By Kisha J. Pinnock
President Trump is, in part, responsible for the COVID-19 pandemic, and is wholly responsible for America’s failed response.
In 2014, the Western Africa Ebola virus was the most widespread outbreak of the Ebola virus disease in history. It caused major loss of life and socioeconomic disruption in the region, mainly in Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone.
It began silently spreading in December 2013 but wasn’t identified as Ebola until March 2014. The Ebola crisis highlights the importance of preparedness – everywhere.
Cities with an international airport are theoretically at risk of imported cases of a virus and the need for preparedness is greatest in countries that share borders or have extensive travel and trade relations with hard hit countries of a virus.
In response to the Ebola virus, in 2016 the Obama Administration created a permanent epidemic monitoring and command group inside the White House National Security Council (NSC), and another in the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) – both of which followed the health lead of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the diplomatic advice of the State Department.
In addition, a global health and bio-threat “czar” position was created. Czar is a title for certain high-level official in the United States that is granted broad power to address a particular issue.
These task forces were designed to establish a policy-making apparatus to tackle global pandemics. The units focused on pandemic preparedness.
However, in the spring of 2018, the Trump Administration fired the entire pandemic response chain command, including the White House management infrastructure. In addition, resources and funding for global health preparedness were drastically cut.
Specifically, the White House pushed Congress to cut funding for Obama-era disease security programs, proposing to eliminate $252 million in previously committed resources for rebuilding health systems in Ebola-ravaged Liberia, Sierra Leone, and Guinea.
Targeted from many sides, President Trump dropped the proposal to eliminate these funds a month later. But other White House efforts included reducing $15 billion in national health spending and cutting the global disease-fighting operational budgets of the CDC, NSC, DHS, and the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS).
In addition, the government’s $30 million Complex Crisis Fund was eliminated. These cuts left a leadership vacuum in global health security at the White House and the White House has been left in distressed confusion in the wake of the coronavirus outbreak.
In May 2018, Trump ordered the NSC’s entire global health security unit shut down, calling for reassignment of Rear Admiral Timothy Ziemer and dissolution of his team inside the agency.
The month before, then-White House National Security Advisor, John Bolton, pressured Ziemer’s DHS counterpart, Tom Bossert, to resign along with his team. Neither the NSC nor DHS epidemic teams have been replaced.
The global health section of the CDC was so drastically cut in 2018 that much of its staff was laid off and the number of countries it was working in was reduced from 49 to merely 10. Public health advocates have been ringing alarm bells to no avail. Ron Klain, political operative, lawyer and former Chief of Staff to Al Gore and Joe Biden, has been warning for two years that the United States was in grave danger should a pandemic emerge.
In 2017 and 2018, billionaire philanthropist Bill Gates met repeatedly with John Bolton and his predecessor, H.R. McMaster, warning that ongoing cuts to the global health disease infrastructure would render the United States vulnerable to “significant probability of a large and lethal modern-day pandemic occurring in our lifetimes.”
Despite China keeping the Coronavirus disease (COVID-19) secretive in a number of ways, United States officials have known about the COVID-19 outbreak as early as January 2020. China alerted the World Health Organization (WHO) to several unusual cases of pneumonia on Dec. 31, 2020.
On Wednesday, Jan. 29, 2020, President Trump tweeted photos from a briefing on the virus he attended with administration officials in the Situation Room, writing that “we have the best experts anywhere in the world and they are on top of it 24/7.”
On the same day, Trump announced the creation of the President’s Coronavirus Task Force, an all-male group of a dozen advisors. Strikingly, in the absence of a formal structure, the United States government has resorted to improvisation.
During the 2014 Ebola outbreak in West Africa, Trump blasted former President Barack Obama for not imposing strict travel restrictions. However, while Trump knew about COVID-19 at least since January 2020, he did not impose strict travel bans until March 2020.
Trump imposed travel bans to China late January 2020, but they were loophole-ridden! The January China-US travel ban restricted travel for “foreign nationals who had been in China for the last 14 days,” but this ban allowed Americans, just as capable of carrying and transmitting a contagious viral infection, free passage between China and the U.S.
Trump imposed stricter travel bans that included Europe in March 2020. However, Trump issued these bans at a stage in the epidemic when we already had community spread in the United States.
