To date, more that 600,000 Americans died of Covid-19. It has been well documented that this is mainly due to what appears to be an almost intentional mismanagement of the US government response to the pandemic.

As noted in an earlier article, as many as 25 million people entered the US from other countries with no health checks at all as the pandemic was getting underway. This was the US response while other countries were closing borders and locking down their populations to protect them. Our government did no such thing.

Why was this? Simply put, Trump’s full and total attention was on getting reelected, not on doing even a corner of his job of protecting the populace from what he was told was the biggest national security threat in 100 years.

As he was calling the pandemic a “democratic hoax” he was simply doing what he did every day in office: lying. How do we know this? Anyone with even a tiny semblance of mental faculties could see the obviousness of his position in March of 2020. But the truth of what he actually knew is even worse. And this is where Bob Woodward comes in.

As CNN and other outlets reported in September of 2020, Woodward had interviewed Trump extensively for a new book. It was revealed that Trump was recorded by Woodward saying such things as “This is deadly stuff,” and “that the coronavirus was maybe five times ‘more deadly’ than the flu.”

Trump was also recorded saying, “It goes through the air. That’s always tougher than the touch. You don’t have to touch things. Right? But the air, you just breathe the air and that’s how it’s passed. And so that’s a very tricky one. That’s a very delicate one. It’s also more deadly than even your strenuous flus.”

The problem, and therefore the reason that Woodward should be considered complicit, is that he had this data on February 7 of 2020! He sat on it for his book for seven months. In that time hundreds of thousands of Americans died.

In the same manner that Trump considered American lives less important than getting reelected, Bob Woodward considered those same lives less important than getting more interviews with Trump.

If Woodward had gone public with what he knew in March when Trump started calling the pandemic a hoax, he surely would have been cut off from further contact with Trump for his book. But how many lives would have been saved? No one can rightly say. But to completely ignore the chance?

Woodward held back this critical information and then when the book was starting to be promoted he let it out. It is hard to come up with terms for how degraded this is in terms of human responsibility. I certainly will never buy a copy, even remaindered, of this book. But the title, Rage, is what is generated in me when I think about his callous inaction.

Woodward by his action of withholding this vital information is just as culpable for the genocide by neglect and dereliction of duty toward the country as Trump. My personal recommendation is to not only shun Rage, but any of his books. Cancel Bob? That would be fitting. Woodward’s shirking of his responsibilities as a human helped cancel hundreds of thousands of lives.