May 9: On This Day In 2018
In response to experts who cautioned that the U.S. was vulnerable to a pandemic, President Obama created the Office of Pandemic Preparedness. Seems exactly like the kind of thing a forward-looking president should do, right?
But OTDI 2018, Trump pushed out the top White House official responsible for leading a U.S. response to those threats. The abrupt departure of Rear Adm. Timothy Ziemer from the National Security Council meant no senior administration official was now focused solely on global health security. The Trump Administration broke up the team below him too. And they cut funding for several other domestic pandemic prevention programs.
And one more thing Trump did: He cut the staffing for the CDC’s office in China by 2/3rds. Because, you know, who would ever think that viral diseases could start in China and that it could prove useful to have boots on the ground?
It was obvious at the time that Trump was making a massive mistake:
As the WaPo reported then: “Luciana Borio, director of medical and biodefense preparedness at the NSC, spoke at a symposium at Emory University to mark the 100th anniversary of the 1918 influenza pandemic…“The threat of pandemic flu is the number one health security concern,” she told the audience. “Are we ready to respond? I fear the answer is no.”
WaPo also notes: “Collectively, warns Jeremy Konyndyk, who led foreign disaster assistance at the U.S. Agency for International Development during the Obama administration, “What (Trump’s actions) all add 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.... “These moves make us materially less safe. It’s inexplicable.”
Ed Yong, health and science reporter for The Atlantic, noted at the time: And “The (current) Administration has a few unique problems with it. Firstly, a lack of expertise. We can look to how President Trump has reacted…and that is concerning in terms of how our (Trump) leadership would react to future disaster… A pandemic will be a problem; it’s a question of When.” Yong also noted, with great prescience: “We rely on supply chains that could be fractured during an easily spreading disease.”
Government-run role-playing war game-like simulations showed the U.S. was deeply unprepared for a Covid-like outbreak, especially after Trump fired the head of the office.
Finally, there’s this guy, who happened to be running for president. Here’s what he warned in October 2019. Two months later…
You know where this is going. Trump’s inexplicable choice came into play when Covid struck an unprepared America less than two years later. Beth Cameron, a former head of the team, noted “In a health security crisis, speed is essential. When this new coronavirus emerged, there was no clear White House-led structure to oversee our response, and we lost valuable time.”
None of this was lost on Joe Biden. So, he restored the pandemic office on the very day he took office in 2021.
“Promise Kept,” concluded PolitiFact
And now, in May 2024: Bird flu is currently raging, and there’s considerable concern it could start impacting humans. So what does bird-brained candidate Donald Trump do? He promises to AGAIN shut down Biden’s new pandemic preparedness office should he win in November.
Dive Deeper
Washington Post has the story on the firing of the top White House pandemic preparedness official
Former pandemic preparedness official writes about it in the WaPo
Reuters reports on CDC in China
Yong was interviewed on C-Span
The New Yorker covered the war game-simulation for a pandemic outbreak
PolitiFact reports on Biden restoring the pandemic preparedness office
Time has the story on Trump’s latest threat to let history repeat itself
Summary: Trump shuts pandemic preparedness office