Comments by "" (@DavidJ222) on "Story of doctor who died treating cornavirus patients has Cuomo fighting tears" video.
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Trump: "Nobody in their wildest dreams could have predicted that a pandemic like this was possible. Perhaps if Obama had left me with something like a global health directorate within the National Security Council, I could have gotten a good head start on this. So I take no responsibility for any of this. This is all Obama's fault."
President Obama created the NSC directorate for global health and security and bio-defense, and he passed it on to Trump in 2017. And then Trump dismantled it, because he doesn't believe in science or facts, so he didn't understand it.
“I think, importantly, what Obama did leave Trump is a global health infrastructure that we had set up informed by the lessons of the Ebola outbreak,” Ben Rhodes said before pointing to a National Security Council (NSC) pandemic directorate that was dismantled by the Trump administration in 2018..
And what we did is set up, in the White House, ... an office that was responsible for managing pandemics, managing global health threats that was shut down two years ago by President Trump.
And when you don’t have an office like that, you don’t have dedicated people inside the White House who are ensuring that information is acted upon. When you see an outbreak in a place like Wuhan, China, you want people in the White House who are thinking about what needs to be done right away so that you don’t get behind the curve, which is what happened in this White House.
You need a president who’s willing to hear bad news, willing to understand that they’re going to have to focus on something that they may have not intended to focus on. President trump clearly did not want to hear that bad news when he heard about the outbreak in coronavirus,”
--Ben Rhodes, Former Deputy National Security Adviser under President Obama.
Trump said that COVID-19 “came out of nowhere” and “blindsided the world.” His comments left scientists, doctors, and national security experts in a state of disbelief. Experts had been warning about the next pandemic for years and criticized the Trump’s decision in 2018 to dismantle a National Security Council directorate at the White House, charged with preparing for WHEN, NOT if, another pandemic would hit the nation.
Trump’s elimination of the office suggested, along with his proposed budget cuts for the CDC, that he did not see or comprehend the threat of pandemics.
“One year later I was mystified when the White House dissolved the office, leaving the country less prepared for pandemics like COVID-19,” Beth Cameron, the first director of the unit, wrote in an op-ed. She said the directorate was set up to be the “smoke alarm” and get ahead of emergencies and sound a warning at the earliest sign of fire — “all with the goal of avoiding a six-alarm fire.”
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