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Once A F*Ck Up Always F*Cked-Up…
Time and time again, Pence dutifully implemented Trump’s disastrous COVID-19 agenda.  “The American people have witnessed what is the greatest failure of any presidential administration in the history of our country,” Kamala Harris said, referring to T-RUMP and Pence’s approach to Covid-19.

Starting in February, Pence was made the head of the White House’s coronavirus task force, which was charged with coordinating the federal response to the pandemic on a day-to-day basis. This put Pence in a leadership position for everything dealing with the coronavirus: testing, scaling up production and distribution of protective equipment, creating public health guidelines, spurring production of a vaccine, and so on — none of which, save the potential future success of a vaccine, went well.

Pence And The Task Force Still Answered To President Donald T-Rump… 
As Pence’s chief of staff, Marc Short, said upon Pence’s appointment: “He is uniquely qualified for this because of his close relationship to the president. Basically there’s no confusion that the president’s in charge.”

It was an admission that Pence would be a yes-man, spearheading and implementing Trump’s Covid-19 agenda — an agenda that has focused on downplaying the pandemic and urging the country to reopen rather than containing a disease that’s so far killed more than 210,000 Americans.

Pence is “basically just a parrot for the president,” Céline Gounder, an epidemiologist at New York University and CNN medical analyst, told me. “He just comes across as a more sane adult.”

At first, Pence’s position put him at the forefront of the Trump administration’s botched rollout of coronavirus tests. The White House effectively punted the issue down to the states and private sector, calling the federal government merely “a supplier of last resort” — which the New York Times described as “perhaps one of the greatest failures of presidential leadership in generations.”

Pence claimed “any American could be tested” in March only to acknowledge days later that “we don’t have enough tests today to meet what we anticipate will be the demand going forward.” The US struggled for months to build up testing — it still doesn’t have enough, many experts argue — and Pence was often the public face of that failure, like when he had to call governors to talk them down from fiercely criticizing the administration.

Reopening Schools…
As the epidemic continued, Pence’s positions were often an echo of Trump’s. When Trump pushed for places to reopen quickly, Pence called on states to implement phased reopening plans. When Trump denied coronavirus cases were spiking over the summer, Pence said the rise was a result of more testing and wrote an op-ed titled “There Isn’t a Coronavirus ‘Second Wave’” — an argument that was proven wrong within weeks. As T-RUMP attempted to bend public health agencies like the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to do his political bidding,  Pence’s staff led the push to get the CDC to loosen its guidelines for reopening schools.

The Bottom Line…
The results speak for themselves. More than 254,000 people have died from Covid-19 so far in the US — the highest death toll in the world. Among developed countries, the US has the fourth-highest death rate relative to its population, with America recently surpassing everyone,  Americans continue dying of the COVID-19 each day.

But Pence closely tied himself to Trump’s response, as the chair of the White House task force and a constant advocate for the president. So far, Pence hasn’t publicly criticized the administration’s response to Covid-19 once — but he has defended it plenty as one of the administration’s leaders on this issue.

He is as close to this mess as anyone but T-RUMP can get. This is true as many feel he kisses T-RUMPS fat ass twice daily as a sign of  devotion and his remarks like “ under the leadership of our great and wonderful compassionate leader  Donald T-RUMP we are winning the war”.   In forty nine of the fifty states this caused severe vomiting and diarrhea.

Wrong Turns  —  Trump’s failures on Covid-19 are now well-known. 

• He’s called for states to reopen quickly despite experts’ warnings. 
• He’s pushed for less testing. 
• He’s mocked masks and often refused to wear one — even after falling sick with the virus himself. 
• And even as he deals with his own case of Covid-19, he’s continued to downplay the virus.
• Doing everything in his power to push a message that America is back to normal in order to boost his reelection chances.
• The White House’s task force — led by the vice president. T-RUMP summarized the setup at the time of Pence’s appointment: “Mike is going to be in charge, and Mike will report back to me.”
• As the COVID-19 became a more prominent threat in the US over February, and as the country struggled to build up testing in what experts now call a “lost month,” the T-RUMP administration scrambled to right its response. 
  
  

T-RUMP Had Help…  Pence is an Accomplice not a Vice President…

• The White House put Pence in charge of fixing the mess. So the President had someone to blame.
• SIDEBAR:  It’s not clear why, given Pence’s bad record on public health issues. 
  • When he was governor of Indiana, parts of the state saw spikes in HIV cases, largely because Pence refused to allow needle exchanges — a public health intervention with decades of evidence behind it — in the state. 
  • The epidemic only subsided once Pence, under public and expert pressure, eventually gave in and allowed needle exchanges.
  • Before that, in 2001, Pence wrote an op-ed claiming that, “ Smoking doesn’t kill” — flouting the decades of scientific evidence proving otherwise.
  • One of Pence’s first tasks on the coronavirus task force was to muzzle officials that contradicted Trump’s positive spin. For much of February, T-RUMP claimed that the US had kept the COVID-19 under control and even said at one point that it would soon disappear “like a miracle.”
    
