The national shortage of N95 respirator masks can be traced back to 2009 after the H1N1 swine flu pandemic, when the Obama administration was advised to replenish a national stockpile but did not, according to reports from Bloomberg News and the Los Angeles Times.
Thanks Donnie ?
Trump undid hundreds of things Obama left him, so you can't tell me he was unaware of this. He chose to ignore increasingly shrill warnings for 3 years.
Nice try tho.
"He chose to ignore increasingly shrill warnings for 3 years."
Got link? Because obviously the Trump-loving LA Times and sycophant Bloomberg News ignored this info.
And here I thought you were paid to be here. Apparently you aren't paid to read or pay attention because there have been MULTIPLE posts in this thread and others with links to news articles.
I will cut your meat for you just this once. Next time, try reading pieces from serious news organizations and staying informed. Learn how to Google, too.
When the inevitable inquiry into the government's response to COVID-19 happens, it will conclude that signs of a coming crisis were everywhere.
We were warned in 2012, when the Rand Corporation surveyed the international threats arrayed against the United States and concluded that only pandemics posed an existential danger, in that they were âcapable of destroying Americaâs way of life.â
We were warned in 2015, when Ezra Klein of Vox, after speaking with Bill Gates about his algorithmic model for how a new strain of flu could spread rapidly in todayâs globalized world, wrote that âa pandemic disease is the most predictable catastrophe in the history of the human race, if only because it has happened to the human race so many, many times before.â If there was anything humanity could be certain that it needed to prepare for to prevent the deaths of a lot of people in little time, it was this.
We were warned in 2017, a week before inauguration day, when Lisa Monaco, Barack Obamaâs outgoing homeland-security adviser, gathered with Donald Trumpâs incoming national-security officials and conducted an exercise modeled on the administrationâs experiences with outbreaks of swine flu, Ebola, and Zika. The simulation explored how the U.S. government should respond to a flu pandemic that halts international travel, upends global supply chains, tanks the stock market, and burdens health-care systemsâall with a vaccine many months from materializing. âThe nightmare scenario for us, and frankly to any public-health expert that you would talk to, has always been a new strain of flu or a respiratory illness because of how much easier it is to spreadâ relative to other pandemic diseases that arenât airborne, Monaco told me.
We were warned in 2018, on the 100th anniversary of the flu pandemic of 1918, which killed 50 to 100 million people around the world. My colleague Ed Yong served notice that the ânext plagueâ was coming, with influenza the most dangerous possibility, even as the United States succumbed to âforgetfulness and shortsightedness.â Luciana Borio, then the director for medical and biodefense preparedness at the National Security Council, told a symposium that âthe threat of pandemic flu is our number-one health security concern.â Serving under a president whoâd come to office on the pledge to wall off the United States, she noted that such a threat could not âbe stopped at the border.â The very next day, news broke that National Security Adviser John Bolton had shuttered the NSCâs unit for preparing and responding to pandemics, of which Borio was a part. The White House official in charge of spearheading such a response to infectious threats departed as well and was not replaced.
We were warned in 2018 and 2019, when the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security gathered public-health experts, business leaders, and U.S. government officials for simulations of the devastating humanitarian, political, social, and economic consequences of fictional novel coronaviruses that left tens of millions dead around the world. Participants exited the events thinking, ââOh my god, we really need to get working on this,ââ Eric Toner, who helped run the exercises, told me. Two months after the second simulation, a novel coronavirus (albeit with what appears to be a substantially lower lethality rate than the fictional viruses in the scenarios at Johns Hopkins) emerged in China.
We were warned in 2019 of the grave hazards of a new influenza pandemic by the U.S. intelligence community in its annual âworldwide threat assessment.â They had also cautioned us in 2018. And in 2017. And in 2016. And in 2015. And in 2014. And in 2013, when intelligence officials pleaded, âThis is not a hypothetical threat. History is replete with examples of pathogens sweeping populations that lack immunity, causing political and economic upheaval.â (The 2020 worldwide threat assessment, which reportedly yet again flagged Americaâs vulnerability to a flu pandemic, has been postponed without explanation.)
When the National Commission on the COVID-19 response materializes, it will differ from the 9/11 Commission in that it will conclude that âthe system was blinking redâ not just in the inner sanctum of the U.S. intelligence community but out in the open, as well. For years. Within government and outside government. And that, despite all that, the U.S. government was not sufficiently prepared when the boogeyman, in this case the virus SARS-CoV-2, finally came calling. President Trump has referred to the coronavirus outbreak as âan unforeseen problem,â as âsomething that nobody expected,â and as a crisis that âcame out of nowhere.â It is demonstrably none of the above.
...
