Sen. Mitt Romney, R-Utah, claimed this week that President Donald Trump’s rhetoric about the coronavirus pandemic has been a “great human tragedy.”
“This hasn’t been the focus of his rhetoric apparently and I think it’s a great human tragedy,” says Sen. Mitt Romney of Trump’s approach to the Covid-19 pandemic.
“The extraordinary loss of life is heartbreaking… From Washington, we have not had a constant, consistent plan.” pic.twitter.com/pmHsJjykxw
— CNN (@CNN) December 4, 2020
Instead of focusing on the spread of the virus, Trump has spent his time pursuing lawsuits in several states in an attempt to overturn the results of the presidential election, Romney told CNN.
“The extraordinary loss of life is heartbreaking, and in some respects unnecessary,” Romney said. “This hasn’t been the focus of his rhetoric, apparently, and I think it’s a great human tragedy, without question.”
Romney urged Americans to continue obeying their states’ coronavirus restrictions.
“Not all respects, but we’ve relaxed our standards as individuals,” he said.
“Some states haven’t had mask mandates,” he continued. “And from Washington we have not had a constant, consistent plan and plea for people to wear masks, to social-distance, to take all the measures that would reduce the spread of this disease.”
It is unfortunate that public health recommendations like mask-wearing have become “political,” Romney added.
“This is public health, and unfortunately we have not made that message clear enough to the American people, and people are dying because of it,” the senator said.
Romney even agreed with CNN host Wolf Blitzer that Republican governors are to blame for not taking the coronavirus as seriously as they should.
“No question, unless you take this very, very seriously and communicate that this is not a political matter, this is not a matter of liberty, this is a matter of safety and public health,” Romney responded.
“And we have people who are very, very sick, many people in the hospital,” he continued. “We have people who have died and are dying. It’s unacceptable.”
Anti-Trumpists like Romney have sought to use the virus as a political bludgeon against Trump since shortly after their impeachment efforts failed in the Senate in February.
In March, even before the World Health Organization had declared the coronavirus to be a global health emergency, Democrats already were drafting bills to loosen election regulations and increase mail-in balloting under the auspices of the pandemic.
Much of the vote-fraud evidence that has been collected since the Nov. 3 election relates to the massive troves of suspicious absentee ballots that resulted, as well as state executives’ decisions to violate election law by implementing their own “emergency” fiats.
Much of the early response to the virus, including controversial lockdown mandates, was based on flawed scientific models and uncertainty surrounding the prospects and timeline for a vaccine.
However, due largely to Trump’s efforts to address the crisis by partnering with private enterprises, there are now multiple vaccines in the work.
Despite early projections of more than 2 million US casualties, the number has been a small fraction of that.
The recovery rate, meanwhile, has increased steadily; and the mortality rate—both in the US and globally—has dropped to well below 3 percent of those who contract the virus.
Many of the most vulnerable high-risk victims come from elderly and minority populations. However, Democrat governors have forcibly co-mingled healthy and infected nursing-home residents.
They likewise have encouraged minorities to engage in high-risk mass gatherings both during long-running race-riots to protest on behalf of social justice, and in celebrations following Democrat presidential candidate Joe Biden’s premature declaration of victory.
Headline USA’s Ben Sellers contributed to this report.
