President Donald Trump tried to blame former President Obama for his poor response to the coronavirus, even going so far as to attack Obama’s response to the swine flu epidemic in 2009. But former Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius didn’t let him get away with it.
Trump’s response to the outbreak has been pathetic thus far as the number of cases in the United States has passed 1,800 and more than 40 deaths have been recorded.
Panic has gripped the nation and the economy has plunged into a recession.
On Friday morning, Trump once again attempted to blame Obama for his own failures.
For decades the @CDCgov looked at, and studied, its testing system, but did nothing about it. It would always be inadequate and slow for a large scale pandemic, but a pandemic would never happen, they hoped. President Obama made changes that only complicated things further…..
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 13, 2020
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…. Their response to H1N1 Swine Flu was a full scale disaster, with thousands dying, and nothing meaningful done to fix the testing problem, until now. The changes have been made and testing will soon happen on a very large scale basis. All Red Tape has been cut, ready to go!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 13, 2020
Trump has been president for more than three years now. He was not only warned last year about the pandemic, therefore having lots of time to prepare for the virus, but he also disbanded the pandemic response team established by Obama and has left hundreds of positions at the Centers for Disease Control unfilled while cutting the health budget.
In no way is Obama responsible for Trump’s recklessness, and Sebelius was having none of it either during an interview on MSNBC.
“It’s really unfortunate to have a president who continues to try to deny that we have an urgent health crisis in this country and find somebody else to blame,” Sebelius said. “Two days ago it was the Europeans at fault, now I guess it’s somehow President Obama and our administration at fault.”
As for Obama’s response to the H1N1 epidemic, Sebelius pointed out that the epicenter of that outbreak was North America and that the mortality rate was far lower than the common flu.
“We did deal with a novel strain of a flu, H1N1, which had not been seen before,” she said. “We didn’t have a vaccine, and it presented in Mexico. We were at the epicenter in the United States of this crisis. I think the good news is, we worked hard, got a vaccine available, had a massive national vaccination campaign. CDC estimates that about 61 million Americans were infected with H1N1 and the death rate was 0.002 percent, way lower than the common flu. So I think the news was very good.”
By comparison, the “official” coronavirus mortality rate in the United States currently stands at approximately 2.28 percent, far higher than the H1N1 mortality rate under Obama.
Furthermore, Sebelius pointed out that mass panic and economic disaster did not befall the Obama administration during the H1N1 epidemic. They were also far more transparent and listened to health professionals.
“The economy did not shut down, we didn’t have massive panic, but told people what we knew and what we didn’t know and coordinated globally with our neighbors and partners on every step along the way,” she said. “So I have no idea why the president would choose at this moment to try and find blame somewhere else for some other epidemic. There was massive testing done by the CDC. As I say, vaccine was available and a huge national vaccination campaign. We shared vaccine with countries around the world. So I think the world health community came together in a very coordinated fashion, sharing information, sharing medicines, making sure that we limited as much as possible the death toll. That sense of urgency has been missing.”
Here’s the video via Daily Motion:
Featured image via screen capture
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