WaPo vindicates Trump, acknowledges CDC/FDA failures for six weeks

[1972 Grad]

"I'm rubber and you're glue..." Nice. What did you graduate from in 1972? Special Ed. Kindergarten?

72 was the year they finally gave up on me after I failed 7th grade 3 times.

 

[Rickyvol77]

Same old sh!t. Trump is to blame for the China Virus and China literally letting people be exposed to it for months before doing anything. Bush was to blame for Hurricane Katrina by not waving his magic hurricane dispersing wand. Reagan is to blame for not going to California and putting rubbers on gay dudes to stop AIDS.

This^^^^

 

[AM64]

72 was the year they finally gave up on me after I failed 7th grade 3 times.

Deplorable.

 

[NCFisher]

With hospitals facing an overwhelming crush of patients, state and federal governments are scrambling to provide them with equipment to protect their health-care workers. CNN's Jeremy Diamond read complaints from doctors about these shortages, and asked Trump why he didn't act weeks ago to prepare for this.

Once again, Trump took no accountability and blamed his predecessors with this statement:

"Many administrations preceded me - for the most part they did very little, in terms of what you're talking about ... We're making much of the stuff now, it's being delivered now." - President Donald Trump

Trump has been President for 3 years now. This is weak and pathetic. The buck is always passed along, it never stops with him. He is always quick to pass blame... 3 years he has been President. 3 f'ing years.

WTH does that even mean - 3 f'ing years - for a virus that appeared in China the first week of Dec. and was hid from the world the next six weeks and genome sequence released mid-Jan?

By that logic, O was in office 8 f'ing years. So where's the f'ing stockpile of shite no one knew we'd need?

Geez, man, you on a TDS bender.

 

[BowlBrother85]

WTH does that even mean - 3 f'ing years - for a virus that appeared in China the first week of Dec. and was hid from the world the next six weeks and genome sequence released mid-Jan?

By that logic, O was in office 8 f'ing years. So where's the f'ing stockpile of shite no one knew we'd need?

Geez, man, you on a TDS bender.

Like I have previously stated, if there was any rule or regulation which needed to be changed in order to allow labs to create their own Coronavirus tests, it could have been done either early in the outbreak or prior to the outbreak... blaming the Obama Administration, 3 years into his term is ridiculous - and Trump won't even specify what rule he is referring to, he just wants you to know that if something is wrong, it's Obama's fault. That isn't leadership. It's petty.

Your unconditional support of Trump and fealty to him is it's own syndrome. Trump is over-hyping drugs and in some cases, he is just flat out lying. On Friday, Trump claimed that the malaria drug they're hoping to use against the Coronavirus was "effective". Dr. Anthony Fauci of the White House task force had to quickly walk back that claim and say that the drug in question had not gone through a clinical trial and that the FDA had previously stated that the drug had not been approved to combat the virus. This misinformation is irresponsible. It's not good leadership to be over-promising and under-delivering, but that is what Trump is doing.

 

[Hunerwadel]

MODERATORS: Please note statement by the Washington Post:

PLEASE NOTE
The Washington Post is providing this story for free so that all readers have access to this important information about the coronavirus. For more free stories, sign up for our daily Coronavirus Updates newsletter.
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How U.S. coronavirus testing stalled: Flawed tests, red tape and resistance to using the millions of tests produced by the WHO
March 16, 2020 at 6:30 p.m. EDT
The Washington Post
https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2020/03/16/cdc-who-coronavirus-tests/

When Olfert Landt heard about the novel coronavirus, he got busy.

Founder of a small Berlin-based company, the ponytailed 54-year-old first raced to help German researchers come up with a diagnostic test and then spurred his company to produce and ship more than 1.4 million tests by the end of February for the World Health Organization.
“My wife and I have been working 16 hours a day, seven days a week, ever since,” Landt said by phone about 1 a.m. Friday, Berlin time. “Our days are full.”

By contrast, over the same critical period, U.S. efforts to distribute tests ground nearly to a halt, and the country’s inability to produce them left public health officials with limited means to determine where and how fast the virus was spreading. From mid-January until Feb. 28, fewer than 4,000 tests from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention were used out of more 160,000 produced.

