RUSH: Have you noticed, by the way, have you noticed that the Democrats and the media criticism of the Trump administration on coronavirus is starting to vanish? If you haven’t noticed that, pay special attention, because they’re starting to back off it. The Democrats, the media screaming about the government’s lack of response to the coronavirus, they’re backing off of this, and I’m gonna tell you why they’re backing off of it. They’re backing off of it because it’s not becoming the pandemic in this country that they were all expecting.
And I’ve got an audio sound bite here of a famous Democrat talking about what an opportunity the coronavirus is or was for the Democrats, for those of you who have doubted me about that.
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RUSH: The jobs report, the wage increases.Wages are up 3%. Job growth has just blown through all expectations for February. Unemployment is back down to 3.5%, 200-and-some-odd-thousand brand-new jobs, 273,000 new jobs, and the best anybody could say is (sniveling), “Well, that was before the coronavirus hit. What effect is the coronavirus gonna have?” You wait. The Democrats are backing off of this, because the way the Trump administration’s reacting to it is reasonable and intelligent, and they’re trying to talk down the panic about it.
They’re doing it. Trump was great last night in the town hall he had on the Fox News Channel.
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RUSH: I mentioned at the top of the program that I have noticed — and it’s abundantly clear — that the media and Democrats are really, really toning down their criticism of the Trump administration’s reaction in dealing with the coronavirus situation.
Now, there are reasons for this. There are substantive reasons for this. First among them is somebody woke up and realized that the Democrat Party was looking awful by attempting to politicize this because the Democrat Party was setting themselves up where they benefit if you get sick. The more people that get sick, the better for the Democrat Party.
That’s not a tenable position for them. They decided to stand back. They don’t need to talk people into any kind of reaction. Whatever happens is going to be obvious. They’re rolling the dice here that Trump and his administration are going to blow it. But they have decided to stop trying to coax people into thinking that it’s been blown beforehand.
They also realized, by the way, that the Trump administration does not blow these things. And you think back, we’ve had a number of natural disasters since the Trump administration began in January of 2017. Can you think of one of them that people still remember as being a debacle?
Remember a hurricane, remember an earthquake, remember tornadoes, can you remember any natural disaster where the Trump administration is thought to have really blown it, meaning the recovery, the aftermath? No, you can’t, because we haven’t blown it. Trump himself is a fixer. Trump himself is a builder. Trump himself is somebody that deals with these kinds of crises, with this kind of daily chaos. He’s been doing it his entire life in his primary business.
So Democrats are looking at this, and they’re understanding here that politicizing this is very, very unseemly. Now, I have a couple of sound bites here to illustrate that which I’m referring to because you know that your host has come under all kinds of criticism for being insensitive and unkind and mischaracterizing.
Your host has been falsely accused of saying the coronavirus is no different than the common cold. When I made that comment, it was talking about the number of cases, the severity at the time, that we never have been in a circumstance that warranted shouting “fire” in a crowded theater. And we still aren’t. We are not in a panic situation in the United States. Now, let me go back, February 27th. I want to repeat to you, this is what I said about the mortality rate of the coronavirus.
RUSH ARCHIVE: Let me explain what the 2% is 2% of. The mortality rate of 2% for people coronavirus is 2% of the people who contract it. It means that 98% of the people who get it recover from it. The mortality rate for SARS was 10%. The mortality rate for MERS was 34%. “Well, wait a minute, Rush. You said the flu’s survival rate was 0.1%.”
Yeah, because that was of the whole population. When you talk about the flu, 30 to 60,000 people die from it a year, it’s about 30,000 — the range is 30 to 60,000, depending on the years you’re talking about. That is one-tenth of 1% of the population the whole country, not of the people who get the disease. There’s a confusion here over the fatality rate and what the universe is. In talking about the 2% mortality rate for the coronavirus, that’s only the people who get it — and it’s low compared to other diseases like SARS or MERS.
The world survived both of those. It’s much lower than Ebola. (chuckles) You get Ebola, and your survival rate is in the single digits. So 98% of people who get coronavirus survive it. It is just within the universe of people that get the disease is what these numbers are, not of the… If it were expressed as a percentage of the whole population, it would be as low as the reported numbers of people who succumb to the flu. But the number 2% has been used here only within the universe of people who get the disease, which is what’s interesting to people now, given that the disease is new and just popping you will all over the place.
