Biden Predicted Trump's Botched Pandemic Response Back in October
Former Vice-President Joe Biden seems quite prophetic now with his tweet from last October about the Trump administration's lack of preparedness for a global pandemic like Covid-19.
Joe Biden, Twitter, 10/25/19: "We are not prepared for a pandemic. Trump has rolled back progress President Obama and I made to strengthen global health security. We need leadership that builds public trust, focuses on real threats, and mobilizes the world to stop outbreaks before they reach our shores."
The Obama administration had established a unit on global health security and biodefense, headed at the senior director level, at the National Security Council. The Trump administration abolished it in 2018 and that turned out to be a a huge mistake, one that has resulted in untold deaths. And it's not like this is a case of hindsight being 20-20; Trump officials were warned at the time that they were making a mistake in shutting down pandemic preparedness.
Washington Post [May 2018]: "The White House proposal “is threatening to claw back funding whose precise purpose is to help the United States be able to respond quickly in the event of a crisis,” said Carolyn Reynolds, a vice president at PATH, a global health technology nonprofit."
"Collectively, warns Jeremy Konyndyk, who led foreign disaster assistance at the U.S. Agency for International Development during the Obama administration, “What this all adds up to is a potentially really concerning rollback of progress on U.S. health security preparedness.”
“It seems to actively unlearn the lessons we learned through very hard experience over the last 15 years,” said Konyndyk, now a senior policy fellow at the Center for Global Development. “These moves make us materially less safe. It’s inexplicable.”
Joe Biden was correct. The Trump administration made a conscious decision in 2018 and 2019 to scale back preparedness for a global pandemic. America is now paying the price.
By: Don Lam & Curated Content
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