We Were Warned

[G_j]

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2020/03/pandemic-coronavirus-united-states-trump-cdc/608215/

When the inevitable inquiry into the government's response to COVID-19 happens, it will conclude that signs of a coming crisis were everywhere.
—


We were warned in 2012, when the Rand Corporation surveyed the international threats arrayed against the United States and concluded that only pandemics posed an existential danger, in that they were “capable of destroying America’s way of life.”

We were warned in 2015, when Ezra Klein of Vox, after speaking with Bill Gates about his algorithmic model for how a new strain of flu could spread rapidly in today’s globalized world, wrote that “a pandemic disease is the most predictable catastrophe in the history of the human race, if only because it has happened to the human race so many, many times before.” If there was anything humanity could be certain that it needed to prepare for to prevent the deaths of a lot of people in little time, it was this.

We were warned in 2017, a week before inauguration day, when Lisa Monaco, Barack Obama’s outgoing homeland-security adviser, gathered with Donald Trump’s incoming national-security officials and conducted an exercise modeled on the administration’s experiences with outbreaks of swine flu, Ebola, and Zika. The simulation explored how the U.S. government should respond to a flu pandemic that halts international travel, upends global supply chains, tanks the stock market, and burdens health-care systems—all with a vaccine many months from materializing. “The nightmare scenario for us, and frankly to any public-health expert that you would talk to, has always been a new strain of flu or a respiratory illness because of how much easier it is to spread” relative to other pandemic diseases that aren’t airborne, Monaco told me.

We were warned in 2018, on the 100th anniversary of the flu pandemic of 1918, which killed 50 to 100 million people around the world. My colleague Ed Yong served notice that the “next plague” was coming, with influenza the most dangerous possibility, even as the United States succumbed to “forgetfulness and shortsightedness.” Luciana Borio, then the director for medical and biodefense preparedness at the National Security Council, told a symposium that “the threat of pandemic flu is our number-one health security concern.” Serving under a president who’d come to office on the pledge to wall off the United States, she noted that such a threat could not “be stopped at the border.” The very next day, news broke that National Security Adviser John Bolton had shuttered the NSC’s unit for preparing and responding to pandemics, of which Borio was a part. The White House official in charge of spearheading such a response to infectious threats departed as well and was not replaced.

..more..

[dem4decades]

1. The worst President for the worst of times.

[llmart]

2. +1

Let's not forget that millions of our fellow citizens thought he was brilliant and still support him and the GOP.

Maybe this is what we deserve at this time (and by "we" I mean those willfully ignorant people) for our lack of shortsightedness. We're not only shortsighted on issues such as pandemics, but on issues of how our attitudes towards other countries (illegal wars, Chinese embargoes, Middle East interference) distance us and tarnish our reputations across the globe making us even more vulnerable.

[live love laugh]

3. My ex is a Trump supporter...I still see him as we are friends

But that’s about to change I can no longer stomach his ignorance. It’s a threat to my life.

[G_j]

4. If he is treating this as a hoax

then it certainly can be life threatening!

[fleabiscuit]

5. +1

[fleabiscuit]

6. OMG. nt