Comments by "NotMe Us" (@notmeus1968) on "Trump says he is not firing Fauci, defends virus response" video.
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@johnathanmiller3033 February 5th
The Senate impeachment vote distracts the nation. But five days later, the president raises COVID-19 at a campaign rally.
“Looks like by April when it gets warmer it will go away,” he said.
February 25
As Coronavirus ravages South Korea, Iran and Italy in late February, President Trump tweets the virus is under control and the stock market is starting to look very good.
“We’re very close to a vaccine,” he said on February 25.
February 26- 28
Expressing a heightened sense of alert, the White House announces a Task Force led by Vice President Pence. “It’s going to get worse before it gets better, we'll see, who really knows.”
March 10
The virus is spreading rapidly in the U.S, and it’s clear efforts at containment have failed. While Trump said he thought “the US has done a very good job on testing,” the lines at testing sites in Chicago tell a different story.

March 11 & 13
No more denial. The World Health Organization declares the outbreak a pandemic, and President Trump addresses the nation.
“Today, I am officially declaring a national emergency, two very big words,” Trump said
Throughout Mid-march
COVID-19’s devastation sets in and the number of deaths soar as hospitals are overwhelmed, the stock market tanks, and states issue stay-at-home orders.
But President Trump, still likening COVID-19 to ordinary flu, announces he wants the country to “reopen” by Easter.
March 26th
The total number of cases in the U.S. reaches the highest in the world. The states bearing the heaviest brunt of the national emergency beg the federal government for more help.
March 27th
President Trump signs an unprecedented $2 Trillion rescue package.
March 30th
In a presidential about-face, social distancing guidelines are extended through the end of April.

March 31
COVID-19 is now a national nightmare with U.S. infectious disease experts warning of possibly 100,000 to 200,000 deaths.
The president, who just one month earlier called the virus, a “hoax” offers this grim assessment: ”This is going to be a rough two-week period.”
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j a July 2019: The Trump administration eliminates an American public health position designed to detect disease outbreaks in China.
The CDC removes an American public health official stationed in Beijing within China’s disease control agency. The official, Dr. Linda Quick, worked with Chinese epidemiologists to help detect and contain diseases. “If someone had been there, public health officials and governments across the world could have moved much faster,” Bao-Ping Zhu, who served in the role between 2007 and 2011, tells Reuters in March 2020. Thomas R. Frieden, former director of the CDC, said that if the Quick had still been in China, “it is possible that we would know more today about how this coronavirus is spreading and what works best to stop it.” However, Scott McNabb, a CDC epidemiologist for 20 years and now a research professor at Emory University says, “it probably wouldn’t have made a big difference.” “The problem was how the Chinese handled it,” he says.
No disease expert replaced Quick in the program following her departure.
“The decision to eliminate Quick’s job came as the CDC has scaled back the number of U.S. staffers in China over the last two years,” Reuters reports.
September 2019: The President’s Council of Economic Advisors (CEA) warns that an influenza pandemic may cause tremendous health and economic losses.
The CEA warns that there will be large health and economic losses if an influenza-like pandemic occurs in the United States.
“The United States is unprepared to deliver a sufficient number of vaccine doses quickly enough to stop the rapid initial spread of a pandemic virus,” the CEA reports. “Pandemic influenza is a low-probability but high-cost problem that should not be ignored. The current influenza vaccine manufacturing infrastructure in the U.S. is dependent on egg-based production that is too slow to produce adequate doses of vaccines for unexpected pandemic outbreaks and may impair vaccine efficacy. This could lead to tremendous, avoidable costs.”
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j a January 29, 2019: The Intelligence Community’s Worldwide Threat Assessment warns that the U.S. is vulnerable to a global pandemic.
As part of the annual WorldWide Threat Assessment by the Intelligence Community, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence warns that a major disease outbreak is one of the top global threats in the world, writing: “We assess that the United States and the world will remain vulnerable to the next flu pandemic or large-scale outbreak of a contagious disease that could lead to massive rates of death and disability, severely affect the world economy, strain international resources, and increase calls on the United States for support.”
April 2019: HHS Secretary Alex Azar says what keeps everyone in the Biodefense world up at night is the threat of a pandemic flu.
Secretary Azar says that one of the biggest concerns in the biodefense world is the threat of a pandemic flu.
The thing that people ask what keeps you most up at night in the biodefense world, pandemic flu, of course. I think everyone in this room probably shares that concern, and working with Secretary Leavitt, President Bush and the Congress to create the pandemic flu preparedness work that we did that really helped rejuvenate a domestic annual flu vaccine capability here in the United States revolutionized, we’re not there yet, but revolutionized our capabilities and capacities around flu production in the U.S., to minimize shortages so we hopefully never go through what we did in 04 on the Chiron shortage, and then [sic] now we]ve got capacity, but we still need to improve our speed of production of pan flu vaccine and our capacities.
