"We were given very little when we came in..." Donald Trump on pandemic response plans.
“We literally left them a 69-page Pandemic Playbook…. that they ignored. And an office called the Pandemic Preparedness Office…that they abolished. And a global monitoring system called PREDICT…that they cut by 75%” Ron Klain, former Obama administration Ebola response coordinator
“The maddening thing is Obama left them a WH office for pandemics, a literal playbook, a cabinet-level exercise, and a global infrastructure to deal with ‘something like this'” Ben Rhodes, former Obama administration national security adviser
Trump is trying to manufacture evidence that his administration was prepared for the pandemic as though the evidence of your eyes isn't enough to rebut the lie. His response consisted mainly of campaigning, golfing, and pretending that the virus would "like a miracle" go away. But the lie about the transition from the Obama administration is particularly pernicious.
McEnany held up a binder purportedly about a 2018 report the administration put together and an "after action" report produced in 2019 after pandemic wargaming. That's nice. 2018 was when Trump's administration dissolved the NSC's pandemic response team. The administration FAILED the 2019 wargaming exercise, which exposed the huge potential for underfunding, muddled leadership, and equipment shortages, none of which seem to have been addressed in the interim.
“The exercise involved officials from more than a dozen federal agencies, several states and hospitals responding to a scenario in which a pandemic flu that began in China was spread by international tourists and was deemed a pandemic 47 days after the first outbreak. By then, in the scenario, 110 million Americans were expected to become ill... It also became apparent that the U.S. was incapable of quickly manufacturing adequate equipment and medicines for such an emergency, according to the draft report.”
These might not be the best items to highlight when trying to pretend that your incompetent administration hasn't been utterly incompetent.
The Obama administration, one week before Trump's inauguration, LITERALLY WALKED THE TRUMP TEAM THROUGH A PANDEMIC SCENARIO. The exercise was modeled on the Obama administration's experiences with outbreaks of swine flu, Ebola, and Zika. It addressed how the US government should respond to a pandemic that halts international travel, upends global supply chains, tanks the stock market, and burdens health-care systems, with no vaccine in sight for many months.
The Trump team appears to have slept through it.
“This happened: it was part of a transition exercise that outgoing officials from the administration of President Barack Obama convened for the benefit of the incoming team of President Donald Trump. As Homeland Security and Counterterrorism Adviser to President Obama, I led the exercise, in which my colleagues and I sat side by side with the incoming national security team to discuss the most pressing homeland security concerns they would face... We included a pandemic scenario because I believed then, and I have warned since, that emerging infectious disease was likely to pose one of the gravest risks for the new administration.”
In 2012, the Rand Corporation surveyed the international threats arrayed against the United States and concluded that only pandemics posed an existential threat to the United States.
In 2015, Ezra Klein, after speaking with Bill Gates about the threat of pandemics, wrote that “a pandemic disease is the most predictable catastrophe in the history of the human race...”
Lisa Monaco, former national security advisor to Obama, stated regarding the reasoning behind walking Trump’s team through a pandemic in 2017, “The 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 spread...”
In 2018, Luciana Borio, then the director for medical and biodefense preparedness at the National Security Council, told a symposium that “the threat of pandemic flu is our number-one health security concern.” The very next day, Trump’s administration shuttered the pandemic response unit and fired the White House official in charge of spearheading a response to pandemics.
in 2018 and 2019, the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security ran simulations of a novel coronavirus pandemic and warned of the dire need for the United States to improve its capabilities relative to responding to such a threat.
In 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, and again in January of 2020, the US intelligence community, in its annual “worldwide threat assessment” highlighted the grave hazards of a pandemic. “This is not a hypothetical threat. History is replete with examples of pathogens sweeping populations that lack immunity, causing political and economic upheaval.” The Trump administration, with no explanation given, postponed the release of the 2020 threat assessment.
Rather than act on these warnings, the Trump administration dismissed experts, reduced budgets of the CDC and the Department of Health and Human Services, and cut funding and staffing for pandemic surveillance.
Then, in March 2020, Trump had the unmitigated gall to suggest “no one could have seen this coming,” and is now running a dog and pony show to try to bamboozle the public into believing that everyone else is to blame, and that only his intervention has resulted in meaningful action. Eighty-seven thousand dead Americans might disagree.
There is one thing McEnany was right about-- they replaced the Obama plan with a "Trump-style plan"-- Trump's name blazoned on the cover of a binder full of empty pages, manufactured as part of a communication plan which is long on praise of Trump and short on actual details.
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