ALSO DO U KNOW HOW TO READ THE TRUTH-O-METER ? DO U SEE WHERE THE NEEDLE RESTS ON THE SCALE ?
1ST QUESTION : DID HE NOT CLOSE THE PANDEMIC UNIT ?
I ran the White House pandemic office. Trump closed it.
The Trump administration’s decision to forgo a World Health Organization test and create its own had fateful consequences, experts say.
www.politico.com
excerpts i picked out ! : decide for urself while u keep trying to defend ur frog emperor !
How testing failures allowed coronavirus to sweep the U.S.
The Trump administration’s decision to forgo a World Health Organization test and create its own had fateful consequences, experts say (not Joe Biden but 'EXPERTS... EXPERTS SAY"
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On
Saturday Jan. 11 — a month and a half before the first Covid-19 case not linked to travel was diagnosed in the United States — Chinese scientists posted the genome of the mysterious new virus, and within a week virologists in Berlin had produced the first diagnostic test for the disease.
Soon after, researchers in other nations rolled out their own tests, too, sometimes with different genetic targets.
By the end of February, the World Health Organization had shipped tests to nearly 60 countries.
The United States was not among them.
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But neither the CDC nor the coronavirus task force chaired by Vice President Mike Pence would say who made the decision to forgo the WHO test and instead begin a protracted process of producing an American test, one that got delayed by manufacturing problems, possible lab contamination and logistical delays.
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Why the United States declined to use the WHO test, even temporarily as a bridge until the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention could produce its own test, remains a perplexing question and the key to the Trump administration’s failure to provide enough tests to identify the coronavirus infections before they could be passed on, according to POLITICO interviews with dozens of viral-disease experts, former officials and some officials within the administration’s health agencies.
“Please provide an explanation for why the Covid-19 diagnostic test approved by the World Health Organization was not used,” ? .
Sen. Patty Murray, the ranking Democrat on the Senate health committee, who represents the hard-hit state of Washington,
asked in a 3½-page letter on the testing fiasco to Pence, Health Secretary Alex Azar, CDC director Robert Redfield, and Food and Drug Administration Commissioner Stephen Hahn.
So far, none has been provided.
The government’s incapacity to conduct widespread testing slowed diagnoses, creating chains of infection. It also deprived epidemiologists of a map that could have told them how far and how fast the virus was traveling and where they should concentrate efforts to slow it down.
But there were additional problems with the administration’s approach to testing, according to experts and former officials. From the start, the White House focused on containment, trusting that a limited ban on travel to and from China could somehow force a fast-moving virus to stop cold when it hit the Chinese border. But, while containment might have helped buy the U.S. some time, without aggressive domestic surveillance through testing, it was an incomplete strategy.
“They needed and still need to be searching for where the cases are, instead of trusting that limited travel bans were keeping out a virus that was probably already on the march,” said former FDA Commissioner David Kessler.
That wasn’t how the president viewed it.
“China has been working very hard to contain the Coronavirus,” Trump tweeted on Jan. 24. “The United States greatly appreciates their efforts and transparency. It will all work out well. In particular, on behalf of the American People, I want to thank President Xi!”
But
once the CDC finally began its national testing regime, it faltered in almost every way imaginable.
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And the mistakes were not just in testing.
Trump repeatedly boasted of airport screening and travel restrictions — which Azar and other administration leaders touted as aggressive and historic in their scope —
but experts told POLITICO that those measures that were far too little, too late, and too focused on China.
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Other failures appear to have been related to a lack of preparation within agencies that spanned administrations but certainly continued through the first three years of Trump’s tenure.
Masks and gowns were in short supply despite years of talk about bulking up federal emergency stockpiles — without Congress appropriating enough money. A whistleblower has alleged HHS staff were inadequately protected when greeting U.S. evacuees returning from Wuhan, China. The CDC has had trouble wrangling passenger information from airlines to contact people who may have been exposed on flights, administration officials said. And health officials are trying to figure out how to handle a second “floating petri dish” in the Pacific, another cruise ship contagion with elderly passengers at high risk. With some passengers already sick, test kits were delivered by helicopter.
James Lawler, a global-health expert at the University of Nebraska Medical Center’s Global Center for Health Security, where some coronavirus evacuees are being treated and the possible course of the epidemic is being modeled, said
the government’s failures have been so extensive that when asked what went wrong, he parried, “What went right?”
Administration officials have seemed to be
under political pressure to minimize the risks of the coronavirus, partly to fall in line with the president’s own statements.
Trump has often downplayed the severity of the outbreak, contradicting the top government scientists squirming right by his side. At other times, health officials have outlined the risks of a major epidemic while Trump’s economic officials, eyeing the plunging stock markets, have insisted that everything’s under control.
“We have contained this,” White House economic adviser Larry Kudlow insisted to a television interviewer on Feb. 25. “I won’t say airtight but pretty close.”
Two days later, the CDC reported the first case of community transmission, meaning there was no known link to any travel. More would follow.
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ONCE AGAIN ! I DONT CARE WHAT JOE BIDEN SAID I CARE WHAT THE EXPERTS SAY !
The Trump administration’s decision to forgo a World Health Organization test and create its own had fateful consequences, experts say (not Joe Biden but 'EXPERTS... EXPERTS SAY"
www.politifact.com