RUSH: And there’s not enough data on it. There’s still thought to be a lot of people with the disease that don’t even know they have it. People who have it are not suffering symptoms yet and may not, but who carry it, who may be transmitting it. The recovery rate for this disease worldwide is over 50%. And they never tell you that, by the way.
The most frequently used website for coronavirus now, the ongoing daily statistics, is the Johns Hopkins University website. If you look at that website it will tell you how many cases per country, how many fatalities per country, and the total recovery rate. And it’s always been the case, no matter what total number of cases reported, the recovery rate is well over 50%. And they don’t tell you about that.
I don’t know why, but what they focus on is the number of people who get the disease and then the number of people who succumb to it. I guess it makes for better news. But the recovery rate is very high here.
So given my sound bite way back on February 27th and the Drive-By Media saying, “This guy, Limbaugh, he’s dangerous. He’s not a doctor. He doesn’t know what he’s talking about.” Yesterday in Washington, on Capitol Hill, the assistant secretary of Health and Human Services, Admiral Brett Giroir spoke to reporters about the coronavirus, and listen to what he said here.
GIROIR: The typical mortality rate for seasonal flu is about 0.1% or 0.15%. The best estimates now of the overall mortality rate for COVID-19 is somewhere between 0.1% and 1%, okay? That’s lower than you’ve heard probably in many reports. Why is this? Number one, it’s because many people don’t get sick and don’t get tested. So probably for every case, there are at least two or three cases that are not in the denominator. It certainly could be higher than normal flu, it probably is, but it’s not likely in the range of 2 to 3%. You have a denominator problem, and I want you to understand that. That only the people who are really sick or have symptoms come in and get tested.
WATCH: “The best estimates now of the overall mortality rate for COVID-19 is somewhere between 0.1% and 1%,” Adm. Brett Giroir, assistant secretary for health at HHS, says. “That’s lower than you heard probably in many reports … it’s not likely in the range of 2 to 3%” pic.twitter.com/ATnMRBLXVy
— NBC News (@NBCNews) March 6, 2020
RUSH: His point there is that there are many more people who have the disease and don’t know it and no symptoms, not suffering from it, than they know. And so their universe here, they’re denominator is only of known cases, and that would be those who are showing symptoms of those who have been tested. We know that the number of tests is insufficient now because the number of test kits are still ramping up.
I just wanted to share this with you because assistant secretary of Health and Human Services, Admiral Brett Giroir, this is one of the reasons so much of the cacophony of criticism toward the Trump administration is being dialed back down. It’s simply because all of the fear that the media has attempted to infuse in this thing simply isn’t warranted yet, in the United States.
Now, here is David Plouffe. One more bite before we go to the break. David Plouffe is the former Obama campaign manager, 2008 and 2012, and this is just a couple of days ago on CNN’s New Day. Listen…
PLOUFFE: Does anybody have any confidence he’s gonna improve his standing managing this crisis with the coronavirus? So I think we’ve got an opportunity to win this election. This is still our election to lose —
RUSH: Stooop the tape! There you have it. “Rush, I never heard all these Democrats you said that are saying this is an opportunity.” Right there it is, David Plouffe, Obama campaign manager: “This is an opportunity,” and he’s not the only one. This is just the one sound bite we have. The Democrats have been running around saying the coronavirus is an opportunity for the Democrats. The media had people saying it. They were salivating over it!
How can that be? How can the coronavirus be an opportunity for Democrats? What has to happen for that to happen? A lot of people have to get sick and the Trump administration has to blow it in dealing with it. That is the opportunity for Democrats? They politicize virtually everything. The president from the get-go has asked people not to politicize this, to come together and solve this as a country, as a population, ’cause it affects everybody.
Coronavirus doesn’t know whether you’re male or female, doesn’t know whether you’re transgender, doesn’t know what bathroom you use. It doesn’t know if you’re male, female, conservative, liberal, Republican, Democrat. It hits anybody who is susceptible to it, and yet here come the Democrats salivating over what an opportunity it could be. Well, I’m tell, you combine that with Chuck Schumer at the Supreme Court threatening a couple of Supreme Court justices, and it is not looking good for the Democrats.
