President Donald Trump’s stumbling and fumbling through the coronavirus crisis has resulted in a strong condemnation from a leading medical journal, which also called for his removal from office.

A death toll of 87,000 would have been enough for any past president to resign or decline to seek a second term. But Trump has no such shame even though his reckless and incompetent response to the pandemic is what got our country into this deadly mess.

Healthcare experts across the country have criticized Trump’s terrible response to the virus, but now a medical journal known as The Lancet is outright condemning him and calling upon Americans to oust him in November.

The Lancet medical journal is highly esteemed, so the following editorial certainly carries much weight.

“The COVID-19 pandemic continues to worsen in the USA with 1.3 million cases and an estimated death toll of 80 684 as of May 12,” the editorial began. “States that were initially the hardest hit, such as New York and New Jersey, have decelerated the rate of infections and deaths after the implementation of 2 months of lockdown. However, the emergence of new outbreaks in Minnesota, where the stay-at-home order is set to lift in mid-May, and Iowa, which did not enact any restrictions on movement or commerce, has prompted pointed new questions about the inconsistent and incoherent national response to the COVID-19 crisis. The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the flagship agency for the nation’s public health, has seen its role minimized and become an ineffective and nominal adviser in the response to contain the spread of the virus.”

The editorial pointed out that Trump failed to properly staff the CDC, disbanded the Pandemic Response team, and removed a CDC staffer from China who could have warned the United States sooner about the virus.

“The Trump administration further chipped away at the CDC’s capacity to combat infectious diseases. CDC staff in China were cut back with the last remaining CDC officer recalled home from the China CDC in July, 2019, leaving an intelligence vacuum when COVID-19 began to emerge,” the editorial said.

The medical journal also slammed Trump for being “obsessed with magic bullets—vaccines, new medicines, or a hope that the virus will simply disappear.”

It’s not often that a medical journal wades into the political realm, but this disaster is so bad that The Lancet called for Trump to be denied a second term.

“The Trump administration’s further erosion of the CDC will harm global cooperation in science and public health, as it is trying to do by defunding WHO,” the editorial concluded. “A strong CDC is needed to respond to public health threats, both domestic and international, and to help prevent the next inevitable pandemic. Americans must put a president in the White House come January, 2021, who will understand that public health should not be guided by partisan politics.”

Hopefully, the American people will do just that because our nation cannot survive another four years of Trump.

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