What We Know About the Trump Administration's Mishandling of the Coronavirus
NYMAG
February 24, 2020 1:52am
By Matt Stieb and Chas Danner
After new outbreaks of the Covid-19 novel coronavirus in South Korea, Italy, and Iran, many experts are warning that a pandemic may be inevitable. “When several countries have widespread transmission, then spillover to other countries is inevitable,” Anthony Fauci, head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, told Vox.
“One cannot shut out the rest of the world.”
... “Our window of opportunity [for containing the virus] is narrowing so we need to act quickly before it closes completely,” World Health Organization Director General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said on Friday. ...According to Harvard epidemiologist Marc Lipsitch, if the outbreak becomes a global pandemic, 40 to 70 percent of the world’s population could eventually become infected — though not all those infected would get sick, and not all those who get sick will develop the most severe and dangerous form of the illness caused by the illness. If the current 2 percent death rate among symptomatic cases holds, the resulting death toll will become a worldwide tragedy.
And as Foreign Policy’s Laurie Garrett recently explained, the administration has spent years enacting policies and putting forth budgets that have weakened the U.S. government’s ability to prepare for and respond to an outbreak like this one. In addition, as Garrett highlights, the administration’s notoriously dysfunctional personnel drama and haphazard efforts to reduce the size of the government haven’t helped either:
In May 2018, Trump ordered the NSC’s entire global health security unit shut down, calling for reassignment of Rear Adm. Timothy Ziemer and dissolution of his team inside the agency.
The month before, then-White House National Security Advisor John Bolton pressured Ziemer’s DHS counterpart, Tom Bossert, to resign along with his team. Neither the NSC nor DHS epidemic teams have been replaced. The global health section of the CDC was so drastically cut in 2018 that much of its staff was laid off and the number of countries it was working in was reduced from 49 to merely 10.
Meanwhile, throughout 2018, the U.S. Agency for International Development and its director, Mark Green, came repeatedly under fire from both the White House and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo. And though Congress has so far managed to block Trump administration plans to cut the U.S. Public Health Service Commissioned Corps by 40 percent, the disease-fighting cadres have steadily eroded as retiring officers go unreplaced....
As administration officials reportedly share concerns that coronavirus is spreading undetected inside the U.S., the possibility of political blowback could soon affect the White House’s response to the outbreak. “The biggest current threat to the president’s reelection is this thing getting out of control and creating a health and economic impact,” Chris Meekins, a former Trump administration HHS emergency-preparedness official, told Politico.
At the point of a substantial outbreak, Democratic messaging on the administration’s mismanagement could be equally as concerning to the Trump campaign.
If a health crisis emerges, expect Democratic candidates to easily and effectively hit the president on proposed CDC cuts — the White House 2021 budget proposed this month suggested a 19 percent reduction — and administration policies designed to undermine scientific research.
The article is worth the entire read.
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/02/what-...virus.html
NYMAG
February 24, 2020 1:52am
By Matt Stieb and Chas Danner
After new outbreaks of the Covid-19 novel coronavirus in South Korea, Italy, and Iran, many experts are warning that a pandemic may be inevitable. “When several countries have widespread transmission, then spillover to other countries is inevitable,” Anthony Fauci, head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, told Vox.
“One cannot shut out the rest of the world.”
... “Our window of opportunity [for containing the virus] is narrowing so we need to act quickly before it closes completely,” World Health Organization Director General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said on Friday. ...According to Harvard epidemiologist Marc Lipsitch, if the outbreak becomes a global pandemic, 40 to 70 percent of the world’s population could eventually become infected — though not all those infected would get sick, and not all those who get sick will develop the most severe and dangerous form of the illness caused by the illness. If the current 2 percent death rate among symptomatic cases holds, the resulting death toll will become a worldwide tragedy.
And as Foreign Policy’s Laurie Garrett recently explained, the administration has spent years enacting policies and putting forth budgets that have weakened the U.S. government’s ability to prepare for and respond to an outbreak like this one. In addition, as Garrett highlights, the administration’s notoriously dysfunctional personnel drama and haphazard efforts to reduce the size of the government haven’t helped either:
In May 2018, Trump ordered the NSC’s entire global health security unit shut down, calling for reassignment of Rear Adm. Timothy Ziemer and dissolution of his team inside the agency.
The month before, then-White House National Security Advisor John Bolton pressured Ziemer’s DHS counterpart, Tom Bossert, to resign along with his team. Neither the NSC nor DHS epidemic teams have been replaced. The global health section of the CDC was so drastically cut in 2018 that much of its staff was laid off and the number of countries it was working in was reduced from 49 to merely 10.
Meanwhile, throughout 2018, the U.S. Agency for International Development and its director, Mark Green, came repeatedly under fire from both the White House and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo. And though Congress has so far managed to block Trump administration plans to cut the U.S. Public Health Service Commissioned Corps by 40 percent, the disease-fighting cadres have steadily eroded as retiring officers go unreplaced....
As administration officials reportedly share concerns that coronavirus is spreading undetected inside the U.S., the possibility of political blowback could soon affect the White House’s response to the outbreak. “The biggest current threat to the president’s reelection is this thing getting out of control and creating a health and economic impact,” Chris Meekins, a former Trump administration HHS emergency-preparedness official, told Politico.
At the point of a substantial outbreak, Democratic messaging on the administration’s mismanagement could be equally as concerning to the Trump campaign.
If a health crisis emerges, expect Democratic candidates to easily and effectively hit the president on proposed CDC cuts — the White House 2021 budget proposed this month suggested a 19 percent reduction — and administration policies designed to undermine scientific research.
The article is worth the entire read.
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/02/what-...virus.html