And then you’ve got Biden not knowing where he is as the presumptive, now, Democrat nominee — and the Democrat establishment once again tightening the screws on Crazy Bernie — and it is not looking good. The situation for Democrats in California is all of a sudden looking kind of iffy. And then all these Democrat conferences are being canceled because of the coronavirus. South by Southwest, movie openings. I mean, wherever where liberals get together, they’re having to cancel it.
And they want to come along and talk about what an opportunity it is for them?
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RUSH: The president is gonna go to the Centers for Disease Control this afternoon. He’s gonna be landing at Dobbins Air Force Base in Atlanta, in Georgia, about 3:30. He originally was not gonna go because somebody there supposedly had tested positive for the coronavirus. He said, “No, no, no, no.” So the president is gonna go. He’s gonna go to the CDC this afternoon, and then he’s coming here when he finishes that.
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RUSH: Do I know these people or do I know these people? One hour ago, I started the program telling you that I had observed that the media and the Democrats are dialing back the criticism of the Trump administration on the coronavirus. Now here it is one hour later, and here’s a headline from New York Magazine: “Trump Declares Mission Accomplished on Containing Coronavirus.”
JOHNNY DONOVAN: And now, from sunny South Florida, it’s Open Line Friday!
RUSH: A-ha! I see what they’re doing, folks. My first instinct was right, buttressed by the second news story. They’re dialing it back because their plan is to run around and say that Trump’s claiming it’s over, that Trump has fixed it. And they’re banking on the fact that it’s not over, that it isn’t fixed. So they’re gonna be able to say that Trump doesn’t know what he’s doing, that Trump lied, Trump’s not taking it seriously enough. Trump sent Larry Kudlow out there today to tell you that it’s pretty much come and gone, we got it handled and so forth and so on.
So the Democrats in the media are still banking on the fact coronavirus is gonna get worse. So they’re backing off claiming that Trump has declared “mission accomplished,” which he hasn’t. He has not declared mission accomplished. What Trump has done is to be very calm and tell people it’s gonna be okay, that we’re gonna deal with it.
In fact, you know something, folks? Let me go out on a limb for you here and tell you that, as I have learned, by the way — and I’ve known this and I’ve believed this my whole life, by the way — that God is good and that there is good in everything that happens, if you just have the wide-enough vision to look for it, there is good in everything that happens. And I’m gonna tell you that there is some good in this coronavirus situation. And you know what it is?
The good in the coronavirus situation — Trump is out there, I’ve got the sound bites coming from last night, town hall, he was with Fox. He was very calm, very reassuring, and told people it’s gonna be okay. We’re gonna deal with it. It’s going to end. Everything does. Everything always passes. It’s replaced by other things, but we’ll move on from this. At some point this will be over. Swine flu was over. Ebola was over. This is gonna be over.
Very important to have somebody not panicking at the top, somebody not trying to exploit your emotions — do you realize what a big deal that is, that we don’t have an Obama-like community organizer trying to manipulate your emotions on this, to make himself look better by making you feel more panicked? I mean, here’s Trump doing the opposite. Here’s Trump telling it’s gonna be okay. Because this is the United States of America, and that’s how things end up.
Now, that’s not gonna be pleasing to a bunch of leftists who don’t like America, but still. If you want to look for something good in the coronavirus, how about the fact that somebody like Trump, who is a fixer, is actually the guy that’s gonna unwind all of the confusion and chaos in government that delays things like this being fixed?
Okay. So here we have the CDC, Centers for Disease Control. Things are not running as smoothly as they should be there, odds are. And, you know, Trump even dealt with this last night. He was asked a question at the town hall about this. He said (paraphrasing), “Well, look, you know, when we were first elected, dealing with things at the CDC was not at the top of the list. The CDC was not on anybody’s radar. Nothing was going on that involved the CDC. So you can’t blame me for not having fixed it when we took office.” He said, “Look. We have discovered a bunch of problems that we inherited from the Obama administration.”
