Trump spent the past 2 years slashing the government agencies responsible for handling the coronavirus outbreak
- President Donald Trump insisted on Tuesday that the coronavirus, known as COVID-19 virus, is under control because China is "working very hard" to contain its spread.
- The president's comments are at odds with reality. The same day, the CDC announced that it expected the virus to spread enough within the US to cause a "disruption to everyday life."
- The Trump administration has also spent the past several years dismantling the very government programs responsible for combatting a global health crisis.
President Donald Trump spent much of Tuesday reassuring the public that the coronavirus is under control.
"China is working very, very hard," Trump told reporters at a business roundtable at the US embassy in New Delhi. "I have spoken to President Xi, and they are working very hard. If you know anything about him, I think he will be in pretty good shape. They have had a rough patch, but now it looks like they are getting it more and more under control. I think that is a problem that is going to go away."
Trump's comments are at odds with reality.
The coronavirus, or the COVID-19 virus, originated in Wuhan, China, and has killed 2,700 people and spread to 30 countries. There are at least 36 confirmed cases in the US, including repatriated citizens.
On Tuesday, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention announced that it expected the virus to spread further within the US.
"It's not so much of a question of if this will happen in this country any more but a question of when this will happen," Dr. Nancy Messonnier, the director of the National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases, said during a press call on Tuesday. "We are asking the American public to prepare for the expectation that this might be bad."
Messonnier also said the agency was "preparing as if we are going to see community spread in the near term," adding that the outbreak could soon lead to a "disruption to everyday life."
Fears of a pandemic come after the Trump administration spent the past several years gutting the very government programs that are tasked with combatting such a crisis.
In 2018, for instance,
the CDC cut 80% of its efforts to prevent global disease outbreaks because it was running out of money. Ultimately, the department went from working in 49 countries to just 10.
Here are some other actions the Trump administration undertook to dismantle government-spending programs related to fighting the spread of global diseases,
according to Foreign Policy:
- Shutting down the entire global-health-security unit of the National Security Council.
- Eliminating the US government's $30 million Complex Crises Fund.
- Reducing national health spending by $15 billion.
- Consistently attacking Mark Green, the director of the US Agency for International Development.
The CDC is working on a new test to screen for the coronavirus, but
according to New York magazine,
problems with the test's development resulted in only three out of 100 public-health labs being equipped to screen for the virus. Moreover, each test costs as much as $250, and the Health and Human Services Department is already running out of money to finance an adequate response to the outbreak.
The Trump administration recently requested $2.5 billion in emergency funds — $1.25 billion in new funding and $1.25 billion to be diverted from other federal programs — to aid in preparing and responding to coronavirus cases in the US.
But Democratic lawmakers and health experts
skewered the administration for not going far enough to combat the crisis.
The
economic consequences of an unaddressed outbreak would dwarf US spending on efforts to control it, Marc Lipsitch, an epidemiologist and the director of the Center for Communicable Disease Dynamics at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health,
told Insider.
"It seems quite inadequate and absurd to divert funds from one serious epidemic to another," Lipsitch said of the emergency-funding package. "Money to control it is a very important investment."
The Trump administration has spent the past several years gutting the government programs responsible for combatting a global health crisis.
www.businessinsider.com
Trump Has Sabotaged America's Response to the Coronavirus ...
As it improvises its way through a public health crisis, the United States has never been less prepared for a pandemic.
foreignpolicy.com
Jan 31, 2020 · 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.
Did Trump Administration Fire the US Pandemic Response Team?
As a new coronavirus spread in 2020, so did concerns about the United States' preparedness for a potential pandemic.
Amid
warnings from public health officials that a 2020 outbreak of a new coronavirus could soon become a pandemic involving the U.S., alarmed readers asked Snopes to verify a rumor that
U.S. President Donald Trump had “fired the entire pandemic response team two years ago and then didn’t replace them.”
The claim came from a series of
tweets posted by Judd Legum, who runs Popular Information, a newsletter he describes as being about “politics and power.” Legum’s commentary was representative of sharp
criticism from Democratic legislators (and some Republicans) that the Trump administration had
ill-prepared the country for a pandemic even as one was looming on the horizon.
Legum outlined a series of cost-cutting decisions made by the Trump administration in preceding years that had gutted the nation’s infectious disease defense infrastructure. The “pandemic response team” firing claim referred to
news accounts from Spring 2018 reporting that White House officials tasked with directing a national response to a pandemic had been ousted.
Rear Adm. Timothy Ziemer abruptly departed from his post leading the global health security team on the National Security Council in May 2018 amid a reorganization of the council by then-National Security Advisor John Bolton, and Ziemer’s team was disbanded. Tom Bossert, whom the Washington Post reported “had called for a comprehensive biodefense strategy against pandemics and biological attacks,” had been
fired one month prior.
It’s thus true that the Trump administration axed the executive branch team responsible or coordinating a response to a pandemic and did not replace it, eliminating Ziemer’s position and reassigning others, although Bolton was the executive at the top of the National Security Council chain of command at the time.
Legum
stated in a follow-up tweet that
“Trump also cut funding for the CDC, forsing the CDC to cancel its efforts to help countries prevent infectious-disease threats from becoming epidemics in 39 of 49 countries in 2018. Among the countries abandoned? China.” That was partly true, according to 2018 news
reports stating that funding for the CDC’s global disease outbreak prevention efforts had been reduced by 80%, including funding for the agency’s efforts in China.
But that was the result of the anticipated depletion of previously allotted funding, not a direct cut by the Trump administration. And as the CDC told
FactCheck.org, the cuts were ultimately avoided because Congress provided other funding.
On Feb. 24, 2020, the Trump administration requested $2.5 billion to address the coronavirus outbreak, an outlay critics asserted might not have been necessary if the previous program cuts had not taken place. Fortune
reported of the issue that:
The cuts could be especially problematic as COVID-19 continues to spread. Health officials are now warning the U.S. is unlikely to be spared, even though cases are minimal here so far.
“It’s not so much of a question of if this will happen in this country any more but a question of when this will happen and how many people in this country will have severe illness,” Dr. Nancy Messonnier, the director of the National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases, said during a press call [on Feb. 25].
The coronavirus was first detected in Wuhan, China, in the winter of 2019, and cases
spread around the globe. The U.S. had 57
confirmed cases as of this writing, while globally,
roughly 80,000 patients had been sickened with the virus and 3,000 had died. As of
yet, no vaccine or pharmaceutical treatment for the new coronavirus. Data from China suggests the coronavirus has a
higher fatality rate than the seasonal flu, although outcomes depend on factors such as the age and underlying health of the patient.
Readers can find the latest coronavirus information from the CDC
here.
As a new coronavirus spread in 2020, so did concerns about the United States' preparedness for a potential pandemic.
www.snopes.com
