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I'm quarantining for COVID because Trump didn't do his job in 2019 [1]

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Date: 2023-09-25

Last week, my wife and I spent some time in her hometown in West Michigan with her family. It should have been a vacation to Yellowstone, but my mother-in-law hadn’t been feeling well and wasn’t in any condition to fly. We came home on Thursday afternoon. Yesterday morning, my wife’s sister frantically texted us to say that she, her mom, her dad, and her husband were all feeling under the weather. Minutes later, she revealed she’d tested positive for COVID-19.

That set my wife and I scrambling to get tested ourselves. Fortunately, we had some at-home tests on hand. Unfortunately, we were both positive. I’m asymptomatic, while my wife has symptoms that would otherwise look like a summer/fall cold. So that means I’m unexpectedly out of work until this Friday.

My head’s been spinning in the last 24 hours—especially when I remember that this shouldn’t even be happening. As far as I’m concerned, I’m going through this because of what may be the most tragic example of Trump dismantling the blueprint Obama left him to handle pandemics—a decision that cost us a chance to get out in front of COVID before it became a raging monster. Specifically, Trump canceled funding for a Centers for Disease Control expert whose specific job was to watch for signs of outbreaks of this magnitude coming from China.

In March 2020, not long after the pandemic mushroomed in full, Reuters reported that a decision Trump made the previous year may have denied us precious months that could have been used to prepare for COVID. Linda Quick, a CDC epidemiologist, was embedded with the Chinese counterpart of the CDC as resident adviser to the U.S. Field Epidemiology Training Program in China. She was tasked with training Chinese field epidemiologists who track and contain diseases at the source. Funding for her position was to end as of September, but she left in July. No other foreign disease experts were brought in to replace her.

One of Quick’s predecessors in that post underlined just how devastating this was in the long run.

“It was heartbreaking to watch,” said Bao-Ping Zhu, a Chinese American who served in that role, which was funded by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, between 2007 and 2011. “If someone had been there, public health officials and governments across the world could have moved much faster.”

Zhu and three others told Reuters that an embedded CDC expert like Quick is in a position to serve as “the eyes and ears on the ground” for the rest of the world, and can send out “real-time information” worldwide in the early stages of an outbreak. That’s particularly critical when you’re dealing with a country where lying to your own people and the rest of the world is SOP. Remember, this pandemic started when local officials in Wuhan tried to hush up a spate of pneumonia-like cases sometime in December.

An official statement from the CDC claimed that lining out Quick’s post didn’t hamstring its ability to get information—a line that is laughable knowing what we know about how Beijing does business. Along similar lines, a former CDC epidemiologist, also doubted that Quick’s presence would have made a difference.

“In the end, based on circumstances in China, it probably wouldn’t have made a big difference,” Scott McNabb, who was a CDC epidemiologist for 20 years and is now a research professor at Emory University. “The problem was how the Chinese handled it. What should have changed was the Chinese should have acknowledged it earlier and didn’t.”

I find that hard to believe, based on what happened with Trump’s attempted shakedown of Ukraine. We only found out just how egregious it was because career diplomats were so outraged by it that they essentially walked on broken glass to get the word out to Congress. Somehow, I would think that Quick and others would have found a way to counter the lies and cover-ups and warn the world.

The lack of real-time information may have been lethal, based on a timeline from Trump’s Department of Health and Human Services.

Alex Azar, secretary of Health and Human Services (HHS) said on Friday that his agency learned of the coronavirus in early January, based on (CDC Director Richard) Redfield’s conversations with “Chinese colleagues.” Redfield learned that “this looks to be a novel coronavirus” from Dr. Gao Fu, the head of the China CDC, according to an HHS administration official, who spoke on condition of anonymity. “Dr. Redfield always talked to Dr. Gao,” the official said. HHS and CDC did not make Azar or Redfield available for comment. Zhu and other sources said U.S. leaders should not have been relying on the China CDC director for alerts and updates. In general, they said, officials in China downplayed the severity of the outbreak in the early weeks and did not acknowledge evidence of person-to-person transmission until Jan. 20.

For those of you keeping score, from the time we learned of the first cases in China, it took almost a month for Beijing to acknowledge person-to-person transmission. You don’t need to be an epidemiology expert to know that someone on the ground would have been able to detect this a lot sooner—and possibly earlier in December.

When I diaried about this article in March 2020, several commenters noted that we weren’t told to prepare for COVID for another month after Beijing finally admitted there was person-to-person transmission. It turned out a vaccine was already being prepared by January—but that news got buried by the news of Kobe Bryant’s death.

Think about it, folks. If we’d had a way to counter the fake news coming out of China about this virus, it’s a near-mathematical certainty we would have had more time to prepare. As we’ve seen all too often in the last three-plus years, when you act matters. For instance, my wife lived in north Georgia at the time we started dating—not long before the pandemic mushroomed. It was theoretically possible to dine in at restaurants in much of the state outside Atlanta and Savannah well into April 2020. In contrast, North Carolina ended in-person dining in mid-March. Hardly a coincidence that Georgia had far more cases than North Carolina did for a long time, despite the two states having almost the same number of people.

As I write this, I’m shaking with anger. It was already amply established that the worst peacetime crisis in this country’s history was man-made. But to think that this could have been a lot easier had we had enough information to get out in front of it? It’s yet another reminder that for all the times Trump bitched about the deep state and their handmaidens in the media and the left weren’t letting him do his job, he never began to do it.

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[1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/9/25/2195343/-I-m-quarantining-for-COVID-because-Trump-didn-t-do-his-job-in-2019

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