Circumstances so far in 2021 appear to make this less-than-a-month year a ratcheting-up squel to 2020, though, with a way-different hand at the national helm there’s some sure footing at least for a while. Still, we’re in the deep-midst of a worldwide virus clusterfuck, plus a democracy showdown in the US, with now an overall scenario close to a horror/sci-fi/political-plague life-play.
Spreading of lies is just small instance of the T-Rump’s administration’s complete fuck-up regarding the COVID-19 pandemic, but there are consequences:

We’re at the mass vaccination site at Dodger Stadium to get my mom the vaccine. The anti–vax protestors have approached the entrance to the site. The LAPD have now closed the gate. We have been sitting here for about half an hour. Nobody is moving. pic.twitter.com/GrJPA5wrqx

— Mikel Jollett (@Mikel_Jollett) January 30, 2021

Unfortunately, COVID-19 came at an optimum point in time to really do great damage. One of the leaders of the world, probably killed it for everybody. He really killed it for Americans. Created a near-about worse-case scenario.
Old news now, but still wretching — via Politico this morning:

His team arrived at the White House with a 200-page response plan ready to roll out.
But instead, they have spent much of the last week trying to wrap their hands around the mushrooming crisis — a process officials acknowledge has been humbling, and triggered a concerted effort to temper expectations about how quickly they might get the nation back to normal.

After a week on the job, Biden’s team is still trying to locate upwards of 20 million vaccine doses that have been sent to states — a mystery that has hampered plans to speed up the national vaccination effort.
They’re searching for new ways to boost production of a vaccine stockpile that they’ve discovered is mostly empty.
And they’re nervously eyeing a series of new Covid-19 strains that threaten to derail the response.
…
“Nobody had a complete picture,” said Julie Morita, a member of the Biden transition team and executive vice president at the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.
“The plans that were being made were being made with the assumption that more information would be available and be revealed once they got into the White House.”

It’s a steep challenge that Biden officials said they’d been anticipating for weeks, amid a rocky transition period that left them scrambling to piece together vaccine distribution plans and coordinate with state health officials.

Yet in the days since taking over, the Covid response team has confronted a situation that officials described as far worse than expected — and that has prompted public assessments so dour they surprised some who had worked on the administration’s former transition team.

On Tuesday, Biden warned that the “vaccine program is in worse shape than we anticipated or expected,” echoing complaints from his chief of staff, Ron Klain, that a “plan didn’t really exist.”

Another no plan, just unconcerned incomtence on a massive scale — from The Washington Post yesterday:

The Trump administration spent $200 million to send more than 8,700 ventilators to countries around the world last year, with no clear criteria for determining who should get them and no way to keep track of where many ended up, according to a new report from the Government Accountability Office.
…
The effort, driven by the Trump White House, was an unusual top-down initiative with little decision-making by experts at the U.S. Agency for International Development, which carried out the administration’s orders. President Donald Trump last year boasted about U.S. success in manufacturing the machines and declared the U.S. “the king of ventilators,” promising donations to foreign countries.
.“These ventilators were not in State or AID’s strategic plan,” said David Gootnick, director of international affairs and trade at GAO. “They could not articulate for us the criteria they used for what ventilators went to what countries.”

The GAO was unable to identify how the Trump White House made its decisions on ventilator allocations, and White House officials did not respond to the watchdog’s questions, which came before President Biden took office last week. For instance, while Sri Lanka had just three new coronavirus cases per day when it received 200 ventilators, Bangladesh, which had 1,409 new cases, received just 100 of the machines, the report found.

Relatively wealthy recipients such as Italy and St. Kitts and Nevis also received ventilator donations, as did tiny island nations such as Nauru and Kiribati, which have yet to report a single coronavirus case.

Truth in reality of the institutionalized:

T-Rump is a plague of man…

(Illustration: Pablo Picasso’s ‘Les Deux Saltimbanques: l’Arlequin et Sa Compagne,’ found here).