"On issue after issue, from September 11 to Hurricane Katrina to climate change and now the novel coronavirus, politicians have attacked, downplayed or buried “inconvenient truths” that they don’t want to address for their own narrow purposes. What we hear is the litany of excuses that “No one could have anticipated x.” Yet the major disasters of this century not only could have been anticipated; they were anticipated within the government and every one of them could certainly have been mitigated if not entirely avoided.
President Trump is the apotheosis of the usual game-plan: ignore, deny, lie, blame others and punish the messenger. But this time, the pile of corpses will be much, much higher.
[…]
President Obama’s outgoing homeland security advisor led the Trump team in a simulation of how an airborne respiratory pandemic would halt international travel, upend global supply chains, tank the stock market, and burden healthcare systems. Yet the Trump administration cut back CDC funding and eliminated the National Security Council unit dealing with pandemics.
In 2019, HHS conducted an extensive simulation of a scenario where a respiratory virus, dubbed “The Crimson Contagion,” began in China and rapidly spread through the US. A draft report raised red flags about several shortcomings currently arising in the federal government’s response and messaging to contain the virus.
A few months later, in November 2019, Covid-19 broke out in Wuhan."
No comments:
Post a Comment