Just left the Administration briefing on Coronavirus. Bottom line: they aren’t taking this seriously enough.
Notably, no request for ANY emergency funding, which is a big mistake. Local health systems need supplies, training, screening staff etc. And they need it now.
— Chris Murphy (@ChrisMurphyCT) February 5, 2020
On February 5th, I sat in a meeting with top Administration officials as Senators pressed them to request emergency funding to hire staff and stockpile supplies for the coming crisis.
They said they had it covered. Didn’t need any additional funding.
What a fatal screw up. https://t.co/SGrH9q7QS7
— Chris Murphy (@ChrisMurphyCT) March 30, 2020
What do you mean by the "first month of the pandemic"?
Trump was given warnings in January and did nothing except the China travel ban, which was very porous, and ineffective because people from Europe were still being allowed in with no testing and minimal screening.
You cannot provide one bit of evidence to back up your claim.
Show me one Republican calling for a serious effort on a national level to gear up for the virus. Show me one Republican who condemned the impeachment hearing during the trial because it was distracting the country from the threat of the virus.
No, the Democrats did not "disrupt the government for the entire first month of the pandemic." Not only is this incorrect, it is a lie
concocted by McConnell in late March and spread by Trump defenders.
The first media reports of COVID-19 that I know of came on December 31.
Mr. Trump was busy being impeached in January.
Here is evidence that the pandemic was ongoing throughout January:
I don't play Blatham's "I think what he thinks" game.
It's debatable when the disease actually became a "pandemic". It didn't really start spreading internationally for a while longer but I'm not in a position to declare when it actually became a true "pandemic". And neither are you.
No, he wasn't "busy being impeached" as you can see from this timeline. He was busy explaining his Iran decisions, holding rallies, attending the Davos forum, addressing the march against reproductive freedom, meeting with Netanyahu etc. He had people working on his defense but there's no evidence that his normal political duties were restricted or that he was hunkered down in the White House actively working on a defense strategy.
Show us where you said it before McConnell.
It was a pandemic from the moment it started spreading through the human population.
An outbreak is a rapid increase in disease occurrence in a particular place and time. Outbreaks can include both infectious and non-infectious diseases, and the nearby and related cases may be called a cluster.
Some places use the term outbreak and epidemic synonymously, but an epidemic is usually much larger in scale. According to some organizations, just four linked cases of an infectious disease is enough to warrant using the term outbreak.
An epidemic is the quick expansion of a disease to a large group of people in a short amount of time and in one specific area or region. Usually, an epidemic is when an outbreak expands into a wider population of people.
A pandemic is when a disease epidemic spreads much farther from the initial origin, usually into multiple countries and/or continents.
Is the new coronavirus considered a pandemic?
The Wuhan coronavirus (2019-nCoV) has now spread to at least 28 different countries. However, for the most part, all instances of the Wuhan coronavirus in countries other than China are few and contained, so most experts do not yet consider it to be a pandemic. A pandemic might be confirmed if more countries experience epidemic-sized occurrences each.
Though the Wuhan coronavirus is not currently a pandemic,[as of February 9] the World Health Organization (WHO) has declared a global health emergency, while still identifying it as an epidemic in mainland China, particularly around the Hubei province.
March 20 is well before March 31.
you claim to have been well aware of the seriousness of the pandemic in January.
The only reason people started using the "distraction" excuse is because it was becoming clear by March that Trump had botched the response.
What I am claiming is that the Democrats disrupted the government in January and thereby impeded the government's response to the pandemic.
Presidents often have to deal with multiple issues which occur simultaneously and I see no reason that a pandemic response team couldn't have been put to work much earlier.
yet you claim to have been well aware of the seriousness of the pandemic in January.
For the record, February 24 was when I first understood what was about to happen to the world.
I attended a symphony orchestra on February 2nd.
I see no reason that a pandemic response team couldn't have been put to work much earlier.
