Full Event Video HERE
During a press call this morning, Wisconsin Lt. Governor Mandela Barnes, Arizona State Representative Athena Salman, Yale’s Dr. Howard Forman, and Columbia’s Dr. Angela Rasmussen called on Donald Trump to cancel his mask-free super-spreader rallies as states are grappling with new outbreaks and record numbers of coronavirus cases. On the call, experts pointed to how Trump’s actions are so blatantly harmful to public health that his own White House Coronavirus Task Force recommends against holding these rallies.
The event highlighted Trump’s willingness to endanger even his own supporters and their communities to achieve some perceived political advantage. Local officials and public health experts have openly warned the president of the dangers posed by the rallies amid surging cases, but Donald Trump wants only to participate in political pageantry at the expense of public health.
Event Video Available Here
“What we see is the Trump administration is letting this happen, unfortunately, by doing nothing serious to combat the virus. And on the other hand, we have the Trump campaign that’s absolutely making things worse,” said Wisconsin Lt. Governor Mandela Barnes. “We see these super-spreader rallies in some of the worst COVID hotspots in the country – Wisconsin, to name one specifically as you just did. He had a rally in Janesville, where 1 in 138 people in Rock County are actively battling COVID-19. This is an area, much like many other parts of the state that are dealing with, or that is currently dealing with the devastating impacts of COVID-19. We’ve seen medical experts who call for Donald Trump to cancel the rally, but of course he doesn’t listen to science, he doesn’t listen to medical experts.”
“In Arizona, we have, already, an 8.6% positivity rate. We are trending poorly. This is before Donald Trump, coming to do these superspreader rallies in Prescott and in Tucson today,” said Arizona State Representative Athena Salman. “We are one of the states, for several months, we had the highest cases per capita in the country for June and July. And much of it has to do with this Administration. You lead by example. Unfortunately, this administration has been leading by a very poor, a very dangerous, and, ultimately, a deadly example. So we are nearing now, in Arizona, we are nearing 6,000 deaths. Those are 6,000 Arizonans who lost their lives too soon because this President, this Administration, has failed the American public to protect us and ensure that people are healthy and safe.”
“These rallies are based on a faulty premise. They are based on the idea that because President Trump has said so, that these are not dangerous activities. President Trump, especially after contracting the coronavirus himself, has dismissed the severity of disease; has said that basically it doesn’t kill that many people, even though over 200,000 Americans are now dead from this virus,” said Columbia University virologist Dr. Angela Rasmussen. “It is just terrible and irresponsible and a dereliction of his duty for President Trump to be putting American citizens in a position where they could contract this coronavirus, and these rallies are very high risk events.”
“These super-spreader events are bad on two different levels. One is that we are harming people that are attending them. Many of these people are doing so by their own free will, but unconsciously or consciously, they are doing so in order to prove that the President must be right and walking away infected in many cases and spreading it into their communities,” said Yale University public health expert Dr. Howard Forman. “And the second reason why this is so horrible is that we count on our president to model the best behavior. And even in more traditional times, we would count on just ‘good behavior’ but in this situation the President has a responsibility and ability to lead by example, and he is choosing not to.”