Americans should prepare for coronavirus spread in U.S., CDC says

Decisions such as.....

WORTH REPEATING INDEED. IN 2018, TRUMP FIRED THE ENTIRE US PANDEMIC RESPONSE TEAM. Today, Every American is paying the price for his abject incompetence. Instead of strengthening our institutions he attacked them and killed them off. The hour of accountability is coming.

WORTH REPEATING: In 2018, Trump fired the entire US pandemic response team.
These were the experts with decades of experience dealing with precisely the kind of situation we are in today. Trump did not replace them? He eliminated the positions.

Trump is abjectly unfit for office.

 

As usual, your response is slanted and misleading.

After Rear Adm. Timothy Ziemer left the National Security Council (NSC) amid a broad reorganization of the national security team, John Bolton dissolved the global health security team that Ziemer oversaw. Those individuals responsibilities focused on Ebola, and they were not fired . . . they were assigned new responsibilities because Ebola was no longer deemed the threat it once was. The change was significant, but the organization was still intact, just no longer represented in the NSC.

In the final week of December 2017, President Trump did fire the remaining ten council members of the Presidential Advisory Council on HIV/AIDS. Members of this committee, founded in 1995, served as volunteers and advised the President on the National HIV/AIDS Strategy. In this case, President Trump did fire (please note volunteer) members of the committee on another specific concern that has long since abated.

You would have your readers believe that all federal employees who would respond to a pandemic were fired.

Thanks Joe . . . thanks an awful lot. Your posts are well worth reading . . . by other closed-minded liberals.

 

You're confusing two different issues as usual.
Trump disbanded NSC pandemic unit that experts had praised

WASHINGTON (AP) — Public health and national security experts shake their heads when President Donald Trump says the coronavirus “came out of nowhere” and “blindsided the world.”

They’ve been warning about the next pandemic for years and criticized the Trump administration’s decision in 2018 to dismantle a National Security Council directorate at the White House charged with preparing for when, not if, another pandemic would hit the nation.

“It would be nice if the office was still there,” Dr. Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases at the National Institute of Health, told Congress this week. “I wouldn’t necessarily characterize it as a mistake (to eliminate the unit). I would say we worked very well with that office.”

The NSC directorate for global health and security and bio-defense survived the transition from President Barack Obama to Trump in 2017.

Trump’s elimination of the office suggested, along with his proposed budget cuts for the CDC, that he did not see the threat of pandemics in the same way that many experts in the field did.

“One year later I was mystified when the White House dissolved the office, leaving the country less prepared for pandemics like COVID-19,” Beth Cameron, the first director of the unit, wrote in an op-ed Friday in The Washington Post.

She said the directorate was set up to be the “smoke alarm” and get ahead of emergencies and sound a warning at the earliest sign of fire — “all with the goal of avoiding a six-alarm fire.”

It’s impossible to assess the impact of the 2018 decision to disband the unit, she said. Cameron noted that biological experts remain at the White House, but she says it’s clear that eliminating the office contributed to what she called a “sluggish domestic response.” She said that shortly before Trump took office, the unit was watching a rising number of cases in China of a deadly strain of the flu and a yellow fever outbreak in Angola.

“It’s unclear whether the decision to disband the directorate, which was made in May 2018, after John Bolton became national security adviser, was a tactical move to downgrade the issue or whether it was part of the White House’s interest in simplifying and shrinking the National Security Council staff,” Cameron says.

The NSC during the Obama administration grew to about 250 professionals, according to Trump’s current national security adviser, Robert O’Brien. The staff has been cut to about 110 or 115 staffers, he said.

When Trump was asked on Friday whether closing the NSC global health unit slowed the U.S. response, the president called it a “nasty” question because his administration had acted quickly and saved lives.

“I don’t know anything about it,” Trump said.

Earlier, when asked about it, he said: “This is something that you can never really think is going to happen.”

On Saturday, John Bolton, a former Trump national security adviser, dismissed claims that “streamlining NSC structures impaired our nation’s bio defense are false.″ In a tweet, he said 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.″

For many years, the national intelligence director’s worldwide threat assessment has warned that a flu pandemic or other large-scale outbreak of a contagious disease could lead to massive rates of death and disability that would severely affect the world economy. Public health experts have been blowing whistles too.

Back in mid-2018, Fauci told Congress: “When you have a respiratory virus that can be spread by droplets and aerosol and ... there’s a degree of morbidity associated with that, you can have a catastrophe. ... The one that we always talk about is the 1918 pandemic, which killed between 50 and 100 million people. ... Influenza first, or something like influenza, is the one that keeps me up at night.”

The White House says the NSC remains involved in responding to the coronavirus pandemic.

