In the wake of the Coronavirus that is currently wreaking havoc around the world and quickly seeping into America, reports are now swirling that Donald Trump may have very well screwed this nation over in regard to our ability to ward off the life-threatening virus — and it all boils down for his deep-seated disdain for Barack Obama.
Yesterday, the World Health Organization (WHO) officially declared a global health emergency as a result of the rapidly spreading, fatal Coronavirus, reversing a decision to hold off on the declaration last week after they determined, with evidence, that the catastrophic illness is rapidly spreading via human-to-human contact. Thus far, 10 confirmed cases of the virus are in the United States, with the very real possibility of more in the coming days as a result of human contact by the infected individual.
While it’s not a huge number yet, it’s enough to certainly warrant a response out of American officials to batten down the hatches and get ahead of what could very well turn into a pandemic.
However, a recent report from Foreign Policy now leads us to believe that the United States may very well be as underprepared for a situation like this as it has ever been, thanks to Trump’s childish obsession with ridding his administration of anything that has anything to do with his predecessor — including Obama’s pandemic response team.
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Back in 2014, when Ebola was running rampant, Obama realized that the response to pandemics such as these left a lot to be desired. As a result of his discovery, Trump’s forerunner appointed a White House “epidemic czar,” who clearly laid out rules, roles, and budgets for various agencies, and dispatched “incident commanders” to each Ebola-hit country as well as the United States.
In building upon his response actions to the Ebola pandemic, Obama implemented permanent epidemic monitoring and command groups within the NSC as well as the DHS, both of which operated on the scientific and public health leads of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and CDC as well as diplomatic advice from the State Department.
However, Trump threw that all down the toilet the moment he was able to, almost assuredly for no other reason than it was attached to his predecessor’s legacy.
In the spring of 2018, Trump tried and failed to do away with $252 million in funding designated to the rebuilding of Ebola-stricken countries — only pulling back on the effort after receiving a boatload of backlash from both sides of the political aisle. However, Donald was still successful in cutting $15 billion from national health spending as well as the global disease-fighting operational budgets of the CDC, NSC, DHS, and HHS. The government’s $30 million Complex Crises Fund was done away with, as well.
Trump went on to order the dissolution of the entire global health security unit. To date, neither the NSC nor DHS epidemic teams have been rebuilt or reinstated.
The CDC’s global health section has been so drastically reduced that the majority of its staff members have been laid off and they’ve gone from working within 49 countries to just 10 while Trump continues to fight back against Congress in an effort to reduce funding to the U.S. Public Health Service Commissioned Corps by a staggering 40 percent.
Now this nation is head to head with what could very likely be a massive, deadly pandemic, and the only force we have to fight against it is a sloppily put together “President’s Coronavirus Task Force” consisting of a dozen all-male advisors, five of whom hail from Trump’s White House staff.
Soon we’ll find out what Trump’s task force is worth, all because he’s mad at Obama for being better than him.
You can read the full report here.
Featured image via Political Tribune gallery
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