Now, I know that every administration, incoming administration likes to blame things on the predecessors. But in this instance Trump was being honest. In January of 2017 he’s inaugurated, there’s no health crisis, so there’s no reason to be delving into whatever’s going on at the CDC or the National Institute for Health or any of that. Now all of a sudden there is. Now we’ve got this worldwide outbreak of coronavirus, number 19, and all of a sudden the CDC and NIH and a number of these organizations are under the microscope.
And guess what? Some things are being found to be out of whack, that may be some things aren’t as streamlined or working as well as they should be. Who better than Donald Trump and his administration to be at the helm when it’s necessary to fix something like this? So I would go out on a limb and say that you could even say that would be one of the good aspects of the coronavirus, that at least it’s happening when we’ve got somebody who knows what they’re doing to fix and streamline and de-bureaucratize a major American bureaucracy that may be suffering roadblocks and obstacles simply because it is a bureaucracy.
In other words, the coronavirus has forced the Trump administration to dig into this, find out what’s going on over there, to find out okay, why don’t we have enough test kits, for example? Now, they tried to blame Trump for this last night at the town hall. “Why don’t you have enough test kits?”
And Trump said (paraphrasing), “What do you mean, blame me? This is the first thing that’s come up. You can’t zero in on every aspect of government in your first week, gonna fix that, gonna fix this, we had a lot of things we had to fix. We had to fix the border. We had to fix illegal immigration. We had to fix the economy. We had to fix the military. We had to fix health care. We had to fix a whole bunch of stuff. This thing never came up. But now it has.” And he said, “We’re on the case. And we got good people working on this.” And he does.
The Trump administration is now looking into these bureaucracies, and they’re gonna clean ’em up and improve their functionality. Just like the VA. Remember the VA was a big deal because that was military people. Trump loves them. That was on the radar shortly after the Trump administration was inaugurated and sworn in. So he is going to go to CDC today.
Now, by the way, I don’t know enough to know who at the CDC is doing good, who’s doing well, who isn’t. But I’m like you, I mean, I get emails from all kinds of people claiming this or claiming that. And there’s some people at the CDC that are being pretty roundly attacked here for being slow on the uptake, late on the draw, whatever. I don’t know about it specifically. All I know is that I feel confident somebody like Trump is rolling up his sleeves, getting to the bottom of it and fixing it. So that may be, if you want to look and try to find good or positives in things.
The CDC, man, that’s a massive place trying to keep track of all kinds of out-of-control illnesses, viruses, bioagents, bioweapons. So hopefully they’ll go in there, be able to make whatever adjustments necessary that will be able to tame this virus and viruses that are gonna be more deadly than this one down the road so that we will be more prepared.
He’s in Tennessee right now. The president’s in Tennessee. And we have a sound bite here. This is from Cookeville, the president speaking with reporters. He got a question, “Mr. President, do you have a message for the survivors?”
THE PRESIDENT: I do have a message and I have a message for the families of those that lost their lives. We love ’em, they’re special people, it’s an incredible place, incredible state, tremendous heart. Already you see people rebuilding. I mean, it took place literally hours ago, couple days ago, and they’re already rebuilding. I’ve never seen — we were flying over, you see the blue roofs going up. It’s all over the place. It’s just great people, it’s a great state, and they have great leadership in this state, and that’s why it’s working out like it is.
RUSH: So this is what happens in states like Tennessee, people rebuild. And as Trump points out, he flew over and they’re already rebuilding, not sitting around waiting, not waiting for some rich people to give them money, although I’m sure that’s happening, by the way. They’re not waiting around for government to move in. People are doing what they can.
Trump goes in and, you know, what can a president do in a circumstance like this? A president can’t go in and help people to rebuild, and his presence there is not gonna speed it up. Just because Trump’s there does not mean that somebody who lost their house is gonna be in it by the end of the day, obviously. But psychology is a strange thing. It’s a comforting thing to people who have experienced this kind of — you lose your house, lose the nest, I mean, there’s nothing more unsettling, and you got nowhere to go if you’ve lost your house in a fire, if you’ve lost it in a tornado like these people in Tennessee or any other natural disaster. It’s a feeling of utter helplessness.