The United States’ struggles, in Landt’s view, stemmed from the fact the country took too long to use private companies to develop the tests. The coronavirus pandemic was too big and moving too fast for the CDC to develop its own tests in time, he said.
“There are 10 companies in the U.S. who could have developed the tests for them,” Landt said. “Commercial companies will run to an opportunity like this.”

As the coronavirus continues to spread across the United States, causing more than 80 deaths and over 4,000 confirmed cases, the struggles that overwhelmed the nation’s testing are becoming clearer.
First, the CDC moved too slowly to tap into the expertise of academia and private companies such as Landt’s, experts said. For example, it wasn’t until last week that large companies such as Roche and Thermo Fisher won approval from the Food and Drug Administration to produce their own tests.

Inside the race to find a coronavirus vaccine and treatment
Across the United States and the globe, scientists are racing to develop a vaccine and a treatment to contain the novel coronavirus. (Luis Velarde/The Washington Post)
Moreover, while FDA and CDC officials have attributed some of the testing delays to their determination to meet exacting scientific standards they said were needed to protect public health, the government effort was nevertheless marred by a widespread manufacturing problem that stalled U.S. testing for most of February.

The CDC has yet to fully explain the nature of the manufacturing problem but told The Washington Post on Monday that the design could also have resulted in flawed tests.
The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, which oversees the CDC, said earlier this month that it is investigating the defect in many of the initial coronavirus test kits.
It has been long-standing practice for CDC scientists in emergencies to develop the first diagnostic tests, in part because the CDC has access to samples of the virus before others, officials said. Later, private companies that win FDA authorization can scale up efforts to meet demand.
In responses for this story, CDC spokesman Benjamin Haynes said in a statement: “This process has not gone as smoothly as we would have liked. … CDC has a responsibility to ensure that all CDC laboratory research and development activities, testing processes, and data are the highest possible quality and are traceable, reproducible, and documented with appropriate rigor.”

He said the manufacturing problem may have arisen because of the test’s design or because of contamination.
Finally, acknowledging there “is a great need for test manufacturers to rapidly make testing available,” the statement said “commercial labs are working to develop their own tests and hopefully will be available soon for clinical settings throughout the country.”
But critics say government officials should have moved much more quickly to bring on expertise from outside the CDC.
“The CDC has good scientists and they are proud,” Landt said. “But in this situation, they took the wrong approach.”

‘We can be proud. … We moved quickly’
At the very beginning, U.S. efforts to develop a diagnostic test for the coronavirus kept pace with the rest of the world.

Shortly after publication of the virus’s genome in early January, German researchers announced they had designed a diagnostic test. Then, within days, scientists at the CDC said they’d developed one, too, and even used it detect the first U.S. case.

“We actually do have laboratory diagnostics here at CDC that are stood up,” Nancy Messonnier, the CDC’s director of the National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases, told reporters on Jan. 17.
From there, however, U.S. efforts fell quickly behind, especially when compared with the efforts of the WHO, which has distributed more than 1 million tests to countries around the world based in part on the method developed by the German researchers.

As early as Feb. 6, four weeks after the genome of the virus was published, the WHO had shipped 250,000 diagnostic tests to 70 laboratories around the world, the agency said.
By comparison, the CDC at that time was shipping about 160,000 tests to labs across the nation — but then the manufacturing troubles were discovered, and most would be deemed unusable because they produced confusing results. Over the next three weeks, only about 200 of those tests sent to labs would be used, according to CDC statistics.

In fact, the U.S. efforts to distribute a working test stalled until Feb. 28, when federal officials revised the CDC test and began loosening up FDA rules that had limited who could develop coronavirus diagnostic tests.

A faulty CDC coronavirus test delays monitoring of the disease's spread
During that critical interval, the CDC repeatedly assured the public that progress was being made, even as public health officials around the country began to raise alarms about the shortage of tests.
In January, CDC officials boasted during the coronavirus briefings that the United States has “one of the strongest public health systems in the world.”
At briefing on Feb. 12, Messonnier said “rapid development of a diagnostic and rapid deployment to the states” is “clearly a success.”
On Feb. 14, she said: “We can be proud. … We moved quickly.”
On Feb. 21, Messonnier acknowledged problems with the testing kits, but described the issues as “normal.”

