History Lesson

Remember Barack Obama?  Now, there was a president!  Such grace, such intelligence, such compassion!  A once-in-a-lifetime leader, the likes of which we will probably never see again.

Unfortunately, in his two terms of presidency, President Obama was all-too-frequently called upon after the tragedy of mass shootings to use his enormous empathy to soothe and console the American people. But each time he rose to the occasion and spoke from the heart.   Remember that time he sang Amazing Grace after the shooting at a Charleston church?  Remember the Together We Thrive speech after the Tucson shootings?  Remember all those moving eulogies and memorials he was forced to so compassionately deliver?

Now comes Donald Trump, a man so full of himself that he has yet to express compassion or words of comfort for his fellow Americans who have died from the coronavirus.  A man who after admitting that 100,000 people could die this week alone from the virus immediately launched into an attack on his political rivals and petty grievances, including those in the room with him to report on his announcements.  A man who when asked what he would say to Americans who are scared, answered "I say you are a terrible reporter"? The closest he's come to expressing sympathy was for British PM Boris Johnson, someone he personally knows and who has been "appropriately" respectful to Trump, at least in Trump's eyes. 

The contrast couldn't be clearer than when we consider how the two men (Obama and Trump) responded to the threat of a pandemic.  

In December 2013, an 18-month-old boy in Guinea was bitten by a bat and developed Ebola, and soon there were five more fatal cases. The virus then spread beyond the Guinea borders into neighboring Liberia and Sierra Leone.  In July 2014, President Obama activated the CDC's Emergency Operations Center and the CDC immediately deployed personnel to West Africa to coordinate a response that included vector tracing, testing, education, logistics and communication. Altogether, under President Obama, the CDC trained 24,655 medical workers in West Africa, educating them on how to prevent and control the disease before a single case left Africa or reached the US.

Working with the UN and the WHO, President Obama ordered the re-routing of travelers heading to the US through certain specific airports equipped to handle mass testing.  Back home in America, more than 6,500 people were trained through mock outbreaks and practice scenarios. That was done before a single case hit America.

Three months after President Obama activated this unprecedented response, on September 30, 2014, we got our first case in the US.  That man had traveled from West Africa to Dallas and had somehow slipped through the testing protocol. He was immediately detected and isolated, but died a week later. Two nurses who tended to him also contracted Ebola and later recovered. All the protocols had worked. It was contained.

The Ebola epidemic could have easily become a pandemic. But thanks to the actions of our government under President Obama, it never did. Those three cases were the only cases of Ebola in our country because President Obama did what needed to be done three months before the first case.

Ebola is even more contagious than Covid-19.  If Obama, had not done the things that he had, millions of Americans would have died.  It’s ironic that because President Obama did these things, we forget that he did them because the disease never reached our shores.

Now comes Donald Trump and the story of the Covid-19 response.  

Before anyone even knew about the disease, even in China, Trump disbanded the pandemic response team that Obama had put in place. He cut funding to the CDC and he cut contribution to the WHO.  Trump fired Rear Admiral Timothy Ziemer, the person on the National Security Council in charge of stopping the spread of infectious diseases before they reach our country - a position created by the Obama administration.

When the outbreak started in China, Trump assumed it was China’s problem and sent no research, supplies or help of any kind. After all, we were in a trade war that Trump had needlessly started, so why should he help them?

In January, he received a briefing from intelligence organizations that the outbreak was much worse than China was admitting and that it would definitely hit our country if something wasn’t done to prevent it. He ignored the report, not trusting our own intelligence.

In a January 29 memo, his own trade adviser, Peter Navarro, told Trump that “The lack of immune protection or an existing cure or vaccine would leave Americans defenseless in the case of a full-blown coronavirus outbreak on U.S. soil."  Navarro said that the lack of protection elevates the risk of the coronavirus evolving into a full-blown pandemic, imperiling the lives of millions of Americans. Despite this warning of a clear and present danger, Trump still refused to take action.

When the disease spread to Europe, the WHO offered a boatload of tests to the United States. Trump turned them down, saying private companies here would make the tests “better” if we needed them. But he never ordered US companies to make the tests and they had no profit motive to do so on their own.

According to scientists at Yale and several public university medical schools, when they asked for permission to start working on our own testing protocol and potential treatments or vaccines, they were denied by Trump’s FDA.

When Trump knew about the first case in the United States he did nothing. It was just one case and the patient was isolated, he rationalized. When doctors and scientists started screaming in the media that this was a mistake, Trump claimed it was a “liberal hoax” conjured up to try to make him “look bad after impeachment failed.”

The next time Trump spoke of Covid-19, we had 64 confirmed cases but Trump went before microphones and told the America public that we only had 15 cases “and pretty soon that number will be close to zero.” All while the disease was spreading. He took no action to get more tests. What Trump did do is stop flights from China from coming here, but this was too little, too late and accomplished nothing according to scientists and doctors. By then the disease was worldwide and was already spreading exponentially in the US by American citizens, not Chinese people as Trump would like you to believe.

As of the moment I’m posting this, the morning of April 7, 2020, we have 12,000 deaths in the US and 385,000 confirmed cases.  The actual number of confirmed cases is undoubtedly much higher, but we don’t know because we don’t have enough tests. And why don’t we have enough tests? Remember back when Trump turned down the tests from the WHO and prevented our own universities from developing them? Remember back when Trump had cut the funding to the CDC?

Yet Trump still has the audacity to go on camera during his daily briefings and blame the previous administration for the mess we are now in, yet he has no one to blame but himself.

Republican pundits try to put the blame on China and they are correct - after all, the disease started there and the Chinese government handled it poorly and dishonestly. So it’s fair to blame the government of China for the origin of the Covid-19 epidemic. But that misses the point.  Obama didn’t blame Ebola on Guinea. He helped them stop it. 

Trump let the disease invade the US.   It's one thing to be stupid and hateful - some people just can't help it.  But it's another thing to be willfully stupid hateful and for your stupidity and hate to result in the deaths of the people you were elected to protect.