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Comment by vikramkr | Hacker News Reader

The agency was also gutted, and the group set up to respond to threats like this let go with the idea that they could be hired back whenever.

I really hope that the sterility issues the fda found in the cdc labs that held up testing[0] aren't indicative of the standards of the BSL 4 facilities handling smallpox, anthrax, etc ...

[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/18/health/cdc-coronavirus-la...

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That isn’t entirely true.

https://www.reuters.com/article/uk-factcheck-trump-fired-pan...

It seems true to me. There was a team dedicated to pandemic response and now there isn’t. The fact that some of the members of the team were reassigned to a broader focus area that included pandemic response doesn’t make that false.

Credible source?

"The angry Left just can't stop attacking, even in a crisis."

That's a John Bolton tweet quoted in the piece. Full context:

> On March 14, 2020, John Bolton described the changes made to the team as streamlining. He tweeted: “Claims that streamlining NSC structures impaired our nation's bio defense are false. Global health remained a top NSC priority, and its expert team was critical to effectively handling the 2018-19 Africa Ebola crisis. The angry Left just can't stop attacking, even in a crisis.”

Even so, it sounds like the US pandemic response was put in a worse place by that change, and that’s the real point. I’m not saying it was excellent before; they never had a chance to prove themselves.

> It is true that the Trump administration has seen fit to shrink the NSC staff. But the bloat that occurred under the previous administration clearly needed a correction

This seems like a poor call. Shrinking staff and joining divisions together sounds like a easy way to get parts of your product that are unowned and unmaintained. When it comes to protecting against pandemics, I’m not sure the primary goal ought to be saving money.

I would be fascinated to learn more about what the officials in the organization did about COVID.

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