But by that point, public health labs around the nation had run very few of the CDC tests, according to the agency. Health officials across the country began pleading for a test that worked, or at least the authorization to use another test.
After Trump promised 'anybody' can get coronavirus tests, patients and doctors still complain of roadblocks

‘You can’t track what you don’t see’
In the absence of tests, the calls for the United States to tap into the expertise of academia, hospitals and private companies, such as Landt’s, grew more insistent.
“It took [the CDC] awhile to come up with the test, honestly,” said Alex Greninger of the University of Washington.
His lab had developed its own test and began seeking approval to use it on patients on Feb. 18. But that test, along with others that had been developed in various academic centers and hospitals, could not be used on patients until the FDA relaxed its testing rules on Feb 29.

He noted that many of the state public health labs had also figured out how to use the CDC test properly — by tossing one of its components — but were not allowed to actually do so until the FDA approved the workaround that same day.
“We had all these state public health labs that had a perfectly good [test] on their hands, and they knew it, they were upset,” Greninger said.
“What surprised me the most was to hear how much emphasis there is at CDC on quality control — to the point where, in my opinion, it really compromised surveillance,” said Michelle Mello, a professor of law and medicine and Stanford who recently wrote a paper about the delays in testing for coronavirus in the United States. “You can’t track what you don’t see.”
On March 7, FDA Commissioner Stephen M. Hahn stressed the importance of quality, noting that diagnostic tests in some other countries have been flawed. He did not specify which countries he meant, but China’s test may have produced lots of false positives, according to a recent publication by Chinese researchers.

“What’s important here is that we have a test that the American people can trust,” Hahn said.
But even a small firm, like Landt’s, is capable of producing a lot of high-quality tests and could have helped the efforts in the U.S., Landt said. His company, known as TIB for TIB Molbiol Syntheselabor GmbH, based their tests on the methods the German researchers published in January.
Though it has just 55 employees globally, TIB had experience in developing tests for SARS and the swine flu. It began producing the coronavirus tests in mid-January, just days after the Chinese researchers posted the virus’s genome, Landt said. It can produce about a million of them a week.
As wearying as his schedule has been, Landt said, “I like the feedback from people.”

