How to Horribly Mismanage the Response to a Lethal Virus Pandemic

The Trump administration has barred the top US disease expert from speaking freely to the public after he warned the coronavirus may be impossible to contain.



Trump Didn’t Just Botch the Coronavirus Response. He Enabled Its Spread.

Even as China was announcing that its deaths from the novel coronavirus had surpassed its toll from SARS, President Donald Trump released a proposed budget for 2021 that slashed funding for our chief defender against epidemics by 18 percent. Within the overall proposed cuts detailed on Feb. 10 for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention was a reduction in spending to guard against “emerging and zoonotic diseases” from $635,772,000 to $550,464,000. 

Zoonotic diseases are those that have crossed from animals to humans, as the novel coronavirus is believed to have done. 

The $85,308,000 proposed budget cut is less than the cost of 5 miles of border wall. The budget proposal would save the cost of another 2 miles of border wall by zeroing out a $40 million funding line for the Epidemic and Lab Capacity Program. The ELCP supports state labs that monitor health emergencies at the local level. A state lab in Texas confirmed the first case of Ebola in the U.S. in 2014. 

For the cost of less than 7 miles of border wall, the proposed budget would leave all of us less protected against a potential epidemic. 

The Trump administration made its priorities even more explicit when Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar discounted a suggestion that border wall funds could be diverted to fight the spread of the coronavirus. 

We might have had earlier warning of the outbreak, but previous budget cuts caused the CDC to end its global security program in China in 2017. 

In another failure of foresight two years ago, the White House eliminated the National Security Council’s position for combating global health crises. The NSC’s Senior Director for Global Health Security and Biothreats post was held by the highly regarded Rear Admiral Tim Ziemer—whose sudden departure in May of 2018 happened to coincide with a new Ebola outbreak in Africa. That outbreak proved to be no threat to America, so most of us quickly forgot about it. So what if there was no longer anybody on the security council to guard against such threats? And as long as the rich are getting their tax breaks and the stock market is booming, who cares if the CDC is being cut year after year? 

But fear of this new bug caused the stock market to tank this week. And worrisome news came on Wednesday even as Trump was insisting there is little cause to worry because of his bold, prescient leadership. California made the startling announcement that a resident of Solano County had tested positive for novel coronavirus without having traveled abroad or coming in contact with somebody known to be infected. 

The chronically underfunded public health system had needed four days to make the diagnosis, as the swab had to be sent to the CDC, which is hampered both by a shortage of tests and reliability problems with the ones it does have.

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At a rally, Trump says the democrats are politicizing the Coronavirus and calls it “their new hoax”.

This is so deranged, it’s hard to know what to say—other than it’s deranged even for @realDonaldTrump. https://t.co/Zc3cIbtn1q

— George Conway (@gtconway3d) February 29, 2020

THIS MOTHERFUCKER IS SO INCREDIBLY IRRESPONSIBLE HE IS LITERALLY GOING TO KILL PEOPLE WITH HIS NEGLIGENCE AND DISINFORMATION. 

I suppose maybe the only "good thing" is that it's his mindless cult who will believe him and not take enough precautions against the virus and endanger themselves. That might be ok except for the fact that they can also spread it to people who aren't in his braindead cult.