Moreover, there was a weak screening process for individuals traveling from heavily infected countries. Those traveling back to the U.S. were waved in through immigration and simply urged to self-quarantine.
On March 13, 2020, Trump was criticized for disbanding the epidemic monitoring and command group and other teams, and for how this may have slowed down the American response to COVID-19.
Trump responded, “I don’t know anything about it.” Not only is this response untrue, but it is irresponsible that our nation’s leader is not appreciating the financial and health risks he has exposed American citizens to by firing these teams and defunding their efforts.
Arguably, if it is President Trump’s position that he “did not know anything about it,” he is then admitting he has been incompetent in leading the United States against COVID-19, or any other viral outbreak, from at least 2018.
While there is no evidence that he, personally, directed the ousting of these teams and individuals, he also did not replace them in the nearly two years since, despite repeated bipartisan urgings from lawmakers and experts.
All this time, Trump ostensibly had a careful approach that was part of a political strategy crafted to avoid upsetting the stock market, calling too much attention to the virus or blaming China for not managing the situation better.
To this day, Trump struggles to explain why he disbanded his global health team. According to Trump, “you can never really think it’s going to happen,” but the NSC’s team existed precisely because officials recognized the possible threat.
“I’m a businessperson,” Trump explained in response to a question about why he disbanded his global health security team. “I don’t like having thousands of people around when you don’t need them. When we need them, we can get them back very quickly.”
As it turns out, the administration cannot actually reassemble such a team “very quickly.”
It is painfully clear that Trump, still unfamiliar with how the executive branch works, may not have known that. It is also just as clear that the Trump Administration’s cuts to critical global health staffing and funding have hampered their response to the coronavirus.
Notably, I remember back when Trump was elected in 2016, it was predicted that he would lead our country into a recession or depression. Historically, whenever all three branches of government are held by Republicans, the markets crash, and our economy suffers.
There was The Great Depression from 1921-1933 where the economy crashed, from 1953-1955 there was a small recession, and from 2003-2007 the market crashed the economy again.
The financial crisis and resulting global economic meltdown former President Bush left us with was eerily reminiscent of the Great Depression, but there was also 9/11, the Iraq War, and Katrina.
With the 2016 election, Republicans won more than the presidency – the party also held onto its majorities in the House and Senate. Republicans held onto this monopoly until 2019.
Normally, when Trump is backed into a corner, he points fingers, resorts to bigoted rhetoric such as referring to the Coronavirus disease as “the Chinese virus,” and I believe he projects frustrations (of his ignorance) onto reporters.”
In his attempt to blame China for this global pandemic, he fails to hold accountability in the ways that he has miscarried his duty to protect the United States, and the world at large, as a true leader should.
It is indisputable that the Trump Administration dismantled and defunded efforts to combat pandemics such as COVID-19. This global outbreak could have been curbed but for the Trump Administration’s previous bouts of penny-pinching on public health. It is indefensible.
Trump is, in part, responsible for the global coronavirus disease that has swept across the globe, the failure of the U.S. government to effectively respond, and the financial crisis many Americans are facing as a result.
Kisha J. Pinnock is a Morristown attorney and social activist who is a member of the New Jersey and District of New Jersey bars. She is a graduate of St. John’s University and the Rutgers University School of Law – Camden, where she received the Mary Philbrook Public Interest Award and the Dean’s Pro Bono Publico Award. Last year she helped organize community protests in Dover after the violent arrest of an unarmed teen; the efforts led to money being earmarked for police bodycams.
Sources:
https://theintercept.com/2020/03/14/trump-says-no-idea-pandemic-response-team-disbanded-thats-true/
The opinions expressed above are the author’s, and do not necessarily reflect those of this publication.
The author’s factual presentation could only lead to one conclusion. No need to assign blame or crucify the messenger. Let’s work together to deal with this reality and what needs to be done to insure we have a government, of the people, by the people and for the people, as intended.
This article is nothing but about assigning blame, not about the pandemic.
Moreover, it omits countless important facts which paint the opposition in a well deserved weak light.
@Rosary I am glad you are happy to have your friend living among us. I have not seen any posts of hers that offer solutions to problems, just anger towards anything not ultra left. It seems it’s much easier to point of problems. And you know why they say about problems.