Labs waited weeks after tests malfunctioned
Exactly what went wrong with the CDC’s first tests in the first critical weeks hasn’t been fully explained by the agency, aside from the possibility that the design was flawed or that the tests were contaminated.
While such diagnostic tests can vary in the specifics, they typically involve trying to match the genetics of a patient sample, taken from nasal and throat swabs, against those of the virus.
In the case of the CDC method, the test consisted of attempts to match a patient sample against three distinct pieces of the virus’s genetic code. A patient was declared to have coronavirus if each of those three attempts came back as a match.
The trouble with the CDC test arose because the third attempt at a match, known as the N3 component, produced an inconclusive result even on known samples of the coronavirus.
While the cause of the problem in the CDC test may yet be unknown, it meant that in the weeks before Feb. 28, the public health labs were left waiting for a usable test.
By Feb. 8, public health labs were notifying the CDC of troubles with the test, and four days later, about a week after the first CDC tests had shipped, officials acknowledged the problem during a news conference.
“Some of the states identified some inconclusive laboratory results,” Messonnier said Feb. 12. “We are working closely with them to correct the issues and as we’ve said all along, speed is important, but equally or more important in this situation is making sure that the laboratory results are correct.”
In the following weeks, CDC officials repeatedly said they were working to resolve the manufacturing problem. Then on Feb. 28, the agency announced it would just scrap the N3 component of the test that had been causing trouble. Officials also contacted a private company called Integrated DNA Technologies and asked it to make new test kits, the company said.
While the problems with the CDC test persisted, the vast majority of testing had to be done at the CDC’s Atlanta lab, and the numbers being tested were woefully below what experts said was needed.
As late as Feb. 27, only 203 specimen tests had been run out of state labs; another 3,125 had been run out of the CDC.
Post Reports podcast: What went wrong with coronavirus testing in the United States
James Lawler, director of the global center for health security and an epidemiologist at the University of Nebraska Medical Center, was one of the infectious disease specialists who flew out to meet the Diamond Princess cruise ship passengers in Japan and flew back with them to the United States. Lawler said the problem was not just in the manufacturing of the test but in the design.
In his view, the test has design problems that make it too difficult for many labs to make it work unless they have perfect conditions.
He said even though the University of Nebraska Medical Center — a world renowned infectious disease institution that houses the state’s public health lab — was able to get the CDC version of the test to work, the Nebraska center developed its own test based on the German lab design published by the WHO.
“It’s very nuanced and complicated to make a diagnostic test,” Lawler said. “If you don’t go back and fix things … and realize, ‘Hey, maybe I should try a different target,’ that’s when you can run into problems. … Everything down to the details of the humidity and temperature in some people’s laboratories is going to be different. ”
If the design of the test is flawed, he said, “all of those conditions may come into play. Some people have been able to get reproducibly good results and others haven’t.”
Concerns about scarce testing continue
Shortly after Feb. 28, when CDC officials announced the decision to reconfigure the CDC test, the number of those tests run by public health labs soared, from roughly 25 or fewer per day to as many as 1,500. At the same time, authorities were allowing other facilities to use their own tests — including Cleveland Clinic, Stanford and Greninger’s at the University of Washington.
Even so, complaints of testing scarcity continued to roll in last week. As tests become more widely available, experts and officials have cautioned that a backlog will continue because of critical shortages: swabs to collect patient samples, machines to extract the genetic material from the swabs, workers qualified to run the tests.
Even if those problems are resolved, however, those critical early delays, when the CDC was struggling to issue tests to the states, significantly damaged efforts to contain the spread of the coronavirus, experts said.
In a CDC tele-briefing on Feb. 29 that included some local and state public health directors, local officials lamented the initial inability to test. A reporter asked: “Did the lack of testing capabilities delay finding out who these cases were, particularly the person who died?”
In answering, Jeff Duchin, the public health chief in King County, Wash., where 37 deaths have been reported, suggested the lack of tests was critical, in addition to the fact that authorities had limited who could be tested. Initially, they had said tests would only be used for those who had traveled in affected regions of the globe or had otherwise been in contact with an infected person.
“So, you know, if we had the ability to test earlier, I’m sure we would have identified patients earlier in the community, possibly at hospitals, but we were also looking at not only availability of testing but whether patients met criteria for testing,” Duchin said.” So, given the fact that we just recently acquired our availability of testing and new criteria were published, this person was brought to our attention.”
Thomas Frieden, an infectious disease physician who served as CDC director under former president Barack Obama, called on Sunday for an “independent group” to investigate what went wrong with the CDC’s testing process. He said in the past, the CDC moved quickly to produce tests for diseases such as H1N1, or swine flu.
“We were able to get test kits out fast,” Frieden said on CNN. “Something went wrong here. We have to find out why so we can prevent that in the future.”
Frieden said the agency has been muzzled under President Trump and despite the multitude of problems with the rollout of testing, “the CDC is still the greatest public health institution in the world.”
Coronavirus: What you need to read
Updated March 20, 2020

Too wordy.

 

[NCFisher]

Too wordy.

Yeah, an article detailing how bureaucracy failed in a pandemic is usually going to be wordy.

 

[AM64]

Like I have previously stated, if there was any rule or regulation which needed to be changed in order to allow labs to create their own Coronavirus tests, it could have been done either early in the outbreak or prior to the outbreak... blaming the Obama Administration, 3 years into his term is ridiculous - and Trump won't even specify what rule he is referring to, he just wants you to know that if something is wrong, it's Obama's fault. That isn't leadership. It's petty.

Your unconditional support of Trump and fealty to him is it's own syndrome. Trump is over-hyping drugs and in some cases, he is just flat out lying. On Friday, Trump claimed that the malaria drug they're hoping to use against the Coronavirus was "effective". Dr. Anthony Fauci of the White House task force had to quickly walk back that claim and say that the drug in question had not gone through a clinical trial and that the FDA had previously stated that the drug had not been approved to combat the virus. This misinformation is irresponsible. It's not good leadership to be over-promising and under-delivering, but that is what Trump is doing.

There's probably nothing preventing independent labs from developing tests. However, they are stuck in doing anything further without regulatory approval - FDA as a minimum.

