Mike Pence is such an out-of-touch, underachieving slacker, you guys. But don’t take our word for it. Take PBS NewsHour White House correspondent Yamiche Alcindor’s:
VP Pence: "The greatest concern is testing. I am pleased to report we have 2500 kits available that we will distribute. We approved a process that will allow testing at state and university laboratories."
2500.
— Yamiche Alcindor (@Yamiche) March 4, 2020
2500 kits. He might as well have said zero, right?
should be fine I mean we are a nation of only 2500 people.
— DumbleDarthVader (@DumbleDarkVader) March 4, 2020
What a joke….@VP you are in way over your head on this one and American lives are in the balance
— TheCynicalOptimist (@OneCynicalGuy) March 4, 2020
How is it even possible to be this reckless and incompetent?
— Azia Gunn (@ASmockingGun) March 4, 2020
You can only get away with it when the corruption is so profound that nobody pays attention to the incompetence.
— Tom Eire (@PioBall) March 4, 2020
And make no mistake: Mike Pence is definitely incompetent and Alcindor definitely isn’t omitting any very important context that would undermine her case for Pence’s incompetence.
this is a bit misleading — you can potentially do 500 tests from a single kit https://t.co/Ok4er4ujue
— Matt Pearce ? (@mattdpearce) March 4, 2020
Important to note that each kit can do 500 tests, per Senators who were briefed yesterday by Pence & health experts. That means over 1,000,000 tests in total. https://t.co/sXxzt0dbqC
— Julie Tsirkin (@JulieNBCNews) March 4, 2020
OK… so, yes, according to the CDC, 1 test kit can test 700-800 patients.
I should note that not one single journalist I follow pointed this out, they are all too busy dunking on Mike Pence to read the CDC website and give you accurate infohttps://t.co/XpvG9BP4dI
— PoliMath (@politicalmath) March 4, 2020
Well, to be fair, Alcindor let her initial tweet fester for about 20 minutes, racking up thousands of likes, but eventually elaborated a little:
The head of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, Dr. Stephen Hahn, said each kit should allow a lab to run about 500 tests. That would work out to 1.25 million tests.
Context: The U.S. has an estimated population of 331 million people.
— Yamiche Alcindor (@Yamiche) March 4, 2020
All you need to know is that Mike Pence still sucks. That’s really the central message here.
Look, you can make fun of Pence for saying they have 2500 testing kits…
Journalists: Oh man, we will!
… or you could do some research & talk to some people about why there are so few kits and how we get more
Journalists: No, I don't think we should do that.
— PoliMath (@politicalmath) March 4, 2020
This has been another edition of "When you give inaccurate information, you have a moral obligation to delete your tweet and give the correct information" pic.twitter.com/pmfkQbiWAw
— PoliMath (@politicalmath) March 4, 2020
Giving shitty info, letting it run viral and following up with the correct info that gets a fraction of the attention without deleting the shitty info is garbage behavior and newsrooms need to make formal policies to punish it.
— PoliMath (@politicalmath) March 4, 2020