“Nobody knew there’d be a pandemic or an epidemic of this proportion.”
— President Trump, March 19
Nobody? Well, let’s see…
The outgoing Obama administration briefed at least 30 representatives of Trump’s team for three hours on the danger of a potential global pandemic.
Obama aides … have pointed to the Jan. 13, 2017, session as a key example of their effort to press the importance of pandemic preparedness to their successors. … Obama aides say the Trump administration’s fumbling of the coronavirus outbreak is partly rooted in how unprepared — and in some cases unwilling — it was to engage in transition exercises at all in late 2016 and early 2017.
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U.S. intelligence officials repeatedly warned President Trump in multiple intelligence briefings.
The coronavirus first appeared in the President’s Daily Brief of intelligence matters in early January … U.S. intelligence officials warned in November that the coronavirus spreading in China’s Hubei region could become a “cataclysmic event,”
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Americans at the WHO transmitted real time information about the coronavirus to the Trump administration.
A number of CDC staff members are regularly detailed to work at the WHO in Geneva as part of a rotation that has operated for years. Senior Trump-appointed health officials also consulted regularly at the highest levels with the WHO as the crisis unfolded, the officials said.
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Once again, Trump lies and plays dumb. Unfortunately, a million people now have covid-19. More people have died of this disease than died in the Vietnam War. Shame Shame Shame on the incompetency of this administration.
Trump Received Intelligence Briefings On Coronavirus Twice In January
https://www.npr.org/sections/coronavirus-live-updates/2020/05/02/849619486/trump-received-intelligence-briefings-on-coronavirus-twice-in-january
Ousted vaccine director files whistleblower complaint alleging coronavirus warnings were ignored
https://www.cnn.com/2020/05/05/politics/rick-bright-complaint/index.html
I used to be an officer in the military and at one point was assigned to a cell that worked with various organizations to identify potential pandemics. During my year and a half in the cell, there were multiple viruses that were identified as potential threats, but only one ever materialized years later.
The problem is that there are always threats of pandemics lurking on the horizon, coupled with models that tend to overpredict the spread. So it is really difficult to determine which of these warnings is actionable. The result is that there are many instances of “crying wolf” when nothing happened at all.
I do not doubt news articles that highlighted some warnings from intelligence agencies. The warnings were likely vague and couched with terms like “medium confidence”. When I was in the military, a frequent complaint was that the intelligence agencies presented information in such a way that they could never be wrong. If the threat actually occurred, the analysts could always claim that the decision makers were warned. If a decision maker took action but nothing happened, the analysts could always claim that the warning was only low or medium confidence.
Given this background, I don’t think that strong actions could have taken place much earlier. The president had to make certain that COVID19 really would threaten the US before taking actions that would devastate the economy and peoples’ lives. As it was, he was called racist and xenophobic for banning air travel between the US and China in late January. However, there are now credible news reports that the Coronavirus was in the US in December. This suggests that even if the earliest warnings were heeded, it was still too late to contain the virus.
I get that you guys hate Trump. If you are going to hate him, you should do so for the right reasons. The response to the pandemic is not one of them. If you want to assign blame, you should look no further than the Chinese. When they became aware of the pandemic, they could have shared information with the world and stopped international air travel to contain the spread. Not only did they not do these things, there are multiple news reports that suggest that the Chinese deliberately took steps to conceal it.
Even if all the information the Trump administration was somehow too vague to be taken seriously, which seems doubtful to me, there’s a real pattern of incompetence here.
The United States has less than 5% of the world’s population, but about 30% of the world’s conronavirus deaths. The United States has fared very poorly compared to many other countries in which the government took the pandemic more seriously.
In 2018 Trump killed the executive branch team responsible for coordinating a response to a pandemic. Trump also cut funding for the CDC, forcing the CDC to cancel its efforts to help countries prevent infectious-disease threats from becoming epidemics in 39 of 49 countries. And we ended up with Jared Kushner filling that void.
Although Trump did shut down entry into the U.S. for most foreigners who had been in China, he waffled on everything else. For instance, he took too long to invoke wartime powers to speed production of the lifesaving breathing machines by streamlining supply chains, so the bulk of deliveries will not arrive until June.
Unfortunately the pandemic has only highlighted the weakness, failure, and chaos in the Trump administration’s disaster preparedness. It’s not really about hating Trump, it’s about incompetence and weakness. The majority of Americans disapprove of Trump’s handling of the pandemic.
And it continues. For instance, Trump playing politics with the “Reopen America” movement. Roughly half the Twitter accounts pushing to ‘reopen America’ are bots, researchers found. When I’m feeling conspiratorial I can imagine these botnets be funded by a foreign national…could Trump be playing pawn to Putin?