Top White House official in charge of pandemic response exits abruptly (May 10, 2018 )
By: CB
President Trump caused The Trump Administration to be unprepared for this advent of a most deadly coronavirus, COVID-19, to land in and decimate New York City and bring the rest of this nation's great people to a standstill. Read below. This is one and a series of articles on the subject of negligence which resulted in a deadly asymptomatic virus landing in our country without a proper exclusion by President Donald J. Trump.
S E E D E D C O N T E N T
By
The top White House official responsible for leading the U.S. response in the event of a deadly pandemic has left the administration, and the global health security team he oversaw has been disbanded under a reorganization by national security adviser John Bolton. [Note date of this story—CB]
The abrupt departure of Rear Adm. Timothy Ziemer from the National Security Council means no senior administration official is now focused solely on global health security. Ziemer’s departure, along with the breakup of his team, comes at a time when many experts say the country is already underprepared for the increasing risks of a pandemic or bioterrorism attack.
Ziemer’s last day was Tuesday, the same day a new Ebola outbreak was declared in Congo. He is not being replaced.
P andemic preparedness and global health security are issues that require government-wide responses, experts say, as well as the leadership of a high-ranking official within the White House who is assigned only this role.
. . . .
Ziemer is a well-respected public health leader who was considered highly effective leading the President’s Malaria Initiative under George W. Bush and Barack Obama before joining the NSC last year. While Palladino said he left “on the warmest terms,” an individual familiar with the specifics behind the reorganization said “he was basically pushed out. He struggled to preserve himself and the integrity of his team, and he failed.”
His exit comes against the backdrop of other administration actions critics say have weakened health security preparedness, including dwindling financing for early preventive action against infectious disease threats abroad.
The White House proposal “is threatening to claw back funding whose precise purpose is to help the United States be able to respond quickly in the event of a crisis,” said Carolyn Reynolds, a vice president at PATH, a global health technology nonprofit.
Collectively, warns Jeremy Konyndyk, who led foreign disaster assistance at the U.S. Agency for International Development during the Obama administration, “What this all adds up to is a potentially really concerning rollback of progress on U.S. health security preparedness.”
“It seems to actively unlearn the lessons we learned through very hard experience over the last 15 years,” said Konyndyk, now a senior policy fellow at the Center for Global Development. “These moves make us materially less safe. It’s inexplicable.
. . . .
“The threat of pandemic flu is the number one health security concern,” she told the audience. “Are we ready to respond? I fear the answer is no.”
Article is LOCKED by author/seeder
We're going to go back - way back - and let the history of the unprepared state affairs at the start of this pandemic in the United States bear themselves out or not. Are you with me? Let's go!
America might not have been able to entirely stop it, but it could have been prepared to limit it. You can thank your POTUS for dumping those who could well have insulated the USA from the worst that has happened.
DUMP TRUMP
Sad, but not surprising.
This is why I have limited patience with those who will not show up to read, discover, and discuss what is factually true! Instead we have persistent invoking of the Trump party line narrative here, abroad, and spreading to parts unknown. It is never okay to exist in a delusion reality—Trump induced or otherwise.
Donald Trump is an anomaly. Somehow he apparently has been given a worldview all his own, whereupon he can allow millions of others to join in. It is not the real world and we can not continue to allow Donald the power, influence, and reputation of this country to "lockdown" on what is proper reality for his substitute version of reality!
Trumpism is not good for the old folks, the middle-aged, and definitely is bad for the youth of tomorrow!
And what about leadership of the world? The United States the world's preeminent nation with NIH, CDC, Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority, as well as the Defense Department's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. We should already have been leading the way for the world's pandemic relief, instead in 2018 this happened:
There was plenty of time in the last three years for the Trump Administration to act. The administration decided to defund and shift funding away from pandemic virus study and relief.
Trump and his supporters try to invoke a new "Red Scare" —China!
President Donald J. Trump, a lifelong native New Yorker, scandalous "billionaire" businessman, tried to turn our nation into a conservative tour de force in four years only in his final year as president to have a lowly, microbe break out and swipe out his political raison d'être (reason for being)! The economic engine he built to be lauded for in the end has been stripped of its power and veneer from him as trillions are deleted, unemployment number are maddeningly inflated, and a staggering thousands of dead citizens are buried under his "attentive" charge and care.
Is it karma or fate that the "hometown" president should helplessly watch and somehow remain emotionally detached
as the COVID-19 virus ravage New York City and near his childhood community hospital?
