"Why don't you start with why Trump is to blame for the disease. He shut off travel. They have reacted and attempted to get PPE (supplies of which were depleted by the prior administration. And the PPE is being hoarded by someone..."
Supplies were "depleted" because both swine flu and ebola were issues the previous Admin had to deal with. And remind me which Party had control of both Houses of Congress from 2010-2018? This whole notion of "Trump being faced with depletion" might have a shred of credibility if we were facing this crisis in March/April 2017. However, it IS March/April 2020- 3+ yrs into the Trump regime.
And Trump did scrap the Pandemic response team (over Fauci's concerns) in 2018...
https://apnews.com/ce014d94b64e98b7203b873e56f80e9a
And more analysis on the "depletion issue"...
"After the first alarms sounded in early January that an outbreak of a novel
coronavirus in China might ignite a global pandemic, the Trump administration squandered nearly two months that could have been used to bolster the federal
stockpile of critically needed medical supplies and equipment.
A review of federal purchasing contracts by The Associated Press shows federal agencies largely waited until mid-March to begin placing bulk orders of N95 respirator masks, mechanical ventilators and other equipment needed by front-line health care workers.
By that time, hospitals in several states were treating thousands of infected patients without adequate equipment and were pleading for shipments from the Strategic National Stockpile. That federal cache of supplies was created more than 20 years ago to help bridge gaps in the medical and pharmaceutical supply chains during a national emergency."
https://www.yahoo.com/news/u-wasted-months-preparing-virus-122411806.html
"You want to say that we were underprepared for this? Fine, I agree. But that did not suddenly happen because Trump."
Well, there is certainly evidence that Trump's obsession with de-Obamatizing the country, along with his business-oriented desire to shrink Govt, at the very least CONTRIBUTED... Again from the same article cited above...
"The NSC directorate for global health and security and bio-defense survived the transition from President Barack Obama to Trump in 2017.
Trump’s elimination of the office suggested, along with his proposed budget cuts for the CDC, that he did not see the threat of pandemics in the same way that many experts in the field did.
“One year later I was mystified when the White House dissolved the office, leaving the country less prepared for pandemics like COVID-19,” Beth Cameron, the first director of the unit, wrote in an op-ed Friday in The Washington Post.
She said the directorate was set up to be the “smoke alarm” and get ahead of emergencies and sound a warning at the earliest sign of fire — “all with the goal of avoiding a six-alarm fire.”
It’s impossible to assess the impact of the 2018 decision to disband the unit, she said. Cameron noted that biological experts remain at the White House, but she says it’s clear that eliminating the office contributed to what she called a “sluggish domestic response.” She said that shortly before Trump took office, the unit was watching a rising number of cases in China of a deadly strain of the flu and a yellow fever outbreak in Angola.
“It’s unclear whether the decision to disband the directorate, which was made in May 2018, after John Bolton became national security adviser, was a tactical move to downgrade the issue or whether it was part of the White House’s interest in simplifying and shrinking the National Security Council staff,” Cameron says."
Another assertion you make...
"And why am I interested in blaming China and the WHO? Because the rest of the world was putting their response together based on the bull shit data they were sharing. It is akin to having cancer but your doctor telling you for months not too worry because it is just a mole. Then you catching the blame for not cutting it off because of that data. And to top it off, in this scenario your doctor knew it was cancer but he wanted to keep that from you for reporting purposes.
So in that case I blame China and the WHO (the doctor in this scenario) quite a bit more than Trump and the rest of the world (the patient in this case.)"
China notified the WHO on Dec 31st. So let's look at Trump's January comments and actions...
"President Trump made his first public comments about the coronavirus on Jan. 22, in a television interview from Davos with CNBC’s Joe Kernen. The first American case had been announced the day before, and Kernen asked Trump, “Are there worries about a pandemic at this point?”
The president responded: “No. Not at all. And we have it totally under control. It’s one person coming in from China, and we have it under control. It’s going to be just fine.”
I'll just interject that this was 2 days before the CDC/Intelligence Services briefing to the Senate Intelligence Committee that resulted in both Burr and Loeffler selling off stock...
"By this point, the seriousness of the virus was becoming clearer. It had spread from China to four other countries. China was starting to take drastic measures and was on the verge of closing off the city of Wuhan."
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/15/opinion/trump-coronavirus.html