The antimalarial is approved for use as an antimalarial. Approval for this would again require FDA approval to keep insurors paying and you'd assume docs out of trouble. The real question is why CDC and our regulators are so certain that only we again out of all the countries in the civilized world are capable of determining what works and what is safe. It seems like a bad time to have a case of "not invented here" syndrome. There are quite a few drugs that were available in Europe well before our regulators got around to deciding they could be of benefit to our own people.

 

[Hunerwadel]

Yeah, an article detailing how bureaucracy failed in a pandemic is usually going to be wordy.

I guess I'm a little like someone else I know of:

Since Trump took office, it has often been reported that he prefers oral briefings and visual presentations over written documents and memos. Shortly after the inauguration, Trump told Axios himself, "I like bullets or I like as little as possible."

 

[BowlBrother85]

I guess I'm a little like someone else I know of:

Since Trump took office, it has often been reported that he prefers oral briefings and visual presentations over written documents and memos. Shortly after the inauguration, Trump told Axios himself, "I like bullets or I like as little as possible."

Reminds me of my son when he was 6 and he refused to read anything without big, colorful pictures in it. Trump is like a child in a lot of ways.

 

[KB5252]

Politicians always put money before people.

FIFY, to word this any other way reduces ones credibility to zero and their intellectual honesty even lower.

 

[Coug]

He fired the entire pandemic response team and now we're conveniently in the middle of a pandemic. Are you next going to roll out a thread excusing his gaffs and stupid comments during all of these coronavirus press briefings? The man is a moron, period.

 

[titansvolsfaninga]

He fired the entire pandemic response team and now we're conveniently in the middle of a pandemic. Are you next going to roll out a thread excusing his gaffs and stupid comments during all of these coronavirus press briefings? The man is a moron, period.

It's not his fault.....he didn't mean what he said. You have to wait a few days for them to tell you what he meant,which in some cases can be the exact opposite of what he said. For someone that has the best words, a lot of clarification is needed around his words.he was top of his class at Wharton too....may be the smartest person walking the face of the earth.

 

[titansvolsfaninga]

It's Chinas fault that donald acted so slowly. If not China, Obama. If not Obama, the bureaucracy. If not bureaucracy, the deep state. He's off the hook....his response has been perfect.

 

[Mick]

WTH does that even mean - 3 f'ing years - for a virus that appeared in China the first week of Dec. and was hid from the world the next six weeks and genome sequence released mid-Jan?

By that logic, O was in office 8 f'ing years. So where's the f'ing stockpile of shite no one knew we'd need?

Geez, man, you on a TDS bender.

This thread is the tighty whities of TDS. The main symptom of TDS is to tell someone they have TDS when they point out Trump's ineptitude.

 

[FLVOL_79]

Donald Trump is to blame for his childish and egocentric behavior in recent days. It wouldn't have changed where we are today if he had expressed greater concern, but Trump did downplay the threat of the Coronavirus to the American people in January and February, but now pretends that he was somehow ahead of the curve the whole time on the issue. It's dishonest. Also, Trump's attempts to blame Obama for something are just as ridiculous and misplaced as what you are describing in this post. Trump is not showing strong leadership through this. He is showing what he has always shown himself to be - a deeply insecure, hyper-sensitive, self-absorbed, petty and dishonest person.

Watch Southpark? Go watch 2016..It pretty much sums up the political race and Trump in a nutshell.

 

[FLVOL_79]

WTH does that even mean - 3 f'ing years - for a virus that appeared in China the first week of Dec. and was hid from the world the next six weeks and genome sequence released mid-Jan?

By that logic, O was in office 8 f'ing years. So where's the f'ing stockpile of shite no one knew we'd need?

Geez, man, you on a TDS bender.

Animal to human transfer of weird viruses like the Corona have been constant in China since at least 2000..probably long before that as well. As China's economy and influence spread within the last 30 years its led to these epidemics. Why no one, and I mean NO ONE, has held China responsible or prepared for it does seem a bit mind boggling. China had a f##king Polio outbreak in 2000.. POLIO...something eradicated in the Western world decades ago.

 

[NCFisher]

Animal to human transfer of weird viruses like the Corona have been constant in China since at least 2000..probably long before that as well. As China's economy and influence spread within the last 30 years its led to these epidemics. Why no one, and I mean NO ONE, has held China responsible or prepared for it does seem a bit mind boggling. China had a f##king Polio outbreak in 2000.. POLIO...something eradicated in the Western world decades ago.

