You know why you don't see the CDC
subject matter experts anymore? Because fair or unfair, their failure to deliver a working test protocol all the way into March, means they've no credibility. I think that is specifically why Birx was brought in and Fauci made more visible.
And no, Trump didn't kill the pandemic team.
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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.”
“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.”
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opin...-didnt-dissolve-its-pandemic-response-office/
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This lie has not quite reached the repetitious scale of "neo-Nazis are fine people", but with a little bit of elbow grease by the left, I'm confident they can reach their goals!
