Donald Trump is on a blame game tirade that openly shows that HE does not know about what every other president in U.S. history has known, and that is “the buck stops here”. He truly cannot lead, and cannot react properly and in a timely manner when it comes to things like a pandemic. Today, it is mid-April and after president Trump finally has declared the pandemic as a national emergency on March 13th, it is clear that he failed to act in a timely manner and put the United States at risk. He blames the NHO (National Health Organization) for a slow response and vows an investigation into the organization. Trump’s timing couldn’t be worse for suspending funds to the organization, because the truth is known when you see first hand the ‘Red Dawn’ emails that were floating around,
showing that
president Trump knew about the pending health disaster in January.
When the disease started to spread, there was a question as to what the Federal government knew about the severity of the Covid-19 outbreak and what steps were being done to address it.
Correspondents reacted about what was happening inside and outside of the Federal government, as a series of emails were leaked to the NY Times, known as the ‘Red Dawn’ emails.
So what is so damning from the emails?
There are a group of physicians and pandemic experts who starting in January of 2020 were observing what was happening with the outbreak in China, and these are folks who spent years working on preparing the United States for pandemics. They were increasingly concerned starting in January about the fact that this might become the kind of threat they have long feared that the United States was going to face, dating back to 1918 and the Spanish Flu. They were quite concerned in January and they were alarmed and really concerned as of the middle of February, that something very terrible was about to happen in the United States.
These same groups of physicians and pandemic experts knew by the end of February that the country was in trouble and informed the Federal Administration that social distancing and other options were needed to prevent the disease to take over the country.
But….
The government did not respond with the claims coming from the experts, like the public health officials and authorities inside and outside of government. Trump waits and does nothing, but then declares a National Emergency on March 13th, 2020.
Here are some of the key moments…
- The lack of decisive decision making in the White House which has been a known factor since Trump has taken office. A lack of leadership is highly noted.
- A lack of respect for the Secretary of Health and Human Services, the lack of respect for the trade adviser, Peter Navarro as the White House dismissed the memo that he wrote in January stating that this would become a pandemic.
- In late February, a consensus forms among the top health advisers in the United States that the time has come, that governors need to know what is now needed which is to perform non-pharmaceutical interventions where outbreaks are rapidly occurring that they needed to shutdown sectors of the economy to prevent further spreading of the disease.
- The president was not willing to do anything at this point as he waited another 3 weeks to take such a position. In the meantime, the disease spread dramatically in places like New York, Washing Michigan, New Jersey, Connecticut, Massachusetts, Louisiana, and California.
- Because of this delay, there were many more deaths because there was no social distancing.
- When it was observed that non-symptomatic people were spreading the disease to others, this is when most all health officials spoke out and said that the United States needs to take action now. But the president wasn’t ready to make that move even with their very valid claims.
- The president initiated a ban from China on certain individuals – non-US citizens. The quarantine of U.S. citizens coming from abroad was sloppy and many refused to self-quarantine. The White House believed that putting this limited ban of people coming to the US from China was the right thing to do. The idea was ‘containment’ which all heath officials knew would not work. Why? Because the president FAILED TO ACT! It was just too late..
- The heath issue still wasn’t under control by March, PPE equipment still wasn’t ordered. Ventilators were in short supply and were not ordered. He promised millions of ventilaters, but only a fraction were produced. The Army Corps of Engineers and DOD weren’t ordered to supply up until March. This should have been done in January. Why didn’t they act in time? Because the government thought they could ‘contain’ the virus.
- Once it spread out of control, then the government went to the next phase which is ‘mitigation’. Again, this preparing for mitigation should have taken place in January.
- In early February, the Secretary of Health and Human Resources – Alex Azar initiated a plan of early surveillance strategy to see if community spread was starting, but targeted cities were never notified in time that they were going to be part of the plan. So when they were finally approached, it was irrelevant, because there were already wide spread infections. The idea of an early warning system wasn’t heeded. TRUMP FAILED TO ACT dismissing Azar’s claims and making a claim of his own, that the problem was like the flu and would go away.
- In an attempt to get the country out of social distancing and lock-down, the need of extensive testing is needed to find out which people are still infected and isolate them so that others don’t become infected. So far as of April 18th, the government hasn’t come out with a clear plan to protect citizens as governors ease restrictions in each state.
It is clear that another outbreak will surely happen because of a lack of leadership, or a lack of a plan to ease the population back into their every day lives living and working together. There president is banking on the fact that further testing is not needed and wants the governors to open up their states. The president remains unchecked as he feels invincible.
He should and most likely will be made responsible for his actions or the lack of, for what he is doing to put people in harms way, yet again. He is seriously violating his oath. History will not be too kind to Donald J. Trump.
Come this fall, it is expected that another outbreak of Covid-19 will come to pass and we may be in this all over again, because there is no vaccine to date and it is believed that it will return annually like other illnesses do. A vaccine may be over a year away.