Comment by piva00
3 days ago
Probably not block CDC scientists of speaking about it[0]. Also not interfere with data collection by the CDC[1].
They probably wouldn't have dismantled the global health security branch of the National Security Council either[2][3][4], 2 years prior to the pandemic.
There's a timeline outlining the disastrous bullshit[5].
[0] https://www.ucsusa.org/resources/attacks-on-science/trump-ad...
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/14/us/politics/trump-cdc-cor...
[2] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/to-your-health/wp/2018/0...
[3] https://csis-prod.s3.amazonaws.com/s3fs-public/publication/1...
[4] https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/white-house-homeland...
[5] https://doggett.house.gov/media/blog-post/timeline-trumps-co...
Let’s be real - the CDC are the important ones in that situation, not the restructuring of the National Security Council.
And preventing panic in the beginning isn’t a terrible idea, as we say from the toilet paper debacle. Whether or not it was warranted in retrospect it’s hard to say, but it’s not like the CDC’s messaging was clear or accurate for quite a while.
When Trump tried to lock down travel from China the democrats called him racist. The Obama administration depleted the national stockpile of PPE and didn’t restock. I’m sure there are a bunch of stupid little fingers to point here and there but the fact of the matter is the US had about as many deaths as you’d expect with our demographics that ran in line with other similar countries. The Trump administration also was responsible for Operation Warpspeed, without which we would have almost certainly gotten vaccines later.
The only way it could have been stopped was in China, early. Whether that would be preventing a leak, if that’s how it originated, or from an immediate local lockdown. Certainly keeping international organizations from investigating didn’t help.