Funding for pandemic preparedness has long lagged behind other homeland-security priorities. The U.S. government, for example, spends at least $100 billion a year on counterterrorism efforts versus $1 billion on pandemic and emerging-infectious-disease programs, according to one calculation in 2016. This despite the fact that the new coronavirus threatens to kill vastly more Americans than terrorism ever has.
And the Trump administration has gone furtherânot only underfunding these efforts but also proposing steep spending cuts year after year to institutions, such as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, that are tasked with handling outbreaks. Congress has resisted these efforts in the bills Trump has ultimately signed, but the presidentâs requests have nevertheless spoken to his priorities. His budget proposal for fiscal year 2021, released in February when the coronavirus outbreak had already reached the United States, called for the CDCâs overall funding to be slashed by hundreds of millions of dollars. The administration did suggest more resources for certain subsets of the CDCâs work relevant to the current crisis. Each of those increases, however, is less than the Trump administration devoted in its 2021 budget proposal to counter Chinese and Russian propaganda and disinformation, and a small fraction of the additional $459 million the administration wished to pour into offensive hypersonic weapons. (But whatâs $459 million when youâre spending billions on them already?)
The Trump administration has also downplayed global health threats through structural changes within the White Houseâs national-security architecture. It downgraded the role of homeland security adviser so that it didnât report directly to the president after Monacoâs successor, Tom Bossert, was dismissed in 2018. (Bossert was an advocate of developing a biodefense strategy for addressing biological attacks and pandemic diseases like influenza.) That same year, it closed a pandemic-response unit that the Obama administration had created after the Ebola outbreak, folding some of the remnants into other NSC directorates. Tim Morrison, who led the resulting counterproliferation and biodefense office before leaving the administration in 2019, has argued that the shake-up was an effort to reduce âbloatâ at the NSC. But the consequences were serious: When the novel coronavirus first broke out, there were no senior administration officials focused solely on combatting such threats and coordinating global health security policy across agencies.
Kaiser Health News: Was The Novel Coronavirus Really Sneaky In Its Spread To The U.S.? Experts Say No. ââ¦Public health researchers have warned for years about the threat of a pandemic. And members of the Trump administration have been sounding the alarm for months now â even while, just earlier this month, Trump was still comparing the virusâs severity to the flu, and arguing that it âwill go awayâ if people âstay calm.â We contacted the White House, which declined to comment on the record. Meanwhile, independent experts told us this claim is deeply misleadingâ¦â (Luthra, 3/19).
New York Times: Before Virus Outbreak, a Cascade of Warnings Went Unheeded ââ¦The simulationâs sobering results â contained in a draft report dated October 2019 that has not previously been reported â drove home just how underfunded, underprepared and uncoordinated the federal government would be for a life-or-death battle with a virus for which no treatment existed. ⦠Many of the potentially deadly consequences of a failure to address the shortcomings are now playing out in all-too-real fashion across the country. And it was hardly the first warning for the nationâs leaders. Three times over the past four years the U.S. government, across two administrations, had grappled in depth with what a pandemic would look like, identifying likely shortcomings and in some cases recommending specific actionâ¦â (Sanger et al., 3/19).
The Chinese government obviously made a mostly foolish choice to hide it. Instead they could've arranged a press conference with Defence Minister Wei Fenghe and announce that "we don't do body counts." Problem solved.
The national shortage of N95 respirator masks can be traced back to 2009 after the H1N1 swine flu pandemic, when the Obama administration was advised to replenish a national stockpile but did not, according to reports from Bloomberg News and the Los Angeles Times.
Thanks Donnie ?
Trump undid hundreds of things Obama left him, so you can't tell me he was unaware of this. He chose to ignore increasingly shrill warnings for 3 years.
Nice try tho.
"He chose to ignore increasingly shrill warnings for 3 years."
Got link? Because obviously the Trump-loving LA Times and sycophant Bloomberg News ignored this info.
I am sorry, but, this makes no sense, Trump is an idiot blah, blah, blah who doesn't know that? But we all have to take some responsibility here, I think there is shame in having Mardi Gras. Is Fox news your only source of information? Do you need the President and the government to tell you when to wipe your butt? I am sorry, this is just ridiculous. The only way we are going to come out of this reasonably well on the other end is for us to take personal responsibility and each of us do the right thing. You hate Trump, he is awful, I get it, that is ok get it out if you like, but remember we all still have to get ourselves together and do the right thing. Government or Jesus or whatever is not going to save us, only we can.
