An annual intelligence report that has been postponed without explanation by President Donald Trump’s administration warns that the U.S. remains unprepared for a global pandemic, two senior government officials who have reviewed a draft of the report tell TIME.As has been reported elsewhere, Trump didn't believe a pandemic was possible. Under Trumpian theory, you might as well cancel your fire insurance because your house would never catch fire and, if it did, it would be "something else", whatever that means.
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The final draft of the report remains classified but the two officials who have read it say it contains warnings similar to those in the last installment, which was published on January 29, 2019. ... The 2019 warning was the third time in as many years that the nation’s intelligence experts said that a new strain of influenza could lead to a pandemic, and that the U.S. and the world were unprepared.
Rather than acting on these recurrent warnings and bolstering America’s ability to respond to an outbreak, the Trump administration has instead cut back money and personnel from pandemic preparedness. In May 2018, Trump’s aides dismissed the National Security Council’s global health security staff and moved to cut its budget. The White House also cut the budgets of the Centers for Disease Control and the Department of Health and Human Services, and closed the federal government’s $30 million Complex Crises Fund.
So we get to the meat of Trump's pandemic plan: Die soon, so the Dow-Jones Industrial Average can recover.
Trump cut the funding because they were spending it on other things. Mission creep and all that.
ReplyDeleteNever forget the CDC had the money to study "Gun Violence". Hardly a disease.
Cutting the funding was a good idea?
ReplyDeleteMeh. Drumpf uck has penis envy. Anything Obama had a hand in ... The Cuckold in Chief.
ReplyDeleteTrump signaled early on that he would bring his business "acumen" to the White House and run the country as he did his businesses. So now we are in huge debt, suffering a blown up stock market and massive damage to our retirement funds, spent extra to stock up for self quarantine (70+), and wondering if all 50 states will be able to manage COVID-19 on their own. Trump always ran his "empire" to look like a picked over chicken carcass and called it "efficiency". Throwing in the Obama factor added fuel to burning down the pandemic infrastructure. If money was being misspent, corrective action was needed to bring it back in line. I guess we should just throw out all our medicines because we will be able to get them "quickly" at the corner pill store. Beautiful!
ReplyDeleteIt wasn't just Obama era stuff that he took the axe to. George W. Bush started a program in response to the H5N1 bird flu that studied pathogen transmission from animals to humans that did good science for years until Fergus defunded it last year.
ReplyDeleteThat seems like a useful program to have right about now, and not an evil liberal joint, either.
Then there were all of those scientists at the USDA who were recently forced out of the government by the clever trick of moving their headquarters from DC to KC with the instructions "move or quit" when there weren't any facilities built for them to move to.
Spare a thought for the rest of the government, and how it could react to a real, non self created crisis now that Fergus has "deconstructed the administrative state": I'm particularly thinking of the state department.
-Doug in Oakland
B., gun violence study is a pretty good idea, especially as it’s very clear directed into wide study from multiple views and beliefs. If you want to whine and pretend it’s just a way to grab guns, go ahead, but that not even close to what is being looked at.
ReplyDeletePlease provide the details on your “mission creep” assertion, as I find no evidence of that in any of the explanations issued by the Orange House.
CP: As I pointed out, "gun violence" is hardly the purview of the Centers for Disease Control.
ReplyDeleteWe may disagree on the issue of firearms (and other things), but really, is your hatred so much that you cannot acknowledge that the CDC spending it's funds for "gun violence" studies shows that it has money to waste?
Why do we need a CDC anyway in the first place! According to Mike Pence, we can pray the Coronavirus away.
ReplyDeleteNo, gun violence and mortality is not a disease, but it is a public health issue, one worth study and analysis to find out more about its causes and outcomes. You may be perhaps legitimately concerned about bias or pre-conception therein. but to just go into anaphylactic reaction to even considering it...
ReplyDeleteTo me this is a simple reality: the people who appreciate and love guns must be involved in gun control in something more reasoned than outright refusal...because if you aren't involved and the situation is dire, things will he done and happen without the tempering of your input and be more condign and extreme than if you had contributed.
It's as it is with professional, like doctors: if docs don't call out and clean up the bad actors in their professional, others will do it for them and in ways that may be very bad.
Guns and their control is as much a matter of public health as clean water and air, as drivers' licensing, as pure food and drugs, as workplace safety. And the more you're positively responsive in forming policy, regulation and enforcement, the more productive and worthwhile they'll be.
One more mention about gun control and this comment thread will be locked.
ReplyDeleteIn 2018, 73 children died accidentally due to fun bang tools.
ReplyDeleteAnd, once again, you miss the point. Mission Creep. Not the purview of the CDC. An issue? Perhaps. Not a disease though. And since they had the funds to go that far outside of their mission, they obviously weren't being spent on Disease Control.
ReplyDeleteThen they shouldn’t study car accidents and how to make cars safer, because that isn’t a disease. See how that works?
ReplyDeleteDA, what the fuck is wrong with you? I said, in no uncertain terms, that if the subject of guns was discussed any further in this comment thread, that I'd lock it.
ReplyDeleteDid you think I was bluffing?
This thread is locked.