Comments by "" (@DavidJ222) on "President Trump halts funding to World Health Organization" video.

  1. Trump is attempting to scapegoat the WHO, the media, and everyone else for his criminal incompetence, and his failure to protect this country from a virus that he was warned about multiple times. U.S. intelligence officials with the National Center for Medical Intelligence issued a report in late November warning that a virus was taking root in China. Analysts concluded it could be a "cataclysmic event,” and the report was shared with the White House, the Pentagon’s Joint Staff and the Defense Intelligence Agency. There were multiple warnings throughout December for the NSC and the White House. Government records shows that repeated warnings were issued to the White House, but they  went unheeded. The first case of COVID-19 reached the U.S. on Jan15. The WHO declared it a pandemic on March 11. Trump declared the U.S. outbreak a national emergency on March 13. On Jan. 18, Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar first briefed Trump on the threat of the virus in a phone call. Trump made his first public comments about the virus on Jan. 22, saying he was not concerned about a pandemic and that "we have it totally under control." On Jan. 27, White House aides met with then-acting Chief of Staff Mulvaney to try to get senior officials to take the virus threat more seriously. Joe Grogan, the head of the White House Domestic Policy Council, warned it could cost Trump his re-election. On Jan. 29, economic adviser Peter Navarro warned the White House in a memo addressed to the National Security Council that COVID-19 could take more than half a million American lives and cause nearly $6 trillion in economic damage. On Jan. 30, Azar warned Trump in a call that the virus could become a pandemic and that China should be criticized for its lack of transparency. Trump dismissed Azar as alarmist and rejected the idea of criticizing China. The World Health Organization declared the coronavirus a global health emergency. On Feb. 5, senators urged Trump in a briefing to take the virus more seriously and asked if additional funds were necessary. The administration made no requests at the time for emergency funding. On Feb. 14, a memo was drafted by health officials in coordination with the National Security Council that recommended the targeted use of quarantine and isolation measures. Officials planned to present Trump with the memo when he returned from India on Feb. 25, but the meeting was canceled. On Feb. 21, the White House coronavirus task force conducted a mock exercise of the pandemic. The group concluded that the U.S. would need to implement aggressive social distancing, even if it caused mass disruption to the economy and American lives. On Feb. 23, Navarro doubled down on his warnings in another memo, this time addressed to the president, stating that up to 2 million Americans could die of the virus. On Feb. 25, director of the National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases Nancy Messonnier publicly warned of the virus threat and said "we need to be preparing for significant disruption in our lives.” Trump reportedly called Azar fuming that Messonnier had scared people unnecessarily and caused the stock market to plummet. On Jan 3, Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar said he first learned of the spread of the virus in China at a White House briefing attended by CDC and Prevention director Robert Redfield. Days after the Jan. 3 briefing in the White House, U.S. intelligence warnings about the threat posed by the virus began appearing in Trump's daily brief. Whether Trump read those is anyone's guess. Either way, his indifference and inaction constitutes a criminal negligence of duty, and a violation of his oath, to protect and defend this country. So far, more than 23 thousand American lives have been lost, and many of them needlessly, as a direct consequence of Trump's moral ineptitude, sociopathic behavior, and criminal negligence, and for that, he must be held accountable.
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  2. "What President Obama left Trump, was a global health infrastructure that we had set up, informed by the lessons of the Ebola outbreak,” Ben Rhodes, Former Deputy National Security Adviser under Obama said, referring to the NSC pandemic directorate that was dismantled by the Trump in 2018. “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.” Trump has defended his record, arguing, “I’m a "businessperson." I don’t like having thousands of people around when you don’t need them. When we need them, we can get them back very quickly.” But experts argue that’s not how pandemic preparedness works, and that's definitely not how a virus works.  “You build a fire department ahead of time,” Tom Inglesby, director of the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security stated. “You don’t wait for a fire.” Trump, being the stable genius that he is,  believed it was smarter to wait and put together a fire department, AFTER a five alarm fire starts.
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