This kind of useless miss-the-point stuff really grinds my gears. Nobody asked Trump to save us/them. Forget that, it's the kind of shit I hear from the Hannity clones around me. Trump doesn't have the power to save anyone, but he does haveâand usedâthe power to cause much of America's system to drag its feet. Governors were worried, but kind of looked at each other and shrugged, "no problem, I guess." At lower levels, our school admin was waiting for word from the state, or at least to coordinate with other districts to keep the bureaucratic nightmare to a minimum. The state Superintendent, who I like quite a bit, was meeting with the governor to coordinate her response, but our governor is a Republican who won the primary over some hard-right zealots only because a lot of Democrats switched parties to vote him in. So those hard-right people would have destroyed him if he got out of step with the President* (despite the urgency: Colorado's outbreak was in full bloom). So our state sat and waited for someone to get serious. No one here wanted the government to save them. We all wanted the government to just acknowledge the truth and let people get the ball rolling.
* this is not to say that his inaction was politically motivated, but his opponent is making headlines and generally stirring up shit and being counterproductive. If the Governor had blazed his own trail, the opponent's words would gain traction and probably bring any recovery/mitigation effort to a grinding halt. As it is, too little too late, the policies he does enact are being adhered to, and the opponent is just a buzzing fly.
I think you both have good points. There has to be responsible and planned action at the personal and governmental level. People have to re-order their lives in ways that reduce the chance of catching Covid-19. Governments have to dispense advice on how to avoid Covid-19, give our healthcare systems the best chance of fighting the virus, and find ways to keep people from starvation, eviction, etc.
You can't blame the Trump administration entirely for this. The Obama administration apparently felt lucky that it had contained an Ebola outbreak in the US and ran a scenario exercise to determine what kind of problems the country could face if a pandemic hit. A lot of the problems that we're seeing today—confusion, lack of government coordination at the federal and state levels, insufficient medical supplies, facilities, and personnel numbers—all showed up. It's not as if Trump tore down an effective and efficient federal organization for handling a pandemic.
However, the Obama administration DID warn the incoming Trump administration—including Chief of Staff John Kelly and Secretary of State Rex Tillerson—about the results of that scenario exercise and the federal government's lack of readiness to deal with a pandemic. Trump's administration ran its own exercise—Crimson Contagion—I think it was in 2017 and found the same problems. But the current administration didn't do much AFAICT to address the problems.
The American people need and deserve more information, action and leadership from the federal and state governments. The federal government desperately needs a plan to ramp up production of medical supplies and to get money to people thrown out of work. The feds also need to tell idiots like the Govs. of FL, MS and apparently MT to lock their states down. Governor DeSantis of FL finally got his head out of his butt and issued a stay-at-home order today after publicly and repeatedly looking to the White House for guidance.
Sirdroseph is right that we all need to take personal responsibility. But that alone isn't going to contain Covid-19 or save the economy.
Trump undid hundreds of things Obama left him, so you can't tell me he was unaware of this. He chose to ignore increasingly shrill warnings for 3 years.
Nice try tho.
I am continuously amazed at the amount of energy spent looking for scapegoats in the middle of the fight. In hindsight, there are surely things prior administrations could have done better, but you can't spend 3 years eliminating capability, ignoring science, and removing everyone who might challenge decision making...only to blame Obama and Impeachment for ignoring the gathering storm. and then having no ability to respond.
In 2 weeks, if Floridians are dropping like flies, It'll be interesting to watch Trump and DeSantis attempt to avoid responsibility. Like Liberty University, those who blindly followed POTUS from the beginning will now be called to justify their actions. The President has moved on...and isn't going to look over his shoulder to see who needs help after being his front line support.
The national shortage of N95 respirator masks can be traced back to 2009 after the H1N1 swine flu pandemic, when the Obama administration was advised to replenish a national stockpile but did not, according to reports from Bloomberg News and the Los Angeles Times.
Thanks Donnie ?
Trump undid hundreds of things Obama left him, so you can't tell me he was unaware of this. He chose to ignore increasingly shrill warnings for 3 years.
This kind of useless miss-the-point stuff really grinds my gears. Nobody asked Trump to save us/them. Forget that, it's the kind of shit I hear from the Hannity clones around me. Trump doesn't have the power to save anyone, but he does haveâand usedâthe power to cause much of America's system to drag its feet. Governors were worried, but kind of looked at each other and shrugged, "no problem, I guess." At lower levels, our school admin was waiting for word from the state, or at least to coordinate with other districts to keep the bureaucratic nightmare to a minimum. The state Superintendent, who I like quite a bit, was meeting with the governor to coordinate her response, but our governor is a Republican who won the primary over some hard-right zealots only because a lot of Democrats switched parties to vote him in. So those hard-right people would have destroyed him if he got out of step with the President* (despite the urgency: Colorado's outbreak was in full bloom). So our state sat and waited for someone to get serious. No one here wanted the government to save them. We all wanted the government to just acknowledge the truth and let people get the ball rolling.
