Hmmmm. What could it be that changed? Trump Firing the US Pandemic Response Team? Nahhhhhh.
“I’m very puzzled by what’s happened. The CDC did a really good job with H1N1 and Zika in exactly this thing: sending out huge quantities of test kits very rapidly to every state in the US and more than 100 countries around the world,” Tom Frieden, who led the CDC under President Barack Obama, told Vox. “The world came to rely on the CDC.”
Hmmmm.
What could it be that changed?
Trump Firing the US Pandemic Response Team? Nahhhhhh.
Made me look. Snopes says true. Factcheck is a bit more nuanced: [...] It sounds like these were administrators doing coordination at the White House, not the people at the CDC actually doing the...
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.
The Trump administration did indeed eliminate a key position that would have been involved in pandemic response.
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Just because Ziemer’s position was discontinued does not mean everyone who was part of the team was fired or that all of the functions of the directorate ceased. According to reporting by the Atlantic and the Washington Post, some team members were shifted to other groups, and others took over some of Ziemer’s duties.
It sounds like these were administrators doing coordination at the White House, not the people at the CDC actually doing the work? Leadership is important, but I still have questions about how the screwup happened.
The cuts started in 2018, as the White House focused on eliminating funding to Obama-era disease security programs. In March of that year, Rear Adm. Timothy Ziemer, whose job it was to lead the U.S. response in the event of a pandemic, abruptly left the administration and his global health security team was disbanded.
That same year, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) was forced to slash its efforts to prevent global disease outbreak by 80% as its funding for the program began to run out. The agency, at the time, opted to focus on 10 priority countries and scale back in others, including China.
Also cut was the Complex Crises Fund, a $30 million emergency response pool that was at the secretary of state’s disposal to deploy disease experts and others in the event of a crisis. (The fund was created by former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.)
Overall in 2018, Trump called for $15 billion in reduced health spending that had previously been approved, as he looked at increasing budget deficits, cutting the global disease-fighting budgets of the CDC, National Security Council (NSC), Department of Homeland Security (DHS), and Health and Human Services (HHS) in the process.
[T]he US has been extremely slow to roll out diagnostic testing for the Covid-19 disease. It’s unclear if there’s a specific policy or decision to blame for the current situation. It arose from a combination of manufacturing problems, chronic underfunding, and an apparent lack of foresight. But no matter the specific reason, the testing challenges, scientists tell us, make us less prepared to deal with this unfolding public health crisis that will probably get worse before it gets better.
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Evidence is mounting that early in the outbreak, in January and February, China bought the world time with its aggressive action to contain the viral outbreak in its borders. The testing fiasco in the US indicates we didn’t use that time well.
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Some labs reported to the CDC that some of the test kits were delivering inconclusive results during verification. It’s believed that one of the chemicals used to conduct the test was not working properly and needed to be remanufactured.
“I’m very puzzled by what’s happened. The CDC did a really good job with H1N1 and Zika in exactly this thing: sending out huge quantities of test kits very rapidly to every state in the US and more than 100 countries around the world,” Tom Frieden, who led the CDC under President Barack Obama, told Vox. “The world came to rely on the CDC.”
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In Seattle, currently the US city with the most Covid-19 cases, local researchers were so exasperated by the CDC’s initial faulty test that they came up with their own [...]
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That testing was vital for Washington state, as it led to more clues about how the disease was spreading there. Genetic detective work from Washington suggests the virus has been circulating there for at least six weeks. Modeling suggests there could be 500 to 600 cases of Covid-19 in the Seattle area, as STAT reports.
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So there’s been human error. But it’s also important to know that the work of setting up testing for a new virus can be difficult. [...] China’s most-used tests have had false negatives nearly half the time.
Hmmmm.
What could it be that changed?
Trump Firing the US Pandemic Response Team? Nahhhhhh.
Made me look. Snopes says true.
Factcheck is a bit more nuanced:
[...]
It sounds like these were administrators doing coordination at the White House, not the people at the CDC actually doing the work? Leadership is important, but I still have questions about how the screwup happened.
There were systematic budget cuts
https://fortune.com/2020/02/26/coronavirus-covid-19-cdc-budget-cuts-us-trump/
From the article:
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