politics

Is there an info on how many tests he gave away? As it's said to be for personal use, I would expect it to be a two digit number. Let's assume 50. What difference do 50 tests make for the survival of the nation? How many lives would have been saved if there would have been 50 additional tests? Hard to quantify. Could be none at all but also thousands. If you're very lucky you might test just the right person at the right point in time. And by putting that one person into quarantaine, you avoid a huge superspreader event. Or all 50 tests are negative. Maybe you even have some false negatives that cause a super spreader event.

Of course, the more tests a nation has and performs during a pandemic, the better. Fully agree. But it's hard to quantify the effect of such a small amount.

Similarly, it's very hard to quantify the effect of diplomacy. Maybe (most likely!) the gift had no effect at all. Maybe Putin didn't even use them in fear of contact poison on the swabs. But maybe, they also had some effect. Maybe the gesture subconciously influenced Putin to not do something stupid, do it a little later, or slightly less stupid. We'll never know. Not even Putin himself knows.

Independent of the diplomacy part, let's try to deconstruct the scandal into two parts.

1. Completely ignore the "Putin" part of this scandal. Let's assume Trump had a stash with Covid tests for his personal use. Let's assume someone finds out now that Trump hoarded 50 tests in his drawer all the time that he never used. The effect on the US pandemic would have been the same as giving the same number of tests away. Maybe even worse: If Putin used the tests and broke some infection chain, that might have saved people in Russia from catching Covid that might have travelled to the US later.

2. Now ignore the "Covid tests" part. If we assume a value of $5 per test, that leads to a total value of $250. So Trump gifted Putin a rare cigar or a nice pen whatever. This is completely normal diplomacy and global leaders exchange such things all the time. Also with nations that aren't your allies. So from my perspective, the Putin part of the scandal is not relevant and can be ignored.

What stays is "Trump reduced the number of available Covid tests in the US by 50". You can call that whataboutism but is this a scandal that deserves our attention in comparison to all the traitorous, imorral and illegal things he did?