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j a May 7, 2018: White House proposes cutting global health budget.
The White House sends a plan to Congress proposing budget cuts. It includes cutting out $252 million for health security preparedness in funds remaining from the 2014-2015 Ebola epidemic.
May 7, 2018: The National Security Council’s director of medical and biodefense preparedness warns that pandemic flu is the top health security concern and that the country is not prepared for it.
Luciana Borio, NSC director of medical and biodefense preparedness, states, “The threat of pandemic flu is the number one health security concern. Are we ready to respond? I fear the answer is no.” Borio’s statement is part of her remarks at a symposium at Emory University to mark the 100th anniversary of the 1918 influenza pandemic.
May 8, 2018: The National Security Council removes the top official responsible for pandemic response and disbands the global health security team.
President Trump’s National Security Advisor, John Bolton, removes Rear Adm. Timothy Ziemer from the National Security Council and disbandsZiemer’s unit, the Directorate for Global Health Security and Biodefense. Previously, Ziemer was the sole senior official focused on pandemic preparedness. He is not replaced.
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j a December 2017: The Trump administration bans the CDC from using the terms “evidence-based” and “science-based.”
The Trump administration instructssenior officials at the CDC that they should not use the phrases “science-based” or “evidence-based” and instead use the suggested phrase: “CDC bases its recommendations on science in consideration with community standards and wishes.”
February 9, 2018: President Trump signs bill that cuts $1.35 billion in funding for Prevention and Public Health Fund at the CDC.
President Trump cuts $1.35 billion of funding for the CDC’s Prevention and Public Health Fund, established in 2016 as part of the Affordable Care Act. The fund supports programs that monitor healthcare associated infections, programs that are responsive to rapidly emerging health issues, and programs that improve public health immunization infrastructure, among other things.
February 13, 2018: The Intelligence Community’s Worldwide Threat Assessment warns of major pandemic risks.
In written testimony before Congress on the presentation of the Intelligence Community’s Worldwide Threat Assessment, the Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats writes:
The increase in frequency and diversity of reported disease outbreaks—such as dengue and Zika—probably will continue through 2018, including the potential for a severe global health emergency that could lead to major economic and societal disruptions, strain governmental and international resources, and increase calls on the United States for support. A novel strain of a virulent microbe that is easily transmissible between humans continues to be a major threat, with pathogens such as H5N1 and H7N9 influenza and Middle East Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus having pandemic potential if they were to acquire efficient human-to-human transmissibility.
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@fructiferous Friday, Jan. 13, 2017: The joint Obama-Trump transition teams run an exercise for pandemic preparedness.
The outgoing Obama team runs the Trump transition team through a series of pandemic-scenarios. The transition documents, obtained by POLITICO, show that the purpose of the exercise is to familiarize the incoming team with “domestic incident management policy and practices” in the face of major crises.
Key takeaways from the exercise include: (1) a collective understanding of the science and the disease must drive response decisions; (2) days and even hours are paramount in order to build as much lead time as possible; (3) a coordinated and unified national response and message is necessary; and (4) “medical countermeasure strategy is key for success,” including social distancing and addressing shortages in ventilators and personal protective equipment.
Trump administration attendees include: Steven Mnuchin, Rep. Mike Pompeo, Wilbur Ross, Betsy DeVos, Dr. Ben Carson, Elaine Chao, Stephen Miller, Marc Short, Reince Priebus (resigned), Rex Tillerson (fired), Gen. James Mattis (fired), Rep. Ryan Zinke (resigned), Sen. Jeff Sessions (resigned), Sen. Dan Coats (fired), Andrew Puzder (not confirmed), Dr. Tom Price (resigned), Gov. Rick Perry (resigned), Dr. David Shulkin (fired), Gen. John Kelly (resigned), Rep. Mick Mulvaney, Linda McMahon (resigned), Sean Spicer (fired), Joe Hagin (resigned), Joshua Pitcock (resigned), Tom Bossert (fired), KT McFarland (resigned), Gen. Michael Flynn (awaiting criminal sentencing), Gary Cohn (resigned), Katie Walsh (resigned), and Rick Dearborn (resigned).
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j a November 17, 2019: Possible first case of COVID-19 emerges in Hubei province, China.
Internal Chinese government data, obtained by the South China Morning Post (in March), show that Chinese government investigators found an earlier case of COVID-19 on November 17. It is not clear that Chinese authorities knew that they were dealing with a new virus at the time.