I hope every country, but especially the West, reappraises trade, investment, and travel with China. This is the second time in as many pandemics they've screwed over the world by hiding it.
For that matter, the WHO declared as late as Jan 14 that the virus was not transmitted human-human. This was another "expert" entity our officials relied on that appears to have taken China's word for it. Also, Taiwan charges that they notified WHO in Dec. of the virus' virulence but that WHO deferred to China and did not notify other countries.

 

[NCFisher]

This thread is the tighty whities of TDS. The main symptom of TDS is to tell someone they have TDS when they point out Trump's ineptitude.

No, man, when you refer to his entire term in office as some indicator we should have a stockpile of pandemic goods that only become somewhat visible to the world less than two months ago, you're on a bender.

 

[NCFisher]

It's Chinas fault that donald acted so slowly. If not China, Obama. If not Obama, the bureaucracy. If not bureaucracy, the deep state. He's off the hook....his response has been perfect.

They didn't react slowly, but took very early ban and quarantine measures the left bitched about and that WHO advised against. FDA issued CDC exclusive EUA. CDC began shipping test the same time as WHO, but those failed in the field taking us all the way into March while CDC promised replacement kits.

There's nothing to indicate response would be better under Obama, for instance. He would have gone to the same "experts" for guidance. And it would be exponentially worse under a Biden presidency as that addled dunce would STILL not have banned travel and quarantined, including direct flights from Wuhan itself.

So go vote Biden in 2020, smart guy.

 

[NCFisher]

He fired the entire pandemic response team and now we're conveniently in the middle of a pandemic. Are you next going to roll out a thread excusing his gaffs and stupid comments during all of these coronavirus press briefings? The man is a moron, period.

Yeah, that just not true despite the left's breathless assertion.
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Fmr. NSC official: The WH didn’t ‘dissolve’ pandemic response office, but made it stronger. ‘I was there.’
On Friday in the midst of the global coronavirus crisis, one-time Obama appointee to the National Security Council (NSC) Beth Cameron wrote in a Washington Post op-ed that the Trump administration’s response to COVID-19 had been “slow and inadequate.” She suggested the reason for that was the closure of the NSC’s Directorate for Global Health Security and Biodefense.

But on Monday, Tim Morrison, former senior director for counterproliferation and biodefense on the National Security Council responded in the Post in an editorial entitled, “No, the White House didn’t ‘dissolve’ its pandemic response office. I was there.”

Morrison angrily charged that Cameron was simply taking part in a Dem-crafted election-year political narrative and that she was not telling the truth about the office’s closure.

“It has been alleged by multiple officials of the Obama administration, including in The Post, that the president and his then-national security adviser, John Bolton, “dissolved the office” at the White House in charge of pandemic preparedness,” wrote Morrison. “Because I led the very directorate assigned that mission, the counterproliferation and biodefense office, for a year and then handed it off to another official who still holds the post, I know the charge is specious.”

“It is true that the Trump administration has seen fit to shrink the NSC staff. But the bloat that occurred under the previous administration clearly needed a correction,” he continued.

He pointed out that former Defense Secretary Robert Gates, who served in the Obama administration, agreed with congressional oversight committees and other members of the Obama administration that the NSC had grown too large and needed a course correction from being too operationally focused. He referenced a 2015 Post article that found between the time of the Clinton administration and the second term of the Obama administration, NSC staff “had quadrupled in size, to nearly 400 people.”

“That is why Trump began streamlining the NSC staff in 2017,” wrote Morrison.

Sweeping away the fog, he told how a reorganization within the NSC actually resulted in a stronger directorate.

“One such move at the NSC was to create the counterproliferation and biodefense directorate,” said Morrison, “which was the result of consolidating three directorates into one, given the obvious overlap between arms control and nonproliferation, weapons of mass destruction terrorism, and global health and biodefense. It is this reorganization that critics have misconstrued or intentionally misrepresented. If anything, the combined directorate was stronger because related expertise could be commingled.”

