Here are my observations and opinions from my select news of the day.

BACK TO MY PILE OF “STUFF” – “When Donald Trump says ‘nobody saw this coming’ he is literally wrong,” comments Holman W. Jenkins in his Wall Street Journal column, “Trump Is Not the Virus.”

“Experts and the U.S. government and the world at large have known for centuries global pandemics were possible; they’ve accumulated a great deal of knowledge in the scientific era about how such contagions operate,” he added.

While Jenkins says there will be much to criticize about the Trump administration’s response to the virus, he draws on what past critics have said about FDR and Pearl Harbor, Kennedy’s Bay of Pigs, Johnson’s Tonkin Gulf, Truman’s Korean War, and even recalls Wilson sending troops to intervene in World War I in the midst of a global flu pandemic.

“A pandemic is always potentially around the corner thanks to natural selection, but when one will actually arrive is a known unknown,” says Jenkins.

I’ve written recently about several of those individuals who have known they were possible; some even predicted when a pandemic would hit us.

Reading Jenkins’ column, I was reminded of material in my pile of “stuff” chocked with best laid plans in preparation for that inevitable pandemic, primarily by the City of New York, dating back to 2006, when Michael Bloomberg unveiled a sweeping pandemic preparedness plan.

Computer models calculated how the disease would spread through the city’s five boroughs, and it was determined that New York needed a substantial stockpile of both masks and ventilators.  A pandemic on the scale of the 1918 Spanish flu, it projected shortfall of between 2,036 and 9,454 ventilators.

Just 500 additional ventilators were acquired over the next few years as the effort to create a larger stockpile fizzled.

Despite the city’s best efforts to stretch its resources, there was no foreseeing a crisis of this magnitude.

“It’s easy to say in retrospect we should have spent all our money on pandemic influenza,” said Dr. Issac Weisfuse, then deputy commissioner at the health department, but at the time you just don’t know what was going to happen, and there were other threats.”

In 2008, the high cost to maintain the ventilators – $100,000 a year – resulted in the city’s decision to auction them off.  Hospitals were reluctant to spend money to store machines and protective equipment that they did not need for day-to-day operations. Sound familiar?

N95 masks were purchased in large quantities, however, they eventually all expired and they became too cost-prohibitive to replace.

Tax revenues dried up when the 2008 financial crisis hit and the health department’s budget was slashed by some $290 million.

In 2012, Dr. Jay Varma, the then city deputy commissioner for disease control, warned that austerity was hitting the infectious disease problems.”  Three years later, Congress was warned of the danger represented in the decline of federal preparedness funding.

As I reported in this space earlier, George W. Bush saw it coming.  He was obsessed with it, but got nowhere.  Most of the failures I just wrote about happened in the Barack Obama era.  And it was Obama, who left both our medical equipment and defense stockpiles bare, while telling Trump that the nation’s greatest danger was North Korea.

Jenkins pointed out how “worthless some journalists are as thinkers and critics when they venture beyond their job of getting quotes and facts right. The media is staffed with people for whom the hindsight fallacy is not a fallacy; it’s their métier.”

I was disappointed that Jenkins thought it appropriate to quote Trump saying “nobody saw this coming,” and to criticize him for it in the middle of the crisis.

HYDROXYCHLOROQUINE – If you didn’t watch Tucker Carlson’s show Tuesday on the Fox News Channel, you missed, in my opinion, an unexpected dramatic moment during a discussion on the topic of hydroxychloroquine, the controversial drug being discussed in fighting coronavirus.

Carlson began with what appeared to be routine interview with Dr. Marc Siegel, Fox’s medical correspondent and associate professor of medicine at NYU Langone Medical Center, on the subject of hydroxychloroquine being used in treating the virus, when Siegel related a story.

“I want to tell you about a 96-year-old man in Florida who said one night, ‘I don’t think I’m going to make it.  I feel very weak.  The end is coming.’

“The next day he was on hydroxychloroquine and antibiotics (Z-Pak) … he got up the next day, he was fine.  This man was my father.”

I was stunned, and I think Carlson was, too.  I don’t think he knew about this before going on the air. ‘Thank you for that, Doctor,” he said, as the interview ended.

As I write this, Carlson reveals that he was, in fact, surprised by Siegel’s revelation.

ANOTHER PROPAGANDIST FOR CHINA – Following on my reporting yesterday of The New York Times providing the Chinese with opinion page space to spew their propaganda, comes a report that NBC News, too, is doing China’s bidding.

Chet Huntley and David Brinkley have to be rolling over in their graves.

While the network has been reporting U.S. virus deaths, it stated, “Meanwhile in China, where the pandemic broke out, not a single coronavirus death was reported.”

Suggesting that China was emerging as a “global leader” during the pandemic, NBC said, “As U.S. struggles to stem coronavirus, China asserts itself as global leader,” highlighting China’s aid to Italy.  “With Italy in dire need of medical equipment, an economic superpower stepped in to help.  No, not the United States, it was China.”

Meanwhile, Fox News Channel, which has consistently reported about the distrust in the numbers coming out of China, commentator Dan Bongino said, “NBC goes all-in on communist propaganda.”  Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) referred to NBC’s bad journalism during an interview with an insulted MSNBC anchor Stephanie Ruhle.

USA TODAY cashed in its journalism credibility, too, with its headline “10,000 now dead of coronavirus in US, more battlefield fatalities than six wars combined,” over a piece by Joel Shannon.

“What a garbage headline this is,” noted Tom Beavan of RealClear Politics, reminding that “we don’t characterize annual flu deaths this way, or traffic fatalities, or suicides.”

Unbelievably, Shannon totaled the battle deaths of the American Revolution, War of 1812, Mexican War, Indian Wars, Spanish-American War and Desert Shield/Desert Storm, and confirmed the numbers with the Veterans Affairs Office, to develop this overreach feature on our war with the virus.

Unfamiliar with Shannon’s work product, I consulted the Internet, where he boasted, “I reach millions of readers every month by writing engaging stories on tight deadlines.  I draw on my past experience as an audience analyst, social media manager and digital editor to create content people want to read.”  Really?

THEN THERE’S JAKE TAPPER, who claims to be a journalist.  When Kellyanne Conway’s husband, George Conway, tweeted President Trump is “100 percent insane, CNN hack Tapper took pleasure in retweeting it.”

“After receiving criticism for favorably retweeting a particularly unhinged Trump critic (George Conway), who is a media favorite, anti-Trump cable outlet CNN host Jake Tapper is now attempting to walk it back,” tweeted The Federalist’s Mollie Hemingway.

“Tapper’s retweeting that ‘Trump is 100% insane’ only further undermines the media by reaffirming for many that the media is campaigning against Trump rather than covering him.,” tweeted Jonathan Turley, a professor of law at George Washington University Law School and a Democrat. “The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result.”

Tapper’s feeble attempt to walk it back: “Retweets do not necessarily equal agreement.”

May God continue to bless the United States of America.