“Some of the cases were likely backdated after health authorities had tested specimens taken from suspected patients,” the newspaper reports. “Interviews with whistle-blowers from the medical community suggest Chinese doctors only realised they were dealing with a new disease in late December.” From the 55-year-old patient on November 17 onwards, one to five new cases of COVID-19 are reported each day, according to the government records.
Note: A report in The Lancet by Chinese doctors from Wuhan’s Jin Yin-tan Hospital refers to the first patient in the study occuring on Dec. 1, 2019.
Late November-December 2019: U.S. intelligence agencies warn of a “cataclysmic” and “out-of-control” disease in Wuhan, China.
The Pentagon’s National Center for Medical Intelligence (NCMI) circulates a report identifying a contagion sweeping through Wuhan, China. NCMI bases its report on wire intercepts, computer intercepts, and satellite images. “Analysts concluded it could be a cataclysmic event,” a source tells ABC News (in April 2020).
Intelligence community bulletins begin circulating across the government around Thanksgiving. “Those analyses said China’s leadership knew the epidemic was out of control even as it kept such crucial information from foreign governments and public health agencies,” ABC News reports.
The intelligence reports raise alarms inside the US government because the disease could pose a serious threat to U.S. forces in Asia.
In response to ABC News and other reports in April 2020, the Pentagon issues a denial. “We can confirm that media reporting about the existence/release of a National Center for Medical Intelligence Coronavirus-related product/assessment in November of 2019 is not correct. No such NCMI product exists,” Col. R. Shane Day, Director of the NCMI, says in a statement provided by the Department of Defense.
Special note: In a careful analysis of the emergence of COVID-19 in Wuhan, Josh Marshall casts doubt on the ABC News reporting. He concludes, “I think the simplest answer is that the ABC report is simply wrong. Not in its totality necessarily but in dating the original report back to late November. If it’s a month later that starts to look plausible.” (The New York Times later reports that the NCMI concluded that the virus was likely to spread across the globe and could become a pandemic, but without a date as to that assessment except that it occured by early January.)
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@fructiferous nearly every politician has a rise in approval ratings like Cuomo approval that went up 27 points to 81% yet traitor trumps approval has dropped by 8 points to 46% approval.
The poll of 3,000 Americans, taken March 21-April 1, found governors with an average approval rating of 72%; "significantly higher" by 27 points than the 45% thumbs up given to President Trump. In an ABC News-Ipsos poll released Friday, Trump received a 47% approval mark for his handling of the COVID-19 pandemic.
The top approval ratings, in Microsoft's survey, went to Republican governors in Maryland and Ohio, who have both been pro-active in banning large meetings, closing schools, delivering stay-at-home orders and issuing blunt warnings of potential coronavirus impacts. Gov. Larry Hogan of Maryland received an 84% approval rating and Gov. Mike DeWine of Ohio came in with an 83% rating. Approval for Trump was just 33% in Maryland, and 49% in Ohio.
New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, whose state is the epicenter of the U.S. coronavirus pandemic, came in at 81%. Cuomo has delivered daily briefings, telecast nationally, which have ranged from health experts' warnings to appeals for ventilators, to exchanges with his little brother, CNN pundit Chris Cuomo, who has tested positive and is sick with the virus.
"Governors from Washington, Hawaii and Massachusetts also received high ratings," the Microsoft survey found. Washington Gov. Jay Inslee received a 74% approval rating in the first state to experience a case and a death in the pandemic. Gov. Gavin Newson of California, who also issued an early stay-home order, came in at 79%.
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.seattlepi.com/coronavirus/amp/us-governors-approval-soars-response-to-covid-19-15177490.php
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January 27, 2020: Acting Chief-of-Staff Mick Mulvaney meets with other senior officials about how the Trump administration is handling the virus. The President’s Coronavirus Task Force begins daily meetings.
During the meeting, Joe Grogan (head of White House Domestic Policy Council) argues that the administration needs to take the virus seriously and that the President’s reelection could be at stake.
The President’s Coronavirus Task Force begins daily meetings. Led by Alex Azar, members include: Robert O’Brien (NSA), Dr. Robert Redfield (CDC), Dr. Anthony Fauci (NIH), Stephen Biegun (State), Ken Cuccinelli (DHS), Joel Szabat (DOT), Matthew Pottinger (Deputy National Security Advisor), Derek Kan (OMB), Dr. Deborah Birx (State Department), Rob Blair, Joseph Grogan, and Christopher Liddell.
The same day: South Korean officials inform private companies that they should start developing testing kits.
In an urgent meeting, South Korean officials disclose information on test methods and encourage companies to quickly develop test kits promising fast regulatory approval.
