Be, Be, Be Prepared, The Motto of the .......

Good Thing We Were Prepared

https://www.cdc.gov/flu/pandemic-resources/pdf/pan-flu-report-2017v2.pdf

Why Plan, When You Can React?

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From the Bulwark, a Conservative Publication

1. Trump Ignored All of the Warnings On March 30, President Donald Trump went onto the most important news venue in America, Fox & Friends, to defend his handling of the coronavirus outbreak. Here is a thing he said: "Nobody could have predicted something like this . . ." This is false. In 2005, President George W. Bush was reading a book—this is a thing presidents used to do, because books often contain useful information. The book was John Barry's history of the 1918 influenza. (If you remember, we talked about it a couple weeks ago.) The book spurred Bush to start poking around to see if the country was ready to handle another pandemic. From the ABC News report: [H]e called his top homeland security adviser into the Oval Office and gave her the galley of historian John M. Barry's "The Great Influenza," which told the chilling tale of the mysterious plague that "would kill more people than the outbreak of any other disease in human history." "You've got to read this," Fran Townsend remembers the president telling her. "He said, 'Look, this happens every 100 years. We need a national strategy.'" . . . When Bush first told his aides he wanted to focus on the potential of a global pandemic, many of them harbored doubts. "My reaction was -- I'm buried. I'm dealing with counterterrorism. Hurricane season. Wildfires. I'm like, 'What?'" Townsend said. "He said to me, 'It may not happen on our watch, but the nation needs the plan.'" . . . According to Bossert, who is now an ABC News contributor, Bush did not just insist on preparation for a pandemic. He was obsessed with it. "He was completely taken by the reality that that was going to happen," Bossert said. . . . In a November 2005 speech at the National Institutes of Health, Bush laid out proposals in granular detail -- describing with stunning prescience how a pandemic in the United States would unfold. Among those in the audience was Dr. Anthony Fauci, the leader of the current crisis response, who was then and still is now the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. "A pandemic is a lot like a forest fire," Bush said at the time. "If caught early it might be extinguished with limited damage. If allowed to smolder, undetected, it can grow to an inferno that can spread quickly beyond our ability to control it." . . . "To respond to a pandemic, we need medical personnel and adequate supplies of equipment," Bush said. "In a pandemic, everything from syringes to hospital beds, respirators masks and protective equipment would be in short supply." Bush told the gathered scientists that they would need to develop a vaccine in record time. "If a pandemic strikes, our country must have a surge capacity in place that will allow us to bring a new vaccine on line quickly and manufacture enough to immunize every American against the pandemic strain," he said. That was the Bush administration. And please keep in mind that all of this energy came directly from President Bush himself, who saw the dangers when others did not, who raised the alarm all on his own, and who then rode herd over the army of officials and bureaucrats in the executive branch. The Obama administration created an actual playbook for dealing with a pandemic—the 69 page document is literally called a "playbook"—which they handed off to the Trump administration in 2017. So it is literally true that the only president in the last 20 years who did not predict that something like this could happen is Donald J. Trump. I know what you're thinking: He's only the leader of the free world. How could he be expected to read a book, or study the history of his immediate predecessors? There are only so many hours in the day and he needs to prioritize time for the essential tasks of the office, like Twitter and playing golf. Except that last night Axios got hold of memos written by one of Trump's top advisors, Peter Navarro, raising the alarm on the novel coronavirus, warning that it was almost certain to spread to the United States, and pointing out that there were concrete steps Trump needed to take to prepare for the crisis, including banning travel from China—which despite Trump's claims, he never did—and freeing up emergency funding for the stockpiling of protective gear and tests. Which Trump did not do until the virus was in full bloom in America and it was too late. Because the wildfire President Bush warned about had already turned into an inferno. The first of these memos was sent on January 29. On January 30, Trump said of the pandemic, "It's going to have a very good ending for us." As of this morning there are 11,000 confirmed COVID-19 deaths in America.