[Jan 31] The epidemic control efforts unfolding today in China—including placing some 100 million citizens on lockdown, shutting down a national holiday, building enormous quarantine hospitals in days’ time, and ramping up 24-hour manufacturing of medical equipment—are indeed gargantuan. It’s impossible to watch them without wondering, “What would we do? How would my government respond if this virus spread across my country?”
For the United States, the answers are especially worrying because the government has intentionally rendered itself incapable. In 2018, the Trump administration fired the government’s entire pandemic response chain of command, including the White House management infrastructure. In numerous phone calls and emails with key agencies across the U.S. government, the only consistent response I encountered was distressed confusion. If the United States still has a clear chain of command for pandemic response, the White House urgently needs to clarify what it is—not just for the public but for the government itself, which largely finds itself in the dark.
When Ebola broke out in West Africa in 2014, President Barack Obama recognized that responding to the outbreak overseas, while also protecting Americans at home, involved multiple U.S. government departments and agencies, none of which were speaking to one another. Basically, the U.S. pandemic infrastructure was an enormous orchestra full of talented, egotistical players, each jockeying for solos and fame, refusing to rehearse, and demanding higher salaries—all without a conductor. To bring order and harmony to the chaos, rein in the agency egos, and create a coherent multiagency response overseas and on the homefront, Obama anointed a former vice presidential staffer, Ronald Klain, as a sort of “epidemic czar” inside the White House, clearly stipulated the roles and budgets of various agencies, and placed incident commanders in charge in each Ebola-hit country and inside the United States. The orchestra may have still had its off-key instruments, but it played the same tune.
Building on the Ebola experience, the Obama administration set up a permanent epidemic monitoring and command group inside the White House National Security Council (NSC) and another in the Department of Homeland Security (DHS)—both of which followed the scientific and public health leads of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the diplomatic advice of the State Department.
On the domestic front, the real business of assuring public health and safety is a local matter, executed by state, county, and city departments that operate under a mosaic of laws and regulations that vary jurisdiction by jurisdiction. Some massive cities, such as New York City or Boston, have large budgets, clear regulations, and epidemic experiences that have left deep benches of medical and public health talent. But much of the United States is less fortunate on the local level, struggling with underfunded agencies, understaffing, and no genuine epidemic experience. Large and small, America’s localities rely in times of public health crisis on the federal government.
Bureaucracy matters. Without it, there’s nothing to coherently manage an alphabet soup of agencies housed in departments ranging from Defense to Commerce, Homeland Security to Health and Human Services (HHS).
But that’s all gone now.
In the spring of 2018, the White House pushed Congress to cut funding for Obama-era disease security programs, proposing to eliminate $252 million in previously committed resources for rebuilding health systems in Ebola-ravaged Liberia, Sierra Leone, and Guinea. Under fire from both sides of the aisle, President Donald Trump dropped the proposal to eliminate Ebola funds a month later. But other White House efforts included reducing $15 billion in national health spending and cutting the global disease-fighting operational budgets of the CDC, NSC, DHS, and HHS. And the government’s $30 million Complex Crises Fund was eliminated.
In May 2018, Trump ordered the NSC’s entire global health security unit shut down, calling for reassignment of Rear Adm. Timothy Ziemer and dissolution of his team inside the agency. The month before, then-White House National Security Advisor John Bolton pressured Ziemer’s DHS counterpart, Tom Bossert, to resign along with his team. Neither the NSC nor DHS epidemic teams have been replaced. The global health section of the CDC was so drastically cut in 2018 that much of its staff was laid off and the number of countries it was working in was reduced from 49 to merely 10. Meanwhile, throughout 2018, the U.S. Agency for International Development and its director, Mark Green, came repeatedly under fire from both the White House and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo. And though Congress has so far managed to block Trump administration plans to cut the U.S. Public Health Service Commissioned Corps by 40 percent, the disease-fighting cadres have steadily eroded as retiring officers go unreplaced.
