Misleading Report Says Trump Responsible For 40% Of COVID Deaths

A report from this past week says that Donald Trump's actions could be attributed to about 40% of the total number of COVID deaths. While there is no doubt that his rampant incompetence led to more death, the study is actually based on the overall number of "unnecessary deaths" in the United States compared to other nations EACH YEAR. The real villain is our healthcare system, as Farron Cousins explains.

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*This transcript was auto-generated. Please excuse any typos.

A very misleading report came out, uh, this past week that I feel definitely deserves a little bit of clarification here. And here it is, here's a headline. This is from Newsweek it and the headline reads, uh, 40% of us COVID deaths could have been averted if it weren't for Trump colon report. So they're saying that this report says if it weren't for Donald Trump, specifically 40% of the people in this country, roughly who died of COVID would not have otherwise

Died.

And then immediately getting into the report. That's actually not quite what it says here it is. This was published by the way, the report in the Lancet on Thursday. And it says the U S saw 461,000 unnecessary deaths in 2018. When compared to the death rates of other G seven nations, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan in the United Kingdom, comparing the U S COVID-19 mortality rate to this peer group. The us would have seen 40% fewer deaths in 2020, if its mortality rate was comparable.

So

Even before the pandemic hit, though, the us had roughly 40% more unnecessary deaths as they call them then these other countries.

So

Of course it would stand to reason that our COVID death rate would be 40% higher because we die 40% more unnecessarily than these other groups. Now, look, there is no doubt about it. We all know that Donald Trump's incompetence led to unnecessary deaths due to COVID-19. I'm not arguing that fact at all. But what I am saying is that this report is not necessarily saying that Trump is, is the main villain here, because as it clearly says, even before the pandemic, our mortality raised about four 40% higher than these other countries. And one of these other countries have that we don't

Universal health care.

The real villain of this report is not Donald Trump. It is the United States healthcare system, because I can promise you even after we're over this pandemic, whenever that is, we're probably still gonna have a 40% higher mortality rate here in the United States because of our healthcare system, because of the pricing, because of the exclusions, because of the limited availability due to financial reasons, that's what this report is saying. And I know we all are always looking for a way to tie something back to Trump to make him look even worse than he already does, but sometimes it's not even necessary. Everybody knows he screwed up the pandemic response, but that is no reason to twist this report, to not implicate the us healthcare system until we hit the point as a country where we offer universal healthcare to every single person in this country with no costs at the point of service, until we hit that point, we are forever going to be behind the rest of the industrialized world that offers universal healthcare to their citizens. That is a fact reports like this are going to be common. We're going to have this throughout the Biden administration that Oh, 40% higher mortality, 30%, maybe, maybe it drops down to 20%, but it'll never be even because Americans cannot as a whole get the same kind of preventative care because of the cost restriction associated with it. That is what this report was really trying to tell us. It just did a really poor job of saying that.