CDC to cut by 80 percent efforts to prevent global disease outbreak (2018) | Hacker News Reader

CDC to cut by 80 percent efforts to prevent global disease outbreak (2018)

washingtonpost.com

97 pointsuptown15 comments

> Countries where the CDC is planning to scale back include some of the world’s hot spots for emerging infectious disease, such as China, Pakistan, Haiti, Rwanda and Congo.

Why was the United States subsidizing China which is the world’s second largest economy and has a military budget of $228 Billion making it the second largest military spender ( https://www.worldatlas.com/articles/countries-with-the-bigge... )

To get a seat at the table for policy decisions. For example, we want them to stop sick people flying to the US. Paying for part of an operation is a common way to have some influence. Also, some deals require them to spend a fraction of it on US suppliers.

The survival of the current US administration is at risk. Especially from anti-science policies like this health one and more abstract ones like climate change.

I say "Good riddance!". We can only hope this happens in time to save more lives.

Why is the US apparently responsibile for this financially in the first place? For the future, will other countries join financially to up our global defenses against future outbreaks?

It sounds like the US took up a global cause on its own and when the clock ran out they didn't renew because that emergency had subsided.

Is this what was being pinned as Trump's "fault" in recent press and social media?

He did a few things to eliminate the pandemic response team in 2018. This was one of the things that happened:

https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/trump-fire-pandemic-team/

The US used to pay for this because the downsides of not doing it are higher than the cost. Also, initiatives like these increase the US’s political and economic power overseas.

"Trump’s budgets have proposed cuts to public health, only to be overruled by Congress, where there’s strong bipartisan support for agencies such as the CDC and NIH. Instead, financing has [bold]increased[/bold].

Indeed, the money that government disease detectives first tapped to fight the latest outbreak was a congressional fund created for health emergencies.

Some public health experts say a bigger concern than White House budgets is the steady erosion of a CDC grant program for state and local public health emergency preparedness — the front lines in detecting and battling new disease. But that decline was set in motion by a congressional budget measure that predates Trump." https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/trump-cut-cdc-budget/ The blame game is beyond getting old...it's moldy.

I'm at a loss how my good faith reply gets immediately downvoted away. The game has broken our collective ability to make sense of anything. The wrong scent gets pushed away without any authentic attempt to cohere.

Why is it so hard to think longer term? What's good for the world is often great for the United States. Catching and quarantining this in time would have saved us from lots of deaths and a almost certain recession coming up this year.

While this may be true, and perhaps even for the dollar the United States benefits more than the cost (while the rest of the world gets a bit of a free ride). But as a taxpayer, I'd rather the US spend that dollar elsewhere, even if the highest ROI is in spending on world pandemic prevention.

That's to prevent the current situation where in game theory terms, we're being the sucker and so it's in everyone else's best interest to leech. We need to reach a new nash equilibrium where everyone is contributing together (which is eventually more optimal for everyone involved, despite the short term hit).

If we are going to use game theory terms, then we are bound to acknowledge that not everything is a non-cooperative game.

Isn't one country paying the bill the definition of a non cooperative game? It's one player repeatedly 'tit' without any corresponding 'tat'

Comparing only the money spent seems awfully naive. The US is definitely not the "loser" in its global hegemony.

Word! The exorbitant privilege of issuing the world's reserve currency has a price, you got to keep the pump primed. This setup used to work ok, it probably peaked in 1999 or so.

If for every tit dollar you spend on outer prevention you can stop some tat percentage of disease spread both inwards and outwards, and then that has a provable impact on your own economy, I'd say playing the geopolitical sugar daddy is no selfless act neither in ther short term nor the long term.

I understand the need for assurance that those dollars are effectively working towards the intended goal, but assuming you are a sucker for paying the bill is only right if there was nothing of nutritional value to you in the menu.

So I guess the question is about working the data and crunching the numbers to know whether there is or isn't impact on your own economy and the welfare of your population, and not about not feeling like a sucker on the supranational ego scene.

Every country in the word is guilty of this then, not just the US.

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