    
• But a CDC official, Nancy Messonnier, on February 25 contradicted Trump’s magical thinking, telling reporters that Americans should prepare for community spread of the COVID-19  social distancing, and the possibility that “disruption to everyday life might be severe.”
• “It’s not a question of if this will happen but when this will happen and how many people in this country will have severe illnesses,” Nancy Messonnier, the director of the CDC’s National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases, said on Feb. 25. 
• According to the Journal, Trump was angry with Messonnier after her statement resulted in a dip in the stock market. The same day, Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar said the virus was “contained” in the US.
• The next day T-RUMP repeatedly said he did not think an outbreak was “inevitable” and appointed Vice President Pence as the head of the administration’s coronavirus task force.
• Democrats have speculated that Trump was unhappy with Messonnier, who has not appeared at White House briefings since February. Ron Klain, a former aide for former Vice President Joe Biden who served as former President Obama’s Ebola czar in 2014, said Messonnier faced “ mmediate blowback" for sounding the alarm about the coronavirus. 
•  It was the right call, as we now know, but the negative outlook reportedly angered Trump.

Bullsh*t  Plus an Ass-kissing Sycophant  Equals Death

• Two days later, the New York Times reported, the White House moved to take control of public messaging on the COVID-19  requiring federal public health officials and scientists to “coordinate all statements and public appearances with the office of Vice President Mike Pence.” 
• From then on, the bulk of federal communication came from the White House press conferences, which spanned from genuinely helpful advice by officials like Anthony Fauci to T-RUMP musing about injecting bleach as a Covid-19 treatment.
• The dynamic — T-RUMP pushing for something and Pence or his task force making it happen — has continued throughout the pandemic.
• As the summer’s coronavirus surge began, Trump and his administration pushed back on the possibility of a spike, arguing that any increase was an artifact of more tests picking up more cases. Pence put that into writing in his op-ed denying a “second wave,” boasting that Covid-19 cases and deaths were in decline across the US in “a testament to the leadership of President T-RUMP.”  Unfortunately more vomiting and diarrhea…
• Within days, it was clear that Covid-19 cases were rising. Within weeks, the US hit records for daily new COVID-19 cases as new outbreaks popped up in Southern and Western states, particularly, Arizona, Florida, and Texas, and eventually the rest of the country.
• Even with these outbreaks in the background, Trump continued his demands that states reopen quickly. That included schools, with T-RUMP publicly criticizing the CDC’s guidance on schools as “very tough” and “expensive.” 
• Once again, Pence dutifully implemented what Trump asked for: As the Times reported, Pence’s staff, including his chief of staff, pressured the CDC to relax its guidelines. The agency eventually gave in.
• In a similar scenario, Trump said he told his people to “slow the testing down, please,” because, in his view, more tests made the US look bad. It’s unclear how personally involved Pence was in this, but, at least under his watch, the White House task force pushed the CDC to in effect recommend less testing: 
• The agency no longer said people without symptoms should get tested if they come into close contact with someone known to have Covid-19. The CDC later reversed course — once again recommending testing for people without symptoms — after experts nearly universally condemned the politically motivated change.
• On masks, Pence has similarly imitated T-RUMP  refusing to wear masks at meetings and campaign events, including those in states where masks are supposed to be mandatory under the law.

America’s coronavirus epidemic could still get worse

• The result of Trump and Pence’s leadership: The US leads the world in Covid-19 deaths. If you control for population, the country is still among the worst: The US is now in the top 15 percent for Covid-19 deaths per capita among developed nations, with seven times the death rate as the median wealthy country. If the US had the same Covid-19 death rate as Canada, more than 125,000 more Americans would likely be alive today.
• To make matters worse, the US is still extremely vulnerable to the coronavirus — something underlined by Trump’s infection, confirmed last week. (Pence has so far avoided the same fate, testing negative multiple times.)
• Experts also warn that the US should brace itself for a potential surge of the virus this fall and winter. School reopenings are already leading to some large outbreaks, particularly in colleges and universities. 
• The cold in northern parts of the country will push people inside, where the virus has an easier time spreading than it does outdoors. Friends and family will likely come together for holidays such as Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Year’s Eve. On top of all that, another flu season may be around the corner.
• Despite this, the Trump administration hasn’t shown a willingness to change its approach. Even after Trump got sick with Covid-19, he and his staff have continued pushing the idea that everything is fine — with Trump tweeting, “Don’t be afraid of Covid. Don’t let it dominate your life.” 
• Pence has also downplayed the need for stricter measures, down to plexiglass at the vice presidential debate, as the White House does everything it can to avoid reminding people that the COVID-19 is still very much around.
• It’s this record, one in which Pence consistently stuck with Trump’s botched response, that followed the vice president and also to be charged eventually with Negligent Homocide….