* this is not to say that his inaction was politically motivated, but his opponent is making headlines and generally stirring up shit and being counterproductive. If the Governor had blazed his own trail, the opponent's words would gain traction and probably bring any recovery/mitigation effort to a grinding halt. As it is, too little too late, the policies he does enact are being adhered to, and the opponent is just a buzzing fly.
The national shortage of N95 respirator masks can be traced back to 2009 after the H1N1 swine flu pandemic, when the Obama administration was advised to replenish a national stockpile but did not, according to reports from Bloomberg News and the Los Angeles Times.
Sadly too common. Especially the kids... teens, the huge outbreaks after Mardi Gras and Florida spring break are truly shameful.
Mardi Gras was a tough call. But there was no excuse for DeSantis keeping the beaches open for Spring Break Viral Camp.
Re: Mardi Gras, what did we know about this, in the US, in the days before February25th? Enough to cancel it? Nope. It was still considered a foreign problem (although I speculate that it was already here and we were testing sick folks for influenza A&B and reassuring them that it was something else).
So, no shame in having the Mardi Gras. Just like so many people that were still going to Disneyland/World and the parks and visiting relatives and friends. It just wasn't widespread, plus, any mention of it was colorized on FOXFakeNews to make it seem like it was a plot to make Trump look worse. And a President who downplayed it as going to miraculously disappear.
So where does shame belong? Who leads the people? Or does he not, and then WTF is he doing up there instead of having a real well-informed, clear-headed leader that the nation needs in times of crisis?
But I digress.. (Politics is a hobby, but healthcare is my life's work. This means something to me, and Trump has fucked us over bad. It's not murder, as some have said, but tantamount to manslaughter that he's done this to the nation.)
I am sorry, but, this makes no sense, Trump is an idiot blah, blah, blah who doesn't know that? But we all have to take some responsibility here, I think there is shame in having Mardi Gras. Is Fox news your only source of information? Do you need the President and the government to tell you when to wipe your butt? I am sorry, this is just ridiculous. The only way we are going to come out of this reasonably well on the other end is for us to take personal responsibility and each of us do the right thing. You hate Trump, he is awful, I get it, that is ok get it out if you like, but remember we all still have to get ourselves together and do the right thing. Government or Jesus or whatever is not going to save us, only we can.
Sadly too common. Especially the kids... teens, the huge outbreaks after Mardi Gras and Florida spring break are truly shameful.
Mardi Gras was a tough call. But there was no excuse for DeSantis keeping the beaches open for Spring Break Viral Camp.
Re: Mardi Gras, what did we know about this, in the US, in the days before February25th? Enough to cancel it? Nope. It was still considered a foreign problem (although I speculate that it was already here and we were testing sick folks for influenza A&B and reassuring them that it was something else).
So, no shame in having the Mardi Gras. Just like so many people that were still going to Disneyland/World and the parks and visiting relatives and friends. It just wasn't widespread, plus, any mention of it was colorized on FOXFakeNews to make it seem like it was a plot to make Trump look worse. And a President who downplayed it as going to miraculously disappear.
So where does shame belong? Who leads the people? Or does he not, and then WTF is he doing up there instead of having a real well-informed, clear-headed leader that the nation needs in times of crisis?
But I digress.. (Politics is a hobby, but healthcare is my life's work. This means something to me, and Trump has fucked us over bad. It's not murder, as some have said, but tantamount to manslaughter that he's done this to the nation.)
... WHO membership is only given to countries that are members of the United Nations - which does not recognise Taiwan - or whose applications are approved by the World Health Assembly.
What this means is that Taiwan has been excluded from emergency meetings and important global expert briefings on the coronavirus pandemic. Taiwanese official Stanley Kao has also said the island has been denied permission to attend the World Health Assembly's annual meetings in recent years.
...
It also means the WHO lists Taiwan's coronavirus statistics together with China's, a move Mr Kao says denies the world of accurate and timely information on the pandemic.
The exclusion, coupled with the WHO's repeated praise of China's response to the outbreak - which public health experts have criticised - has led some to accuse the organisation of political bias towards China, a major contributor to the organisation.
...
No wonder the US still doesn't have processes to build, distribute, and pay for ventilators.
WHO membership is only given to countries that are members of the United Nations - which does not recognise Taiwan - or whose applications are approved by the World Health Assembly.
What this means is that Taiwan has been excluded from emergency meetings and important global expert briefings on the coronavirus pandemic. Taiwanese official Stanley Kao has also said the island has been denied permission to attend the World Health Assembly's annual meetings in recent years.
...
It also means the WHO lists Taiwan's coronavirus statistics together with China's, a move Mr Kao says denies the world of accurate and timely information on the pandemic.
The exclusion, coupled with the WHO's repeated praise of China's response to the outbreak - which public health experts have criticised - has led some to accuse the organisation of political bias towards China, a major contributor to the organisation.