President Trump, the non-reflective, non-apologetic leader of the Trump conservatives, can not be brought to saying publicly, "I'm sorry," to the citizens of his hometown for this onslaught of misery and sorrow they are experiencing. How can it be that a man, any man, could be so lacking of real empathy for those he knows so well?
History will grant Donald J. Trump, president, his due alright. The president who came into office pointing fingers in every direction he could and continues doing so as he nears exiting the office. Stirring up one last controversy against China on his way out!
To be clear, China may not be an innocent in this pandemic, but our national reaction was clunky and chumpishly slow-footed in February-March 2020!
So because this super hero doesn’t work there anymore, thousands of people have coronavirus? Seems thin.
Based on the above, this makes me wonder how we all managed to avoid getting Ebola.
Yeah, all the bioterrorism attacks have been a bummer. Oh wait . . .
There are no "superheroes" involved here. This pandemic head was not a super hero, his position was necessary. He-it- was not filled afterwards. We are desirous of "simple servants" humbly watching out for highly contagious monsters that lurk barely out of sight and invisibly in droplets of our exhalations, talking, and screams.
How can you win against people working for your professional 'destruction.' Hyperbole? Not really. We continue to watch President Donald Trump leave no stone unturned or revisited in his efforts to overturn what he calls the "deep-state" or what Trump conservatives consider to be costly agencies of the government.
How much is a single citizen's life worth during a wild-fire pandemic?
Thank goodness, we have doctors, nurses, and first-rate defenders who are selfless in the face of this pandemic to help us!
Oh, I agree, but the sense I get from this story is that but for this single person, our entire experience of this pandemic would be substantially different. I doubt that very much.
Was it though? How do we know? Just because a journalist says so? People who put a lot of their faith and hope in government tend to think almost every government position is “necessary.”
I can see how his position was potentially useful, but I can’t make a full assessment without considering everyone else who could possibly have helped with the pandemic. Knowing that I will probably never have such comprehensive information, I look around at the rest of the world. Roughly 185 countries have widespread infection of this virus. Compared with many of the developed countries, we are actually doing pretty well on a per capita basis.
I see a lot of attempts to engage in political scapegoating related to the pandemic and this, I suspect, is another example of exactly that.
No question about that! My wife and several of our friends and relatives are nurses. My wife is thankfully retired (although the board has tried to recruit her to come back). It is such a scary time for them and they are truly heroes for going to work every day.
Kudos to your retired wife and her professional friends. Grace be upon them for their service through their careers. I have only praise for the medical staffing of this world we live in.
This article is not a celebration of Rear Adm. Timothy Ziemer. It serves to point out that our pandemic team was disbanded and no replacement leader or team was put back in place. It is an enticement of the Trump Administration's pointing fingers at China and other nations now when Trump members did not fulfill their obligation to keep us all safe from exotic viruses detailed from overseas.
Our duty, and yours as a citizen is not to past judgement on other countries and their administrations for which said judgement would carry little to limited weight as a non-participant in the system. However, that you choose to disregard an act of your president because you cherish his leadership control shows poor judgement and extreme partisanship.
You can like, appreciate, and respect Trump and simultaneously point to a weakness in his judgment and decision-making. You intend to speak about anything but this here. For instance, recognizing the importance and usefulness of dedicated care professionals you have every right to respect, while maligning and diminishing a leader in the field of pandemic viruses and his team is obviously inconsistent and biased treatment against the persons involved.
President Trump has an obligation to keep the citizens of this country safe from pandemic viruses when possible. He did not. We can know this. How can we know this?
Case in point: We can note that President Trump mirrored the democratic candidates in their campaign treks across this wide-spread country of ours and it doing so, at his presidential 'stops' he mocked democrats in Washington regarding this virus, COVID 19. Trump said that democrats were blowing the virus out of proportion: "A hoax" he implied they needed to make him look bad.
Presidential trekking after the democrats, presidential rallies, and all mockings ended in accordance with the death of the first patient on our shores in Washington State at the end of February.
It was an "UH-OH" moment of realization for President Donald Trump that he had made a mistake in not making the public aware that this virus could kill, and do so asymptomatically as he had been warned by officials prior to his campaigning in earnest!
Facts got their tongues. . . .
Where is our NT version of Kayleigh McEnany? Somebody in Washington needs to answer for all these bodies which left here last March!
What I want to know is who is going to defend Trump and his administration over the death of thousands of his "hometown" folks in New York City?