ArgumentTrump Has Sabotaged America’s Coronavirus Response
If the coronavirus begins to spread in the United States, what would we do? How would the U.S. government respond? Laurie Garrett writes that the answers to these questions “are especially worrying because the government has intentionally rendered itself incapable. In 2018, the Trump administration fired the government’s entire pandemic response chain of command, including the White House management infrastructure.” She adds: “The next epidemic is now here; we’ll soon know the costs imposed by the Trump administration’s early negligence and present panic.”
The epidemic control efforts unfolding today in China—including placing some 100 million citizens on lockdown, shutting down a national holiday, building enormous quarantine hospitals in days’ time, and ramping up 24-hour manufacturing of medical equipment—are massive and unprecedented. Laurie Garrett writes in Foreign Policy that “ It’s impossible to watch them without wondering, ‘What would we do? How would my government respond if this virus spread across my country?’”
He adds:
For the United States, the answers are especially worrying because the government has intentionally rendered itself incapable. In 2018, the Trump administration fired the government’s entire pandemic response chain of command, including the White House management infrastructure. In numerous phone calls and emails with key agencies across the U.S. government, the only consistent response I encountered was distressed confusion. If the United States still has a clear chain of command for pandemic response, the White House urgently needs to clarify what it is — not just for the public but for the government itself, which largely finds itself in the dark.
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Public health advocates have been ringing the alarm bells to no avail. [Ronald] Klain [the “epidemic czar” in the Obama White House], has been warning for two years that the United States was in grave danger should a pandemic emerge. In 2017 and 2018, the philanthropist billionaire Bill Gates met repeatedly with Bolton and his predecessor, H. R. McMaster, warning that ongoing cuts to the global health disease infrastructure would render the United States vulnerable to, as he put it, the “significant probability of a large and lethal modern-day pandemic occurring in our lifetimes.” And an independent, bipartisan panel formed by the Center for Strategic and International Studies concluded that lack of preparedness was so acute in the Trump administration that the “United States must either pay now and gain protection and security or wait for the next epidemic and pay a much greater price in human and economic costs.”
The next epidemic is now here; we’ll soon know the costs imposed by the Trump administration’s early negligence and present panic.
