in the United States,” said Young, the oldest man in Congress.

Young had skipped a vote on COVID-19 relief in Congress so he could campaign. He said the measure he wasn’t in Washington to vote on was a “dumb bill” packed with socialist items he opposed.

Last month Young falsely claimed on Talk of Alaska that the COVID-19 pandemic had become “serious” only after his “beer virus” speech.

He also claimed that the media misrepresented his beer virus speech. “Everybody took it the wrong way other than the audience didn’t. But the media did. So I’m not asking for excuses, I’m just saying times change.”

Young has never taken responsibility for his words or admitted that he didn’t know what he was talking about. He still doesn’t know what he is talking about. Or that he is part of the problem,

Young, the Trump administration, the U.S. Senate and many others failed the nation with an incompetent response to the pandemic.

Rather than listen to the uninformed Young, heed the advice of the New England Journal of Medicine, published Oct. 8.

“This crisis has produced a test of leadership. With no good options to combat a novel pathogen, countries were forced to make hard choices about how to respond. Here in the United States, our leaders have failed that test. They have taken a crisis and turned it into a tragedy.”

“The magnitude of this failure is astonishing. According to the Johns Hopkins Center for Systems Science and Engineering, the United States leads the world in Covid-19 cases and in deaths due to the disease, far exceeding the numbers in much larger countries, such as China. The death rate in this country is more than double that of Canada, exceeds that of Japan, a country with a vulnerable and elderly population, by a factor of almost 50, and even dwarfs the rates in lower-middle-income countries, such as Vietnam, by a factor of almost 2000. Covid-19 is an overwhelming challenge, and many factors contribute to its severity. But the one we can control is how we behave. And in the United States we have consistently behaved poorly.”

“Why has the United States handled this pandemic so badly? We have failed at almost every step. We had ample warning, but when the disease first arrived, we were incapable of testing effectively and couldn’t provide even the most basic personal protective equipment to health care workers and the general public. And we continue to be way behind the curve in testing. While the absolute numbers of tests have increased substantially, the more useful metric is the number of tests performed per infected person, a rate that puts us far down the international list, below such places as Kazakhstan, Zimbabwe, and Ethiopia, countries that cannot boast the biomedical infrastructure or the manufacturing capacity that we have. Moreover, a lack of emphasis on developing capacity has meant that U.S. test results are often long delayed, rendering the results useless for disease control.”

“The response of our nation’s leaders has been consistently inadequate. The federal government has largely abandoned disease control to the states. Governors have varied in their responses, not so much by party as by competence. But whatever their competence, governors do not have the tools that Washington controls. Instead of using those tools, the federal government has undermined them. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which was the world’s leading disease response organization, has been eviscerated and has suffered dramatic testing and policy failures. The National Institutes of Health have played a key role in vaccine development but have been excluded from much crucial government decision making. And the Food and Drug Administration has been shamefully politicized, appearing to respond to pressure from the administration rather than scientific evidence. Our current leaders have undercut trust in science and in government, causing damage that will certainly outlast them. Instead of relying on expertise, the administration has turned to uninformed ‘opinion leaders’ and charlatans who obscure the truth and facilitate the promulgation of outright lies.”

“:Anyone else who recklessly squandered lives and money in this way would be suffering legal consequences. Our leaders have largely claimed immunity for their actions. But this election gives us the power to render judgment. Reasonable people will certainly disagree about the many political positions taken by candidates. But truth is neither liberal nor conservative. When it comes to the response to the largest public health crisis of our time, our current political leaders have demonstrated that they are dangerously incompetent. We should not abet them and enable the deaths of thousands more Americans by allowing them to keep their jobs.”

Don Young, who denies the Trump failure and continues to spread nonsense, has demonstrated once again that he is dangerously incompetent.