> But it did happen with Covid
what do you mean? We did not have stockpiles of drugs because the drugs were not known and it took quite a bit of research to figure out what works and what does not.
what do you mean? We did not have stockpiles of drugs because the drugs were not known and it took quite a bit of research to figure out what works and what does not.
May 2018 The Trump Administration disbands the White House pandemic response team.
July 2019 The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) epidemiologist embedded in China’s disease control agency left the post, and the Trump Administration eliminated the role.
Oct. 2019 “Currently, there are insufficient funding sources designated for the federal government to use in response to a severe influenza pandemic.”
Jan. 22, 2020 “We have it totally under control. It’s one person coming in from China. It’s going to be just fine.”
Ah yes, yet another person who a) uses Snopes to "fact check" and b) looked at the Snopes piece's headline and nothing else. One would think reading only that, or the Twitter thread (!) the piece is based on, that to save money (or because the Trump administration hated science, or something) the entire "US Pandemic Response Team" agency was eliminated and everyone in a large DC office building was fired.
Actually reading the contemporary NBC News https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/politics-news/tom-bossert-t... and Washington Post https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/to-your-health/wp/2018/0... articles the Snopes piece cites in the body, they seem to have been a handful of people in one team in the National Security Council hierarchy, that the new National Security Advisor reassigned to related agencies, as part of a desire to have his own hierarchical structure. Ziemer resigned because he wanted to keep his team the way it was.
COVID19 was not a surprise; that is, it was known to exist in China some time before the first cases appeared in the US. It is not unreasonable for a government to assemble a team to respond to something like a pandemic as needed, as opposed to having people dedicated solely to the purpose and nothing else. And that's exactly what the US did, implementing the ban on non-American travelers who'd been to China in late January 2020, among other things.
You may or may not agree with this. But please don't claim that this is somehow prima facie proof of the Trump administration's malfeasance/evilness.
PS - No, Trump did not "cut the CDC budget" either. https://apnews.com/d36d6c4de29f4d04beda3db00cb46104
The Trump administration indeed eliminated the Global Health Security and Biodefense unit, known as the “pandemic response” team. Some of its members were reassigned to roles that included pandemic response, but the change had only one single honest purpose, which was to placate Trump's obsession with undoing whatever President Obama's administration set up. There was no other purpose than that, and the government lost some experts in so doing. It was a pretty stupid thing to do, though the Trump Administration later claimed they were "streamlining," to cover up for what can only be described as tribal boneheadedness.
https://multimedia.3m.com/mws/media/869238O/3m-health-care-p...