He went on to insist that even with a continuing effort underway to trim the NSC fat, “it has left the biodefense staff unaffected — perhaps a recognition of the importance of that mission to the president, who, after all, in 2018 issued a presidential memorandum to finally create real accountability in the federal government’s expansive biodefense system.”
-----------------------------------------------

 

[titansvolsfaninga]

Yeah, that just not true despite the left's breathless assertion.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Fmr. NSC official: The WH didn’t ‘dissolve’ pandemic response office, but made it stronger. ‘I was there.’
On Friday in the midst of the global coronavirus crisis, one-time Obama appointee to the National Security Council (NSC) Beth Cameron wrote in a Washington Post op-ed that the Trump administration’s response to COVID-19 had been “slow and inadequate.” She suggested the reason for that was the closure of the NSC’s Directorate for Global Health Security and Biodefense.

But on Monday, Tim Morrison, former senior director for counterproliferation and biodefense on the National Security Council responded in the Post in an editorial entitled, “No, the White House didn’t ‘dissolve’ its pandemic response office. I was there.”

Morrison angrily charged that Cameron was simply taking part in a Dem-crafted election-year political narrative and that she was not telling the truth about the office’s closure.

“It has been alleged by multiple officials of the Obama administration, including in The Post, that the president and his then-national security adviser, John Bolton, “dissolved the office” at the White House in charge of pandemic preparedness,” wrote Morrison. “Because I led the very directorate assigned that mission, the counterproliferation and biodefense office, for a year and then handed it off to another official who still holds the post, I know the charge is specious.”

“It is true that the Trump administration has seen fit to shrink the NSC staff. But the bloat that occurred under the previous administration clearly needed a correction,” he continued.

He pointed out that former Defense Secretary Robert Gates, who served in the Obama administration, agreed with congressional oversight committees and other members of the Obama administration that the NSC had grown too large and needed a course correction from being too operationally focused. He referenced a 2015 Post article that found between the time of the Clinton administration and the second term of the Obama administration, NSC staff “had quadrupled in size, to nearly 400 people.”

“That is why Trump began streamlining the NSC staff in 2017,” wrote Morrison.

Sweeping away the fog, he told how a reorganization within the NSC actually resulted in a stronger directorate.

“One such move at the NSC was to create the counterproliferation and biodefense directorate,” said Morrison, “which was the result of consolidating three directorates into one, given the obvious overlap between arms control and nonproliferation, weapons of mass destruction terrorism, and global health and biodefense. It is this reorganization that critics have misconstrued or intentionally misrepresented. If anything, the combined directorate was stronger because related expertise could be commingled.”

He went on to insist that even with a continuing effort underway to trim the NSC fat, “it has left the biodefense staff unaffected — perhaps a recognition of the importance of that mission to the president, who, after all, in 2018 issued a presidential memorandum to finally create real accountability in the federal government’s expansive biodefense system.”
-----------------------------------------------

the documents refute Tim Morrison. Actions refute Tim Morrison. If he made the PRT stronger, where in the hell are the test, why were they not prepared. You can copy and paste any EDITORIAL (OPINION) you want, but the facts does not back up Tim Morrison's claim. Tim Morrison who is also a lobbyist for the Hudson Institute. So as I said, his motives are clear as day.
Conservatives claim that to make something stronger, you starve it. That's a fallacy.

 

[SpaceCoastVol]

I think your post shows an eagerness to give Trump a pass for his constant deflection. He has been the President of the United States for 3 years and any time there is anything which even smells like criticism of his administration, his default response is to blame previous administrations. That is weakness. Any action he is taking now, could have been taken much earlier. So spare me your patronizing BS.

wow. For three years the left has persecuted him in vain weak attempts to undo 2016. Of course he will 'deflect'. Hell if a powerful body came after you 24/7 for 3 years, I would think even you would be gunshy. Good Lord. You people are something else

 

[SpaceCoastVol]

Same old sh!t. Trump is to blame for the China Virus and China literally letting people be exposed to it for months before doing anything. Bush was to blame for Hurricane Katrina by not waving his magic hurricane dispersing wand. Reagan is to blame for not going to California and putting rubbers on gay dudes to stop AIDS.

But Puerto Rico and Haiti were magnificently handled, no?

 

[SpaceCoastVol]

This thread is the tighty whities of TDS. The main symptom of TDS is to tell someone they have TDS when they point out Trump's ineptitude.

Nice try, but...