That being said, your comment about her being one of the few devoting her time to the community, instead of just talk, shows how out of touch you are to what is actually happening in the community.
I do need to get this straight, if she was to post a picture wearing a swastika, we would chalk that up to a family trip to Germany?
@charles. No hysteria intended, just stating facts. Or as the NJ11th for change bull horns. #factsMatter
Oh no, a red under every bed, Mr. Needham!
Communism’s only scary if your current system is seriously malfunctioning, so…
We could all use a little more common resources for the common good. Been doing the “everyone for themselves” and “I got mine, too bad for you” nonsense for far too long and all it’s given us is a steadily decaying society with the less fortunate being ground down and the most crooked rising to the top.
We should impeach Trump for this. He should never allowed the virus into this country. He should have signed an executive order telling it to stay out!
Kisha, there is no cure for TDS…
People who know Fran Wolkin can tell you she’s not just all talk like some of the commentators on this page. She’s active in many life-saving activities in our greater Morristown community. We’re glad to have her among us.
Is she a communist? I don’t know nor care. If we’re making the assumption based on pictures on FB, check my page you may find some evidence that I’m also a “fellow traveler.”
I blame China, the WHO, the NIH and the media.
I was extremely pleased when I recently started visiting this website to become more aware of things going on in my community, possibly identifying somewhere I could help or read a feel-good story about others in our great community: Police, Fire, Medical, Food Service etc. As a 50+ resident of Morris Township, I was truly disappointed, this article appeared on the site. I think there are many other places, CNN, FOX, Facebook to name a few to get this type of commentary and share comments. It does not matter if you a have positive or negative feeling about our President, this type of journalism, will infuriate as many as it pleases, just look at the comments. I work in media, so I understand FREE speech. However, I hope in the future the administrator will not allow the posting of these types of articles. The people can decide in November if they are happy are not. Let’s remember Morristown/Morris Township, Mo Plains we are in this together! Stay Safe
As a believer of states rights, the buck truly stops with the governors and state legislators.
The amount of funding money cut, being represented in this article and supposedly causing this pandemic, could have been covered by the state debt of NJ multiple times over again.
Perhaps our state government needs to do a better job of managing our financial affairs, instead of settling for the status quo.
If NJ was properly run, we would have been ahead of this situation and been a leader for other states.
But again, we vote in the governor and state legislature – so perhaps the buck stops with the voters.
@fernwolkin – you still haven’t explained why your Facebook profile had a picture of you wearing a Russian Cossack hat with the Soviet hammer and sickle insignia on the front.
Do we really have communist living in our area and have they infiltrated the NJ 11th for change? #factsmatter
@ Diana it is Trump’s fault. He is the leader and he did nothing to stop it.
Donald Trump failed America and has blood on his hands.
He’s not alone in blame – as the social media accounts of his apologists show throughout January and February – when this ‘hoax’ was marching onto American shores.
Now they want unity (@Diana). More diversion of blame (@Matt). I’m sure pretty soon Hillary Clinton’s emails will be blamed for COVID-19. You just cannot reason with the mentally hamstrung people of this nation that exercise the profound tribalism that supporters of Trump do.
This article is based on facts and history. It shows how I’ll prepared Trump is to run a country, especially in times of crisis. People are dying needlessly due to his incompetence and the incompetence of his staff. The governor’s of most states, NJ, NY and CA in particular, are doing a good job in spite of the lack of cooperation from the Federal government. But when you order supplies, as the feds tells you to do, and then they sieze them from you for the federal stockpile so they can give them to red/politically friendly states, something is seriously wrong. And that seriously wrong thing is the President of the U.S., Donald Trump.
If you continue to feed this type horrific stories to the public I will never read this newsletter again. We are in a pandemic it’s time to come together. Not play blame game. Get over your destructive attitude and move on to do some stories for the greater good.
This opinion piece has a lot of good information. However, it is written with extreme bias and hatred toward “all” the people in President Trump’s Administration. What is surprising is the fact that the author did not mention that many of the state Governments and hospitals were also ill prepared.
It goes without saying that being a Monday Morning Quarterback is a lot easier than playing the game.
It is damaging to a person’s health and soul when someone hates another person as you do.
I will pray for the author to be a more loving person toward all people, regardless of their behavior and actions.