USA’s ability to respond to biothreats like the Wuhan Coronavirus needs to become a larger part of the 2020 Election discussion — because it allows us to highlight how Trump and the GOP have sabotaged our country’s abilities to respond.
A good example is the Republican Party’s ongoing efforts to repeal and otherwise weaken Obamacare, a.k.a. the Affordable Care Act. One of the aspects of Obamacare that would be gutted by GOP repeal efforts is called the Prevention and Public Health Fund.
Through the ACA, the Prevention and Public Health Fund accounts for nearly one-seventh of the budget for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention — approximately $1 billion a year.
The Prevention and Public Health Fund currently provides nearly half of the funding for the Epidemiology and Laboratory Capacity program. It supports the efforts of state and local health departments to track outbreaks for conditions like meningitis and foodborne illness. It also helps develop rapid responses to evolving threats such as Ebola and the West Nile virus.
In Trump’s most recent Presidential budget proposal, the Prevention and Public Health Fund and other infectious disease programs saw massive funding cuts.
As the US health care system watches the ongoing coronavirus epidemic in China and braces for a potential local outbreak, President Trump is looking to cut funding for public health preparedness programs.
The administration’s proposed 2021 budget for the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) cuts $25 million from the Office of Public Health Preparedness and Response and $18 million from the Hospital Preparedness Program. The administration also asked for over $85 million in cuts to the Emerging and Zoonotic Infectious Diseases program.
I think this issue is a great example to use to highlight how much better a Democratic Party candidate would address and take seriously these threats.
Elizabeth Warren, for example, includes a significant portion of her primary campaign website to highlight a better response.
TREATING EMERGING INFECTIOUS DISEASES
It’s essential that we continue pushing for medical advances -- both to treat those who contract diseases and vaccinate against those we can prevent.
Invest in basic science. I have committed to invest $100 billion in the NIH -- and $60 billion of that will fund basic science research. And when drug companies break the law, I’ll create a “swear jar” where companies will pay a portion of their profits from publicly-funded research back to the NIH. This funding will expand the research we need to develop vaccines and treatments for infectious diseases we know and novel diseases that have not yet emerged.
Invest and incentivize development of new medical countermeasures. To ensure we are able to effectively surge development during a pandemic, we must build and maintain strong infrastructure for medical countermeasure development. As President, I will ensure that small biotechnology innovators get ongoing support from Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority (BARDA), and we will leverage the Food and Drug Administration (FDA’s) expertise in manufacturing and clinical trials to help larger drug manufacturers bring these countermeasures to market at scale.
Ensure treatments can reach patients quickly. Time is critical when you’re combating infectious diseases. We must make sure that our system is ready to “turn on” at a moment’s notice. That means we must constantly evaluate our medical countermeasure stockpiles and prepare annual updated biological threat assessments. And during an outbreak, we must quickly distribute medical countermeasures, with proper protections for equitable distribution across communities.
Ensure safety of high security labs. My administration will not allow labs to generate novel viruses with epidemic or pandemic potential, or to perform field testing of such viruses and will closely monitor dual-use research on biological threats and update policies as needed. This knowledge is incredibly important to protect our health, but could be harmful if used as a weapon. And we must be vigilant about lab safety standards and avoid accidentally mailing anthrax or forgetting about smallpox specimens for 50 years.
And although I am sure Warren is not the only major Democratic candidate who speaks well on the issue, her page so far is the most impressive that I have come across. If the issue of how to prepare and respond to threats like the novel coronavirus becomes a more important discussion topic such as during the debates, I am sure we would see similar initiatives proposed by all the candidates before long, and would be a great benefit towards the run to the General election.
On the other hand, a lot of Trump and the rest of the Republican Party’s efforts have largely made it harder for the US to prepare and respond to outbreaks.
In the spring of 2018, the White House pushed Congress to cut funding for Obama-era disease security programs, proposing to eliminate $252 million in previously committed resources for rebuilding health systems in Ebola-ravaged Liberia, Sierra Leone, and Guinea. Under fire from both sides of the aisle, President Donald Trump dropped the proposal to eliminate Ebola funds a month later. But other White House efforts included reducing $15 billion in national health spending and cutting the global disease-fighting operational budgets of the CDC, NSC, DHS, and HHS. And the government’s $30 million Complex Crises Fund was eliminated.
In May 2018, Trump ordered the NSC’s entire global health security unit shut down, calling for reassignment of Rear Adm. Timothy Ziemer and dissolution of his team inside the agency. The month before, then-White House National Security Advisor John Bolton pressured Ziemer’s DHS counterpart, Tom Bossert, to resign along with his team. Neither the NSC nor DHS epidemic teams have been replaced. The global health section of the CDC was so drastically cut in 2018 that much of its staff was laid off and the number of countries it was working in was reduced from 49 to merely 10. Meanwhile, throughout 2018, the U.S. Agency for International Development and its director, Mark Green, came repeatedly under fire from both the White House and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo. And though Congress has so far managed to block Trump administration plans to cut the U.S. Public Health Service Commissioned Corps by 40 percent, the disease-fighting cadres have steadily eroded as retiring officers go unreplaced.
So it would be great if it became more of a discussion topic in things like the televised Democratic debates, as I trust that most of the primary candidates would do well speaking on how they plan to address the issue. But more importantly, because it would be a great opportunity to point out to the entire country, how badly Trump and the GOP have left us weak and vulnerable.
Even though the story of the Wuhan Coronavirus is still unfolding, and we do not yet know if the outbreak will be largely contained or become a true global crisis. But even if not coronavirus, another global pandemic will almost undoubtedly come before too long. And because the Trump and the Republican Party have largely set back America’s healthcare reforms because of their defense of private healthcare and attacks on systematic reforms such as the Affordable Care Act, it has also in the process, left us largely vulnerable to these real biological threats.
While it is true that Trump can point to his idea of a response to coronavirus, such as the travel bans, to claim that he is addressing the issue after all. But compared to the system that country could be utilizing, his policies are largely a worse response than the USA is truly capable of.
Trump and the GOP’s policies are mirrored in other serious national threats, such as climate change and seasonal predictable emergencies like wildfires and hurricanes. Slash funding to the agencies and programs that could help us prevent, mitigate, monitor, and alert on these issues, then when disaster truly does strike, force our government to rush through exorbitantly more costly emergency aid packages — all in the name of their so-called “fiscal responsibility.”
However, what their response could best be compared to, is the used car salesmen, who tell you that routine preventive maintenance like oil changes for your car are wastes of money, and it’s better to instead let things inevitably fail, and then buy a whole new car a few years down the line.
While I understand this is not the main priority for many in the Democratic Primaries, it is also a valuable opportunity to highlight just how bad and predatory the used car salesmen of Trump and the Republican Party truly are.
And since we are talking about threats of a global nature such as an epidemic, the stakes are far higher than just letting a car break down.