>>8247241 (pb)
Corona Wrap-up Smear (cont'd)
Well, lookee here anons. What a nice wrapping job:
"TRUMP HAS ALREADY HAMSTRUNG THE U.S.’S CORONAVIRUS RESPONSE
"The White House is expected to request funds from Congress this week—but its disorganized response, and past cuts, may have complicated efforts to tackle the crisis."
"Even if Congress provides additional funding, there remain fears that the Trump administration has already hamstrung it’s ability to address this emergency. As Foreign Policy’s Laurie Garrett wrote last month, the administration has “intentionally rendered itself incapable” of dealing with a problem of this scale. It wiped out its “entire pandemic response chain of command, including the White House management infrastructure,” Garrett wrote, and shut down the National Security Council’s global health security team, as well as its counterpart in the Department of Homeland Security. In addition to proposing funding cuts for national and global health programs, the administration has also kneecapped its public health teams by declining to replace officials who have left. While the president established a Coronavirus Task Force led by Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar last month, “it’s not clear how it will function,” Garrett noted—essentially forcing the administration to “[resort] to improvisation” in its approach to the crisis.
"While the U.S. has been fortunate so far to not see an outbreak like those experienced in China and Japan, the administration has appeared disjointed at times in its handling of the crisis. The State Department’s decision to allow 14 American passengers who had been quarantined on the Diamond Princess cruise ship to return to the U.S. took Trump, a notorious germaphobe, by surprise, the New York Times reported over the weekend, and he expressed his fury to Azar. GOP officials in Alabama were similarly taken aback when the Trump administration notified the state it would be sending some coronavirus patients there; after objecting to the proposal, the administration backed off the plan. “[Trump] called to assure me that this plan will not move forward,” Republican Governor Kay Ivey tweeted Sunday. What’s been lacking in the federal government’s response, Democratic Sen. Brian Schatz said on MSNBC, “is coordination and effort." There’s been confusion, he said, as different agencies, at times, have provided conflicting information. “To the extent that we’ve been fortunate with this disease, it’s because of the epidemiology of the disease,” he said, “not because of some sort of coordinated response from the federal government.”
BY ERIC LUTZ
FEBRUARY 24, 2020
https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2020/02/trump-has-already-hamstrung-the-us-coronavirus-response