Donald Trump shouldn't be tried for tax fraud, he should be tried for mass murder

[wnylib]

43. Absolutely. He knew. Didn't care.

I didn't see Contagion until well into the covid pandemic. Missed it before, somehow. Then I ordered a DVD set of both Contagion and Outbreak (which I had seen before). Friends said I was being morbid to watch them in a real pandemic, but I wanted to compare how true to life they are. It's one thing to watch an imaginary horror and walk away feeling, "Well, it's just a movie." Quite another thing to actually live the horror that was once just a movie.

Outbreak's theme fits the conspiracy theory that there's secret government knowledge of a dangerous virus and also a secret cure being withheld in order to use the virus as a biological weapon. But it's not completely off the mark since, in real life, the president actually did know and did keep the full knowledge a secret from the public. And worse, he did treat it like a biological weapon, but against his own country, for personal political gain.

There is one scene in Outbreak that I wish everyone would see in order to drive home the reality of viral spread in public places. It shows an infected man seated in the back of a theater, coughing. As the spectators laugh at the movie they're watching, the scene shows a droplet aerosolizing and floating ahead several rows to land in the open mouth of a laughing spectator. This is followed by a swamped ER when several movie goers show up infected.

Contagion is so true to life in everyday details that it's an advance warning of what is now going on. The knowkedge of how this would play out existed in advance. And Trump did nothing. We have not yet reached the level of social breakdown that occurred in Contagion when shortages occurred as the supply chains broke down due to illness in manufacturing and shipping, but we're not far behind. We might get there with the more infectious strain of covid discovered in the UK. It's already in Toronto, and that's not far from us in western NY. Consider how long it will take to get the vaccination to millions of Americans and we're in a race between vaccine and accelerated covid spread.

In Contagion, the government functions as it should in a pandemic, with international WHO cooperation and CDC experts in control at home. Contrast that with what has been and is happening in today's real pandemic. Contagion shows the military handing out MREs to the public. Trump won't even allow emergency funding to pass. In Contagion, the disinformation about contagion and phony cures comes from a huckster on social media out to make a buck from a cult following. In real life today, the huckster is the president himself.

That's when I thought that we need a true to life documentary showing exactly what really did happen and how. There are plenty of audios and videos available to tell the whole story, supplemented with interviews. It could be called Contagion 2, The Real Story.