Trump's Deadly Cornavirus Bungle
"Nobody ever expected a thing like this,” Trump said in a Fox News interview on Tuesday, March 23. To the contrary, starting in 2016, in the aftermath of the Ebola crisis of 2014-2015, the National Security Council had initiated a project to develop a "Playbook for Early Response to High-Consequence Emerging Infectious Disease Threats and Biological Incidents," aka "the pandemic playbook." The playbook outlines hundreds of tactics and decisions to be considered when confronting a pandemic including consideration of availability of personal-protective-equipment (PPE) for healthcare providers, recommendation that the federal government work to detect potential outbreaks, and consider invoking the Defense Production Act.
The Trump administration was made aware of the document's existence in 2017, but -- whether by choice or ineptitude -- it was "thrown onto a shelf" according to a government official interviewed by Politico, who worked in the Obama and Trump administrations.
Among its many recommendations, the playbook contains a set of key questions and decisions to be addressed as soon as there is a "credible threat" of a pandemic, which in the case of COVID19 would have been in early to mid January when the virus was spreading in China....