“More than a dozen United States experts were working at the World Health Organization and feeding the Trump administration information last December as the coronavirus spread through China, according to reporting by the Washington Post.”
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“A top official from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) was part of the committee that advised the WHO on whether to declare a global public health emergency in late January. Two US scientists were part of the WHO’s information gathering mission to China in mid-February. A CDC official has compiled daily reports of outbreaks in consultation with WHO counterparts and passed along information to higher-ups in the organization through daily briefing calls. And upcoming WHO plans and announcements were reportedly shared days in advance with top US officials like Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar.
The WHO has been criticized for its handling of the pandemic — including whether the organization waited too long to declare a global emergency and if it has been too liberal in its praise for China’s response — but the Post’s reporting indicates that lack of early communication of the threat to the US was likely not one of its missteps.
Trump claims otherwise, telling reporters last Tuesday, “The reality is that the WHO failed to adequately obtain … and share information in a timely and transparent fashion.””
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“Trump’s threat to stop sending the millions of dollars the country sends annually to the WHO would be a devastating blow to the organization, which is helping to coordinate the global response to Covid-19. The US is the organization’s single largest funder, providing 22 percent of all member state assessed contributions and often hundreds of millions more in voluntary contributions.
It’s not clear whether he can stop the $116 million that’s been appropriated to the agency by Congress, but it seems he may be allowed to reroute the funding to other organizations or withhold it until next year.”
“There’s consensus in Congress that another relief bill is needed, and Democrats have been talking about either extending the extra $600 a week in federal aid or adding more weeks before an individual would be kicked off regular UI benefits (without the extra $600 per week), according to a senior Democratic aide.
But the problems that currently exist have led unemployment experts like Stettner and Evermore to say that Congress also needs to fund the system itself, by helping states add more employees and get better technology to help connect people to the benefits they so badly need.”
“An investigation by the New York Times has revealed that experts and administration officials tried to warn Trump of the serious nature of the coronavirus pandemic early on. Alerts from high-ranking government experts began as far back as January, six weeks before his administration finally sprang into action on March 16, when he issued concrete guidelines for the public.
The report exhaustively outlines numerous ways in which Trump avoided listening to government authorities as they proposed strategies for dealing with the pandemic. It also details an administration mired in political bickering, which hamstrung officials at every phase of their response. The report prompted epidemiologist Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, to respond that “obviously” lives could have been saved if the government had taken the warnings seriously.
The report paints a portrait of Trump as being swayed by things like petty politics, one-upmanship, advice from his uninformed business associates, and his annoyance at inconsequential conspiracy theories, rather than the strenuous and sustained advice of experts — most of which he ignored for weeks. The delay resulted in a lack of effective quarantining measures, a dearth of testing centers and equipment, a failure to reallocate existing resources, and widespread confusion about how seriously the public should be taking the disease.”
“Historically, the federal government has been fairly cautious in writing public health laws not to exceed its authority under the Constitution. The federal law and regulations dealing with quarantines, for example, does not claim the power to impose a quarantine on any American anywhere in the nation. Rather, they permit quarantines of individuals entering the country or crossing state borders, while leaving the question of whether to quarantine individuals within a state’s borders to the state itself.
Similarly, the raft of stay-at-home and business closure orders imposed on many Americans, as well as various orders closing public schools, have typically come from state or local officials. And, in many cases, these officials have already signaled that they plan to keep these orders in place well beyond Trump’s May 1 deadline.”
“The SARS-CoV-2 virus that causes the disease swept across the globe not because of the WHO’s errors but because of a “very fragmented, chaotic, state-centric response,” according to Yanzhong Huang, a senior fellow for global health at the Council on Foreign Relations.
And now, with over 2 million reported cases and 125,000 deaths worldwide, countries “failing in their response have decided WHO is the culprit,” says Ashish Jha, a professor at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.”
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“Most experts agree there are some legitimate criticisms of how the agency has handled the Covid-19 global health crisis, particularly in how it responded to China’s initial delays and suppression of key information. Other critiques, they say, are less founded.”
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“On January 22, just three weeks after first being notified of the virus’s existence, WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus convened an emergency meeting to determine if the outbreak qualified as a public health emergency of international concern (PHEIC), the agency’s term for an “extraordinary event” that requires a coordinated international response — like SARS, H1N1, and Ebola outbreaks in 2014 and 2019. The experts couldn’t agree and decided to meet again. After the director-general traveled to Beijing to meet with Chinese President Xi Jinping in Beijing on January 29, a PHEIC was declared on January 30.
This declaration activated WHO measures to “address travel, trade, quarantine, screening, treatment” as well as national measures in countries that have tied their pandemic response plans to WHO declarations. “I called for WHO to do it a little earlier,” says Gostin, “but it had no impact on the epidemic.” Jha agrees. “I think they could have called it when they initially met, but it wouldn’t have made a big difference,” he says.”
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“all the experts Vox interviewed agreed that the US government’s lack of preparation for Covid-19 was not a result of WHO delays.”
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“ABC News reports US intelligence agencies warned the White House and the Pentagon of the disease as early as November. In January, trade adviser Peter Navarro warned the White House that the novel coronavirus could kill half a million Americans. In February, the US lost valuable weeks failing to develop effective testing. As late as February 27, Trump told a press briefing the virus would “disappear.” The next day, the first American died of Covid-19.