January 28, 2020: Alex Azar holds a coronavirus press briefing and informs the public that the HHS has been monitoring the virus since December. A Department of Veterans Affairs official circulates awarning to government public health experts about the outbreak.
He says that HHS has been monitoring the virus and preparing a response since December and that he is speaking regularly with the president about the situation.
Dr. Carter Mecher, a senior medical adviser at the Department of Veterans Affairs, emails dozens of his colleagues in government and at universities about the coronavirus.
“The chatter on the blogs is that WHO and CDC are behind the curve. I’m seeing comments from people asking why WHO and CDC seem to be downplaying this. I’m certainly no public health expert (just a dufus from the VA), but no matter how I look at this, it looks to be bad,” he warns in the email chain later leaked to the N.Y. Times. “The projected size of the outbreak already seems hard to believe, but when I think of the actions being taken across China that are reminiscent of 1918 Philadelphia, perhaps those numbers are correct. … Any way you cut it, this is going to be bad. You guys made fun of me screaming to close the schools. Now I’m screaming, close the colleges and universities.”
The email chain, dubbed the “the Red Dawn String” by its members based off the 1984 movie about a group of Americans trying to save the United States from a foreign invasion, later includes: Dr. Jerome Adams (Surgeon General of the United States), Dr. Larry G. Padget (State Department), Dr. Anthony Fauci (NIH), Dr. Robert Kadlec (HHS), Dr. Robert Redfield (HHS), Col. Matthew Hepburn (DARPA, DOD), nine other senior officials at the Department of Health and Human Services, eight senior officials from the Department of Homeland Security, among other academics, private sector employees, former government officials and state officials.

The same day: Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR) urges senior White House officials to implement a targeted travel ban on China.
Senator Tom Cotton, a member of U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (SSCI), urges Secretaries Mike Pompeo, Alex Azar, and Chad Wolf to implement a targeted travel ban on China and warns the senior White House officials not to trust Chinese authorities. He writes in a letter:
China’s own actions demonstrate the severity of the threat. Beijing has quarantined more than 50 million people–the combined population of our entire West Coast–and cancelled school indefinitely. Just this morning, Hong Kong has slashed travel from mainland China. These are not the actions of a government in control of the outbreak. … Thanks to the deadly combination of Chinese duplicity and incompetence, the virus has now spread to most provinces in China and neighboring nations.
He also urges the White House “to marshal the full resources of the federal government to engineer a vaccine to the virus.”
The following day, Sen. Cotton meets with President Trump to discuss the coronavirus.
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j a January 30, 2020: Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross, in a Fox News interview, says the virus will be good for the U.S. economy. Secretary Azar directly warns President Trump that the virus could morph into a pandemic, a warning the president discounts as alarmist.
“I don’t want to talk about a victory lap over a very unfortunate, very malignant disease,” Ross says. “But the fact is, it does give business yet another thing to consider when they go through their review of their supply chain. It’s another risk factor that people need to take into account. So I think it will help to accelerate the return of jobs to North America.”
Secretary Wilbur Ross says coronavirus will be good for [checks notes] American jobs: "I think it will help to accelerate the return of jobs to North America."
Secretary Azar, along with Mick Mulvaney, calls Trump aboard Air Force One and gives the president a blunt warning that the virus could morph into a pandemic, The president responds that Azar is being alarmist. Azar also recommends that China should be criticized for not being transparent. Trump rejects the idea of criticizing China.
The same day: The WHO declares that the COVID-19 outbreak is a “Public Health Emergency.”
WHO Director-General Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus declares that the COVID-19 outbreak is a Public Health Emergency of International Concern
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j a February 13, 2020: Secretary Azar announces that the government will establish a “surveillance” program in five cities which will then be expanded nationally, but the plan is delayed for weeks.
The plan is supposed to help experts measure the disease and predict next hot spots. “We were flying the plane with no instruments,” one official toldthe New York Times. The Washington Post reports that the plan would require diagnostic tests produced on a mass scale for rapid deployment.
February 14, 2020: The HHS and the National Security Council produce a memo titled “U.S. Government Response to the 2019 Novel Coronavirus.”
In a memo dated February 14, the HHS and National Security Council outline possible U.S. responses to the coronavirus, including what more severe community mitigation measures would look like:
significantly limiting public gatherings and cancellation of almost all sporting events, performances, and public and private meetings that cannot be convened by phone. Consider school closures. Widespread “stay at home” directives from public and private organizations with nearly 100% telework for some.
President Trump later cancels the meeting with senior HHS and National Security Council officials, when officials intended to present the memo and their recommendation for enhanced mitigation measures. “The White House focused instead on messaging and crucial additional weeks went by before their views were reluctantly accepted by the president — time when the virus spread largely unimpeded,” the New York Times reports
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