A senior administration official said Friday that the NSC’s global health security directorate was absorbed into another division where similar responsibilities still exist, but under different titles. The work of coordinating policy and making sure that decisions made by Trump’s coronavirus task force are implemented is still the job of the NSC.

Some lawmakers aren’t convinced.

Rep. Gerald Connolly, D-Va., and Rep. Steve Chabot, R-Ohio, have introduced a bill that would require future administrations to have experts always in place to prepare for new pandemics.

“Two years ago, the administration dismantled the apparatus that had been put in place five years before in the face of the Ebola crisis,” Connolly said. “I think, in retrospect, that was an unwise move. This bill would restore that and institutionalize it.”

Connolly said the bill is not meant to be critical of the Trump administration. He said it’s a recognition that Trump had to name a coronavirus responder just like Obama had to name one for Ebola in 2014. “We can’t go from pandemic to pandemic,” Connolly said.

The House Foreign Affairs Committee on March 4 passed the measure, which is co-sponsored by 37 Democrats and five Republicans. The full House has not yet voted on the bill.

Chabot said one of the bill’s main goals is to would require personnel to be permanently in place preparing for pandemics.

“Specifically, we need someone, preferable at the NSC, to quarterback the U.S. government’s response since that response inevitably involves several agencies across the government,” Chabot said. “Our bill would make this position permanent.”

Former Obama administration officials insist that the Trump White House would have been able to act more quickly had the office still been intact.

“I think if we’d had a unit and dedicated professionals looking at this issue, gaming out scenarios well before ... we might have identified some of these testing issues,” says Lisa Monaco, President Obama’s homeland security adviser, said at a recent forum on coronavirus. “There would have been folks sounding the alarm in December when we saw this coming out of China, saying ’Hey, what do we need to be doing here in this country to address it?”

Ron Klain, who managed the government response to contain and mitigate the spread of Ebola in 2014, agreed.

“If I were back in my old job at the White House ... I’d be pushing to have us do 30 million tests — to test people in nursing homes, to test people with unexplained respiratory ailments, to test the people who regularly visit nursing homes, to test healthcare workers,” Klain said recently at the event hosted by the Center for American Progress in Washington.

 

If there was an award for just saying things regardless of the truth of the matter, this Administration would win it hands down.

 

What happened to the team at the NSC is what happens at every major governmental department in this mafioso administration: Trump and his handpicked cronies forced out all former Obama officials and anyone with an iota of credibility and experience.​

 

Well, in all seriousness.... Isn't it a presidents obligation to say the things the mass public needs to hear to calm their ragged nerves? Wasn't it FDR that uttered, "We have nothing to fear but fear itself" just as we were going into the great depression? Heck, folks did have something to fear. The ability to feed their families!

 

Joe the Hater doesn't care if he tears the country apart. He doesn’t care if people die, and he would love to see the economy go down the tubes. He wants Trump to fail, and he’ll take it any way he can get it. All he can think of is his imagined political advantage.

His conduct reminds me of Linsey Graham’s comment during Nancy Pelosi’s holdup on the impeachment trial. Linsey said she was “playing with a dead cat” and that “she would be better off if she stopped doing it.”

Joe is insane with hate. He can't think straight. We had best hope that he has no responsible position in any level of government. If he did, he’d be doing all he could to sabotage the current Federal Government response to this situation.

Joe is nothing but troll, and all his posts on this subject are garbage. All of us would do well to ignore him. He is a sick, sad individual on this topic.

 

Every time you post this canned garbage that you get from your far left sources, I'm going to post this response

Dead Cat, Stop playing with it.

You are not changing any minds here, except how people perceive you. You act like you want people to die so that you can verify your personal, twisted vendetta against President Trump.

If you were smart, you would give it a rest. People are learning, if they didn’t know it already, that you are not very bright.

 

That’s why we elected President Trump in the first place . . . Because Obama officials almost always had only an iota of either credibility or experience, and almost never both.

 

Okay, I am done with you.

Life is too short waste it on you. I think that you are @JoeNation with a new name. You are a troll and a waste of my time.

Good bye.

 

aren't all opinions welcome?

 

I'm not joe nation. see my profile on the coin forum-bullion section

 

How profoundly inane and imbecile. Maybe you can find some Uber-left meme of a bus running over puppies with a caricature of Trump driving perhaps? Good lord man. Have you no fortitude about you at all? Humans are suffering and you have no better lot in life than to wag a finger. How profound. I too am done with you.

 

trump lied and people died. the buck stops there.

 

So vote and change it. Your teenage bravado talk and insightful pre-teen cartoons are not painting a very flattering picture of you. Do something worthwhile and make a change. Until then, play with your cartoons.

 

. . . As liberal leaders tell their brainwashed followers, “stay calm, more icebergs are on order”.​