Scientist explains how Trump ‘obliterated’ Obama’s pandemic response infrastructure out of spite
Laurie Garrett, the former senior fellow for global health at the Council on Foreign Relations, Pulitzer Prize-winning science writer.
LAURIE GARRETT: Pretty abysmal situation.
Where we are right now is that everybody is recognizing, oops, it was a big mistake by the Trump administration to obliterate the entire infrastructure of pandemic response that the
Obama administration had created.
Why did he do it?
Well, it certainly wasn’t about the money, because it wasn’t a heavily funded program. It was certainly because it was Obama’s program.
AMY GOODMAN: And explain. You’re talking about the unit within the Centers for Disease Control.
LAURIE GARRETT: No, we’re talking about something much vaster than that.
It was a special division inside
the National Security Council,
the Department of Homeland Security
collaborating centers in HHS
Office of Global Health Affairs
the Commerce Department,
Treasury Department.
All had special units to handle a pandemic.
They were all eliminated. It’s gone.
Donald Trump killed all of them leaving us defenceless.
But what Obama understood, dealing with Ebola in 2014,is that any American response had to be an all-of-government response, that there were so many agencies overlapping, and they all had a little piece of the puzzle in the case of a pandemic.
Just do this mental exercise with me, Amy.
If we get to the situation where we’re anything like what’s going on in China right now, then our Department of Commerce, our Department of Transportation and our department of USDA would have to collaborate to get food deliveries all over America so that parts of America don’t starve.
And you could see in China convoys, hundreds of 18-wheeler vehicles completely full of food, coming into Wuhan every single day. Do we have the capacity to coordinate that?
What the Obama administration realized was that you can’t corral multiple agencies and things from private sector as well as public sector to come to the aid of America, unless you have some one person in charge who’s really the manager of it all.
And in his case, it was Ron Klain, who had worked under Vice President Biden. And he was designated, with an office inside the White House, to give orders and coordinate all these various things.
And now they’re hastily trying to recreate something.
And last night there were many names tossed around about who he was going to appoint as head of the response.
He had previously gone on the record, President Trump, saying,
“I have great faith in Secretary Azar, and my HHS secretary will be in charge.”
And we’re told, from multiple sources, that right up until they got on stage for that press briefing, Azar thought he was in charge. And then the president says, “And here’s my good friend Mike Pence, and he’s taking charge.”
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