Yesterday, I posted a story about TIME’s reporting on Trump’s agenda for a second term: TIME Magazine Reports Trump's Agenda [Update: Biden Strikes Back]. This morning there is a front-page story along the same lines: 9 of Trump’s most disturbing responses from his terrible Time interview. Neither story gave much space to something that really needs more attention, attention which TIME gave it today: Trump Threatens to Shut Down Pandemic Preparedness Office Launched by Biden.
In an interview with TIME published Tuesday, Trump said he would disband the Office of Pandemic Preparedness and Response Policy (OPPR), which opened last summer after Congress approved a bill in 2022 with bipartisan support to mandate its creation.
The Biden campaign is pushing this, as did TIME, as should we:
Joe Biden’s presidential campaign criticized Donald Trump on Tuesday for saying that, if elected, he would close an office in the White House tasked with making sure the country is better prepared for the next pandemic. . . .
The Biden campaign compared Trump’s comments to his haphazard response to the COVID-19 pandemic during his last year in office, when he claimed the virus would disappear “like a miracle” and would “go away without a vaccine” and suggested during a White House press briefing that the virus could be cured by injecting patients with bleach.
But it’s more than just Trump’s disastrous, actually murderous, mishandling of Covid. It goes back years before that, as confirmed by a SNOPES analysis: Did Trump Administration Fire the US Pandemic Response Team?
It's thus true that the Trump administration axed the executive branch team responsible for coordinating a response to a pandemic and did not replace it, eliminating Ziemer's position and reassigning others, although Bolton was the executive at the top of the National Security Council chain of command at the time.
(Trump did not completely disband the pandemic response team as has been claimed. But he did drastically cut back the CDC monitoring office in Wuhan, which — arguably, but still plausibly — cost us valuable time in discovering the epidemic.)
The Office of Pandemic Preparedness and Response Policy — the office Trump claims is “pork” and promises to shut down — is our first line of defense against the next pandemic. From the TIME story:
The office keeps Americans ready for biological threats and pathogens, says Dr. Raj Panjabi, who previously served as Biden’s top NSC official for pandemic preparations. Shutting down the OPPR “would leave Americans, as it did in 2020, deeply unprepared to respond to a pandemic and run the risk of leading to the same kind of chaotic response that we all saw with bodies piling up in trucks that had to be converted into morgues in New York City and ultimately to a loss of lives that are preventable and avoidable,” he says.
Trump’s comments, adds Panjabi, “just shows he’s not serious about it now, which is just absolutely absurd after over a million Americans lost their lives to this.”
And a new pandemic may be on the way: Risk of bird flu spreading to humans is ‘enormous concern’, says WHO (The UK Guardian, Apr 18).
The problem extends beyond Trump himself, however. Here is the final word from TIME (which is actually committing journalism and should be acknowledged for doing so):
It’s true that when Trump came into office, the U.S. Strategic National Stockpile, an integrated collection of secret, federally-controlled warehouses packed with medical and protective equipment, was short on supplies. That’s because President Barack Obama deployed resources from the stockpile for public health emergencies such as the swine flu and the Ebola outbreak. When Obama tried to refill the stockpile, Tea Party Republicans blocked the new funding. In his first three years as President, Trump never attempted to replenish the equipment. That proved costly once the pandemic struck. By April of 2020, the U.S. government had already distributed 90 percent of its supplies. [emphasis added]
Chris Hayes has taken to running an ongoing feature, “Are You Better Off Today Than You Were 4 Years Ago?” which reminds me people just how badly Trump screwed the country over Covid. We need to remind people not just of that disaster, but of how Trump is already threatening / promising to make the next disaster just as bad or worse. (And also warn against other Republicans; see the bolded text above.)
The next medical emergency — be it bird flu, a new Covid variant, or something else — is coming. President Biden did yeoman’s work cleaning up the mess Trump made of the last pandemic, and we can trust him to do the same on the next one. (Provided the GOP House doesn’t get in the way again, but that too will become campaign fodder.)
We are at war for our lives and our health on many fronts. Abortion is one front that has so far worked to our advantage, though we are still down and have a long way to go. Pandemic preparedness is another that we need to hammer and hammer and hammer until Trump and his minions are flattened.