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Originally Posted by boneyard1962
Predictions of a pandemic have been around for literally decades. There's no excuse why the CDC with a 10 billion dollar a year budget was caught so unprepared. There is no excuse why cities like New York, LA, Baltimore or Boston were so woefully unprepared. There is no excuse for states with high population densities to have been so unprepared. The USA was caught flatfooted and looking stupid.
Is it all Trump's fault? No, but he is the guy in charge after all so he gets to own it.
GWB will forever own 911 even though most of what allowed it to happen, happened on Clinton's watch. The same is true here. The USA had decades to prepare and Trump's predecessors all kicked the can down the street.
Future? The Department of Homeland Disease control? Because 10 billion a year wasn't enough for the CDC.
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No, we had a former president who specifically did not “kick the can down the street”. Bush was proactive in addressing the issue.
https://www.cdc.gov/flu/pandemic-res...ategy-2005.pdf
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK396378/
What happened was that supply was depleted during the next administration and not replenished.
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"75 percent of N95 respirators and 25 percent of face masks contained in the CDC's Strategic National Stockpile (∼100 million products) were deployed for use in health care settings over the course of the 2009 H1N1 pandemic response."
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https://www.liebertpub.com/doi/10.1089/hs.2016.0129
Additionally, what was left of the stockpile was used in the 2014 outbreaks of the ebola virus and botulism, and then the 2016 zika virus. No attempts were made to replace the used stockpiles as they were depleted which, frankly, should have been automatic. Notice those dates? All during Obama’s time, the bulk of the use happened seven years before Trump ran for a political office. You are blaming Trump for not cleaning up after Obama.
Then there is the whole NYC thing, where the bulk of the US problem rests. I am appalled that a state with 5 times my state’s population, including just one city alone with twice its population, had less than twice as many hospital beds, ICU beds, and ventilators. It’s inexcusable... and we are are supposed to be the undereducated dolts. (Of course we didn’t force nursing homes to take infected people either, but that’s another rant). Bloomberg had tried to address the problem and did in a very limited manner. de Blasio managed to erode it even below the pre-Bloomberg levels.
https://www.propublica.org/article/h...-auction-block
New York had been warned what has happened would happen.
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journ...5712846B5CFDD0 And yet, when just paying attention to the news indicated an ugly virus was probably already on our shores, and sparsely populated states like mine were closing schools and limiting public activity, de Blassio and his city health commissioner not only neglected to take precautions, they actively encouraged their population to continue life as normal.
I agree the Trump administration did not respond to a late 2019 report that we were unprepared but let’s not forget who was steering the ship when the shortages occurred. Just one of Trump’s predecessors kicked the can down the street, but that’s all it takes. Unfortunately, Trump did not fix it either.
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