“WHO is not responsible for America not heeding the warnings of its own scientists and security apparatus — for two months,” says Jha. “That’s laughable.””
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“WHO has offered little criticism of governments’ responses.”
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“More than 430,000 people traveled from China to over 17 American cities after the virus was discovered but before the ban; another 40,000 people arrived to the US from China after the ban went into place.”
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“Although the WHO has not publicly criticized the American travel ban, it doesn’t recommend travel or trade restrictions during disease outbreaks, both because they often don’t work and because they can make disease response more difficult. Kamradt-Scott recalls firsthand his difficulty in trying to get from Australia to West Africa during the 2014 Ebola outbreak, when all but two commercial airlines had stopped flying there. “It’s not simply that it causes economic damage, but that it impedes responses,” he says. ”
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“Kamradt-Scott, however, is on the fence. He has just completed a literature review, looking at travel and trade restrictions, and his view is that travel bans “may have helped delay the arrival of the virus.” He predicts that eventually Covid-19 research will cause the WHO to revisit some of its guidelines. “It’s rather fraught. It does create economic problems, but if it can help countries by giving them time to prepare, perhaps it can be justified on that ground.”
But, he adds, “Trump implemented travel restrictions but then did nothing to prepare the country, so again, that really comes back to his administration.””
“One thing that happened is that after the 2009 H1N1 pandemic there were a lot of masks distributed to states and localities and they simply weren’t replenished. Then there was a plan to purchase thousands more ventilators. A contract was signed with a small medical equipment company in Southern California. That company was then bought by a different medical equipment company, and in the end the contract wasn’t fulfilled. The new ventilators never came in.
So there are these matters of prioritization and inattention that can affect whether in fact we have the supplies that have been recommended in the stockpile.”
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“There’s a key period that a lot of people are now focusing on, which is late January to mid-February. This is a point at which we were already aware of what had happened in China, and the World Health Organization had declared Covid-19 a “global health emergency of international concern.”
That was really the time to consider whether we had the supplies we needed of these essential items and to figure out whether the stockpile needed to be replenished rapidly and do whatever it took to make sufficient supplies available — whether that meant purchasing supplies from other sources or even using the DPA to force manufacturers to shift to production of ventilators, for example.
So even if it had not been replenished prior to this administration, there was a chance to do a better job at the outset.”
“Social distancing absolutely does work to slow the spread of the coronavirus. In the states that started social distancing the earliest, including Seattle and San Francisco, the growth of new cases has slowed noticeably. In places that implemented them a little later, like New York, the growth of new cases began to slow later.
Testing is still limited and the criteria for testing varies in different places, making direct comparisons difficult, but there are enough cities seeing improvement that a real trend can be observed.”
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“It’s a vexing situation. The US has succeeded at its first task of slowing the wildfire spread of the virus through our communities, but it may have achieved only a standstill, not a victory. And as pressure grows to open more businesses and get the country back to work, there is still limited (and not encouraging) data about what will be needed to keep the virus from roaring back. Even worse, if the data suggests that the country actually needs more stringent restrictions than the current ones, it’s hard to imagine who’d muster the political will to implement them.”
““When somebody is the president of the United States, the authority is total,” Trump said at one point. “And that’s the way it’s gotta be. It’s total.”
Trump’s claim is false — governors have broad authority to close schools and businesses in their states.”
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“The irony is that while Trump claims to have dictatorial power, state governors keep calling on him to do more to provide them with the medical supplies they need to make sure each Covid patient can receive adequate medical care. Characteristically, Trump on Monday lied about this state of affairs by claiming “nobody is asking for ventilators.” (Maryland’s Republican governor, Larry Hogan — chair of the National Governors Association — said on Sunday’s installment of This Week that “to say that everybody is completely happy and we have everything we need is not quite accurate.”)”
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“conveying truthful information is not the point of these briefings. Instead, Trump’s objective is to reframe problems as the result of unfair media coverage and feed red meat to his base by sparring with reporters. On Monday, Trump attacked two female reporters — Paula Reid of CBS and Kaitlan Collins of CNN — when they dared to ask him questions about the government’s slow coronavirus response and his dictatorial statements, respectively.
“You are so disgraceful,” Trump admonished Reid at one point. “You know you’re a fake.””
“A campaign-style video President Donald Trump is promoting in an attempt to rewrite the history of his coronavirus response accidentally reveals the truth — that he didn’t really do much during a crucial period in February and early March when the virus was spreading undetected in America, besides downplaying the threat.
The video, which premiered during Monday’s unhinged White House coronavirus task force briefing and was then posted to Trump’s Twitter account, features a timeline of what the video refers to as the president’s “DECISIVE ACTION” during that period. But the list of Trump’s anti-coronavirus actions is far shorter than it might appear as it ticks by your screen.
For one thing, Trump had little to do with a number of the “actions” highlighted in the timeline. For another, the video includes a number of developments that are really nothing to brag about, such as the first US case being reported on January 20 and the CDC testing debacle that put the US behind the curve compared to other countries that have more successfully handled the coronavirus. And it skips right from early February to March, thereby revealing Trump didn’t do much during a period in which proactive measures could’ve been taken, saving lives”
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“instead of being focused on the coronavirus during that India trip, upon his February 26 return, Trump reportedly chastised a number of government officials over the CDC’s February 25 warning that the virus might cause “severe” disruption to American life — not because he thought the analysis was inaccurate, but because it hurt the stock market.”