‘They Took the Side of Covid’: Chris Hayes Rails Against Trump WH After Stunning Report Revealing Herd Immunity Strategy That Supercharged Pandemic
MSNBC’s Chris Hayes condemned the Trump administration’s deadly negligence over Covid-19 and called it out for exacerbating the pandemic, pointing to explosive, newly-released White House memos that openly encouraged a do-nothing, “herd immunity” approach.
On Wednesday, Politico obtained email records from a top HHS official, Paul Alexander, that repeatedly pressed for a “herd immunity” strategy that would encourage the spread of the coronavirus, urging as a policy perspective that “we want them infected.”
“It’s a strategy we have seen unfold before our eyes. We’ve talked about it here on the show,” Hayes said t the outset of his show. “It’s been apparent to all of us reporting on this and watching. We now have the smoking gun evidence, e-mails obtained by Politico, in which the very people at the center of this say what exactly they were doing. That they wanted people to get the virus.”
Pointing out the ongoing death toll under President Donald Trump’s watch, Hayes noted that another 3,400 Americans died on Wednesday, a new single-day record.
Our daily update is published. States reported 1.8 million tests, 231k cases, and a record 3,400 deaths. There are 113,069 people currently hospitalized with COVID-19, a new record for hospitalizations. pic.twitter.com/UBkhbQa909
— The COVID Tracking Project (@COVID19Tracking) December 17, 2020
“The thing to understand about that is it is not an accident and it is not bungling,” Hayes insistsed. “Donald Trump, his administration as backed by Republicans in his party, in Congress, explicitly pursued a strategy that would lead to more Americans getting sick and more Americans dying, and they did this despite the fact they kept denying they were pursuing the so-called herd immunity approach. It was always clear they were.”
“They took the side of Covid. They had the same aims as the virus,” Hayes added. “Through a combination of idiocy and cynicism they thought that path aligning with the virus to infect as many people as possible would be best for Donald Trump’s re-election. And the deliberate, intentional decisions that Donald Trump, Alexander and [HHS spokesperson Michael] Caputo and all of them took have gotten tens probably actually hundreds of thousands of Americans killed unnecessarily. We are now 35 days from the end of the administration. We lost 3,400 people today and more we’ll lose tomorrow and the day after. We are at the beginning of writing the history of Donald Trump’s stewardship of this pandemic. And the epithet scrawled across this era should be those four words: ‘We want them infected.'”
Watch the video above, via MSNBC.