Public health advocates have been ringing alarm bells to no avail. Klain has been warning for two years that the United States was in grave danger should a pandemic emerge. In 2017 and 2018, the philanthropist billionaire Bill Gates met repeatedly with Bolton and his predecessor, H.R. McMaster, warning that ongoing cuts to the global health disease infrastructure would render the United States vulnerable to, as he put it, the “significant probability of a large and lethal modern-day pandemic occurring in our lifetimes.” And an independent, bipartisan panel formed by the Center for Strategic and International Studies concluded that lack of preparedness was so acute in the Trump administration that the “United States must either pay now and gain protection and security or wait for the next epidemic and pay a much greater price in human and economic costs.”
The next epidemic is now here; we’ll soon know the costs imposed by the Trump administration’s early negligence and present panic. On Jan. 29, Trump announced the creation of the President’s Coronavirus Task Force, an all-male group [ten more people have been added, including some women] of a dozen advisors, five from the White House staff. Chaired by Secretary of Health and Human Services Alex Azar, the task force includes men from the CDC, State Department, DHS, the Office of Management and Budget, and the Transportation Department. It’s not clear how this task force will function or when it will even convene.
In the absence of a formal structure, the government has resorted to improvisation. In practical terms, the U.S. government’s public health effort is led by Daniel Jernigan, the incident commander for the Wuhan coronavirus response at the CDC. Jernigan is responsible for convening meetings of the nation’s state health commissioners and briefing CDC Director Robert Redfield and his boss, Azar. Meanwhile, state-level health leaders told me that they have been sharing information with one another and deciding how best to prepare their medical and public health workers without waiting for instructions from federal leadership. The most important federal program for local medical worker and hospital epidemic training, however, will run out of money in May, as Congress has failed to vote on its funding. The HHS Office of the Assistant Secretary for Preparedness and Response (ASPR) is the bulwark between hospitals and health departments versus pandemic threats; last year HHS requested $2.58 billion, but Congress did not act.
(...)
It might have been more effective if they hadn't had to start at square one. What if they'd already had a plan for a pandemic response? What if the machinery were already in place and PPE supplies were stockpiled, ready to be delivered to hospitals?
Trump deserves much of the blame because of his dismissive attitude toward government and his obsession with undoing everything done by the previous administration.
So instead of answering the question...
...and you want to talk about Trump reorganizing the CDC to be more efficient back in 2018?
This just goes to show you are interested in the truth about the virus, you are looking to bring Trump down.
But other White House efforts included reducing $15 billion in national health spending and cutting the global disease-fighting operational budgets of the CDC, NSC, DHS, and HHS. And the government’s $30 million Complex Crises Fund was eliminated.
I'm not surprised to see people like you ... toting the Chinese Communist Party line
I'll point out again, you will blame Trump for not shutting down the country but in the same breath turn around and claim he doesn't have the authority to open the country back up. Forever speaking out of both sides of your mouth.
I said the government should have already had a plan and an agency to put it into practice.
Yes. Because a pre-existing pandemic response plan should have been in place already.
The two aren't mutually exclusive. Yes, I am interested in the truth about the virus (the biological and the political) and yes, I do hope Trump loses his job because his response to the pandemic has been incompetent and
his attitude toward government in general is ill-suited to the world we live in.
Had the agencies already been set up and ready to go with a strategic plan and had open lines of communication existed with the Chinese medical community we'd have been much further ahead.
And where have I done that? I haven't defended Chinese duplicity in regard to this epidemic (check the link at the bottom of the post);
I have credited them for eventually taking the steps needed to halt the spread of the virus which seem to have worked — for them.
But that's hardly "toting the Chinese Communist Party line" — you just make this stuff up. And, by the way, the phrase is "toeing the line".
Where have I blamed Trump for "not shutting down the country"?
I blame him for the climate of hostility between the USA and China,
And where have I claimed "he doesn't have the authority to open the country back up"? Where do you come up with this crap? For christ's sake, Baldimo, you come swaggering into a thread with your "take no prisoners" attitude but there's no substance to your arguments.
I'm supposedly "speaking out of both sides of my mouth" ("forever" at that!)
I answer your questions and I provide sourced articles by people who know more than we do about the subjects under discussion. You, in turn, hurl accusations based on nothing more than ideologically-based tropes such as red-baiting.
What was the program?
