Like Bush Bungled Katrina, Trump is Blowing It on Coronavirus

If you haven't been worried about the coronavirus before now, you better sit up and take notice.  The financial markets are certainly paying attention-- as evidenced  by the two-day slide in the stock market, which wiped out all gains year-to-date.

Dr. Nancy Messonnier, one of the top officials at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention warned the public, saying, "We expect we will see community spread in this country.  It's not so much a question of if this will happen anymore, but rather more a question of exactly when this will happen and how many people in this country will have severe illness."

But is the Trump administration ready?  "I think that's a problem that's going to go away," Trump said about the virus while he was in India-- less than a few days after global infections exploded in South Korea, Italy, Austria, Croatia and Iran.  In that same news conference, Trump insisted that "we're very close to a vaccine." Well that's yet another Trump lie-- there's no available evidence that a vaccine is "close," in fact, most infectious disease experts say developing a vaccine for the coronavirus is roughly a year away. Trump also claimed that all the U.S. coronavirus patients "are getting better ... they're all getting better."  However, Dr. Messonnier, told reporters that the Americans hospitalized in Japan are still "seriously ill."

So where are we actually?  Let's start by going back to early 2018, when the Trump White House pushed Congress to cut funding for Obama-era disease security programs.  The Trump administration then also eliminated $15 billion in national health spending and cut the global disease-fighting operational budgets of the CDC, NSC, DHS, and HHS.  In addition, 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.

Obama's "epidemic czar" Ronald Klain has been warning for two years that the United States was in grave danger should a pandemic emerge. In 2017 and 2018, the philanthropist billionaire Bill Gates met repeatedly with Bolton and his predecessor, H.R. McMaster, warning that ongoing cuts to the global health disease infrastructure would render the United States vulnerable to, as he put it, the “significant probability of a large and lethal modern-day pandemic occurring in our lifetimes.” And an independent, bipartisan panel formed by the Center for Strategic and International Studies concluded that lack of preparedness was so acute in the Trump administration that the “United States must either pay now and gain protection and security or wait for the next epidemic and pay a much greater price in human and economic costs.”

The next epidemic is now here; we’ll soon know the costs imposed by the Trump administration’s early negligence and present panic. On Jan. 29, Trump announced the creation of the President’s Coronavirus Task Force, an all-male group of a dozen advisors, five from the White House staff. Chaired by Secretary of Health and Human Services Alex Azar, the task force includes men from the CDC, State Department, DHS, the Office of Management and Budget, and the Transportation Department. It’s not clear how this task force will function or when it will even convene.

In the absence of a formal structure, the government has resorted to improvisation. In practical terms, the U.S. government’s public health effort is led by Daniel Jernigan, the incident commander for the Wuhan coronavirus response at the CDC.  Jernigan is responsible for convening meetings of the nation’s state health commissioner, but it is unclear if that has happened.  In the meantime, state-level health leaders are telling reporters that they have been sharing information with one another and deciding how best to prepare their medical and public health workers without waiting for instructions from federal leadership.

Preparing a country for infectious disease is a complicated process—to do it right will require sustained attention and resources, and it’s unlikely that a comprehensive plan will materialize in time to make a real difference as the coronavirus spreads.