And what leaders can do is simply let you know that you’re not alone and that there is help, compassion, people paying attention to you, looking out for you. It matters. And some people are good at this and other people aren’t. As Peter Jennings said (paraphrasing), “Some presidents are better at this kind of stuff than others.”
He was doing that to be critical of George W. Bush after 9/11. I thought it was very unfair criticism of George W. Bush. But it does happen to be one of the things that Trump excels at. And it’s because he’s likable, so people like having him around. People like seeing him. And I’m telling you, I’ve had enough personal experience with Donald Trump, he’s got the ability to make things seem okay. One day I’m gonna get permission to describe everything here I could tell you. I don’t have that permission now. But believe me, it informs much of my thinking on Trump and his capabilities.
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RUSH: Here’s Tony in Amarillo, Texas. Great to have you on the EIB Network, sir. Hello.
CALLER: You gave it the Hispanic variation there. I like it.
RUSH: Thank you, sir. (chuckling) I appreciate that.
CALLER: (chuckling) Rush, I consider you the older brother I always wished I had. So I wanted to find out from you, I was a little out of sorts back when the swine flu was going around, and I’m just curious. Was there this same level —
RUSH: Oh, hell, no.
CALLER: — or how does this level of fear and the apocalyptic hysteria? I mean, I —
RUSH: No.
CALLER: This just blows me away.
RUSH: No. When the swine flu, even when Ebola hit, no. There was none, because, remember, the whole point was to make it look like Obama had everything under control personally and all by himself. Just because Obama was president, Ebola was gonna stay away, because Obama was president, the swine flu was not gonna be much of a swine.
CALLER: (chuckles) Didn’t we as a country end up with several hundred, if not a thousand or so people die because of that?
RUSH: We did. We did. But that doesn’t… The media would not allow any kind of criticism or panic related to Obama’s performance in what they were dealing with. So, no, all these things were vastly undersold — or, to the contrary, Obama personally and his administration were overtly, outwardly praised for their competence in dealing with these things. It was a totally different…
You know, I’m actually glad that you called, because that aspect of this had slipped my mind until I saw your call up on the board here. It was exactly that way with everything. It didn’t matter what Obama was doing, it was the best it’s ever been. It was the most intelligent it ever been, the most reasonable it ever been, the most mature it had ever been. The diseases were more frightened of Obama than any disease had ever been.
CALLER: (chuckling)
RUSH: The diseases were more intimidated of Obama. The diseases were not gonna make Obama look bad no matter what. If it was entirely different media atmosphere back during both Ebola and the swine flu than with a we’re getting here.
CALLER: Well, that’s… Like I said, I was out of sorts a little bit during that time because of life circumstances, but I’ve tried to read and figure out what was the comparison, what were things like back then, and I have not been able to really determine, okay, were they just crying that the world’s coming to an end like they are now?
RUSH: No.
CALLER: I just can’t find anything about that.
RUSH: No, no. It was a combination. The diseases were reported on as deadly and worrisome and threatening and all that — and then Obama was portrayed. But every United Nations organization, every globalist organization that Obama associated with or partnered with was portrayed as the epitome of competence, the epitome of intelligence, the epitome of maturity and that we could not be in better hands. We could not be in better… Why, we could not be safer. We could not be more protected. We could not be better taken care of.
CALLER: Oh, my goodness. Well, I am with you. I am so grateful that we have a president that is a doer, someone who is out there trying to accomplish things because it makes such a difference in my mind of how this is gonna be dealt with.
RUSH: Well, let me tell you how important that is. What you’re actually saying when you say, “You like that we have a president who’s a doer,” I know exactly what you mean. Trump actually does things. There isn’t a bunch of PR or buzz like there was with Obama. So okay. If Obama were president now and the coronavirus hit and everything’s the same, we would be hearing about the brilliance of Obama and the brilliance of anybody of any bureaucracy in Obama’s administration.
They would be the most competent — and it would all be PR. It would all be buzz. It would all be an effort to manufacture an impression or an image not based on anything Obama or his people had actually been doing. The Trump administration is actually doing things. They’re impaneling these groups that are actually doing things, like he’s doing things on the economy. These are real jobs being created, real wage increases that are happening, real unemployment rates that are shrinking. It’s real!
We don’t need any PR or buzz about it because it’s real — and that’s the difference.