Kerry: Trump Pushing Reopening Is Playing ‘Russian Roulette’ with American Lives

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Janet Ybarra
Democrat
Former Washington Journalist
Contributor on The Bipartisan Press

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Donald Trump is acting irresponsibly, putting the lives of the American people in jeopardy by not providing adequate testing for the novel coronavirus, according to former secretary of state John Kerry.

Trump has been pushing to loosen the extreme lockdown conditions in place across most of the United States despite a lack of volume of testing for the novel coronavirus.

Coronavirus testing in the United States has turned into a fairly haphazard affair. Indeed, just this week, Maryland acquired 500,000 tests from South Korea, owing to the South Korean heritage of the state’s first lady.

Meanwhile, Trump has gone so far as stoke protests against state stay-at-home orders via Twitter telling them to “liberate” their states despite the continuing spread of the virus.

In the United States, 44,575 have died and more than 800,000 have been sickened by COVID-19, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

Medical professionals and others are expressing worry over this scenario.

“We are not testing on a per capita basis, which is the real ratio you look at, is the size of our country, measured against the tests we’re having. It doesn’t do us any good to have more tests than a tiny nation in the world and stand up and say, we have more tests than anybody in the world. We have to measure the number of tests against the people, against the risk, against what it takes to put people back to work,” said Kerry, who served as the nation’s top diplomat during President Barack Obama’s second term. “And if you don’t have the ability to track who’s had it, the antibodies test, and you don’t have the ability to track who has it now, it’s very difficult to say to people, ‘Hey, you’re safe, go out to work.’

“What are you doing to do? Play Russian Roulette with everybody’s lives? That’s not the job of the president of the United States,” added Kerry, who ran for president himself as the Democratic nominee in 2004. “His job is to lead the country to a place of calm understanding, about how together, together, that’s what our nation is built on, you know, out of many come one, ‘E pluribus unum,’ we are one. And the one is the job of the president of the United States to think about.”