REPUBLICAN Senator Richard Burr, Coronavirus Outbreak: A Cascade of Warnings, Heard but Unheeded

Cape Cod Women for Change

WASHINGTON — The outbreak of the respiratory virus began in China and was quickly spread around the world by air travelers, who ran high fevers. In the United States, it was first detected in Chicago, and 47 days later, the World Health Organization declared a pandemic. By then it was too late: 110 million Americans were expected to become ill, leading to 7.7 million hospitalized and 586,000 dead.
That scenario, code-named “Crimson Contagion,” was simulated by the Trump administration’s Department of Health and Human Services in a series of exercises that ran from last January to August.
The simulation’s sobering results — contained in a draft report dated October 2019 that has not previously been reported — drove home just how underfunded, underprepared and uncoordinated the federal government would be for a life-or-death battle with a virus for which no treatment existed.

WASHINGTON — The outbreak of the respiratory virus began in China and was quickly spread around the world by air travelers, who ran high fevers. In the United States, it was first detected in Chicago, and 47 days later, the World Health Organization declared a pandemic. By then it was too late: 11...

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Coronavirus Outbreak: A Cascade of Warnings, Heard but Unheeded

WASHINGTON — The o

Coronavirus live updates: Over 13,000 diagnosed in US, State Department raises threat level

Coronavirus has reached all 50 states, D.C. and Puerto Rico.

WASHINGTON — The outbreak of the respiratory virus began in China and was quickly spread around the world by air travelers, who ran high fevers. In the United States, it was first detected in Chicago, and 47 days later, the World Health Organization declared a pandemic. By then it was too late: 110 million Americans were expected to become ill, leading to 7.7 million hospitalized and 586,000 dead.

That scenario, code-named “Crimson Contagion,” was simulated by the Trump administration’s Department of Health and Human Services in a series of exercises that ran from last January to August.

The simulation’s sobering results — contained in a draft report dated October 2019 that has not previously been reported — drove home just how underfunded, underprepared and uncoordinated the federal government would be for a life-or-death battle with a virus for which no treatment existed.

The draft report, marked “not to be disclosed,” laid out in stark detail repeated cases of “confusion” in the exercise. Federal agencies jockeyed over who was in charge. State officials and hospitals struggled to figure out what kind of equipment was stockpiled or available. Cities and states went their own ways on school closings.

Many of the potentially deadly consequences of a failure to address the shortcomings are now playing out in all-too-real fashion across the country. And it was hardly the first warning for the nation’s leaders. Three times over the past four years the U.S. government, across two administrations, had grappled in depth with what a pandemic would look like, identifying likely shortcomings and in some cases recommending specific action.

In 2016, the Obama administration produced a comprehensive report on the lessons learned by the government from battling Ebola. In January 2017, outgoing Obama administration officials ran an extensive exercise on responding to a pandemic for incoming senior officials of the Trump administration.

The full story of the Trump administration’s response to the coronavirus is still playing out. Government officials, health professionals, journalists and historians will spend years looking back on the muddled messages and missed opportunities of the past three months, as President Trump moved from dismissing the coronavirus as a few cases that would soon be “under control” to his revisionist announcement on Monday that he had known all along that a pandemic was on the way.
What the scenario makes clear, however, is that his own administration had already modeled a similar pandemic and understood its potential trajectory.

The White House defended its record, saying it responded to the 2019 exercise with an executive order to improve the availability and quality of flu vaccines, and that it moved early this year to increase funding for the Department of Health and Human Services’ program that focuses on global pandemic threats.

But officials have declined to say why the administration was so slow to roll out broad testing or to move faster, as the simulations all indicated it should, to urge social distancing and school closings.
Asked at his news briefing on Thursday about the government’s preparedness, Mr. Trump responded: “Nobody knew there would be a pandemic or epidemic of this proportion. Nobody has ever seen anything like this before.”

The work done over the past five years, however, demonstrates that the government had considerable knowledge about the risks of a pandemic and accurately predicted the very types of problems Mr. Trump is now scrambling belatedly to address.

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Christopher Kirchhoff, a national security aide who moved from the Pentagon to the White House to deal with the Ebola crisis, was given the job of putting together a “lessons learned” report, with input from across the government.

The weaknesses Mr. Kirchhoff identified were early warning signals of what has unfolded in the past three months.

His report concluded that the United States assumed more ability on the part of the World Health Organization than the agency actually had.

The United States had its own issues. There was no airplane in the U.S. fleet capable of evacuating an American doctor who was infected while treating patients in Liberia. The Pentagon was largely unprepared for the intervention that Mr. Obama ordered.

While the United States rapidly developed a way to screen air passengers coming into the country — borrowing from intelligence tools developed after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks to track possible terrorists — Mr. Kirchhoff found deficiencies in even measuring how fast the virus was spreading.

On the plus side, the Obama White House had created an Ebola Task Force, run by Ron Klain, Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s former chief of staff, before a single case emerged in the United States. Congress allocated $5.4 billion in emergency funding to pay for Ebola treatment and prevention efforts in the United States and West Africa.

The money helped fund a little-known agency inside the Department of Health and Human Services in charge of preparing for future contagious disease outbreaks, the same office that in 2019 ran the Crimson Contagion exercise and other similar events in the years since.

After a man named Thomas Duncan, a Liberian citizen, became the first person given a diagnosis of Ebola on American territory in September 2014, errors resulted in the infection of two nurses and fear of a wider spread in the United States. (Mr. Duncan died, but the two nurses recovered.)

What is striking in reading Mr. Kirchhoff’s account today, however, is how few of the major faults he found in the American response resulted in action — even though the report was filled with department-by-department recommendations.

There were deficiencies “in personal protective equipment use, disinfection” and “social services for those placed under quarantine.”

There was confusion over travel restrictions, and the need “for a smoother sliding scale of escalation of government response, from local authorities acting on their own to local authorities acting with some federal assistance” to the full activation of the federal government.

The report concluded that “a minimum planning benchmark might be an epidemic an order of magnitude or two more difficult than that presented by the outbreak of Ebola in West Africa, with much more significant domestic spread.”

But one big change did come out of the study: The creation of a dedicated office at the National Security Council to coordinate responses and raise the alarm early.

“What I learned most is that we had to stand up a global biosecurity and health directorate, and get it enshrined for the next administration,” said Lisa Monaco, Mr. Obama’s homeland security adviser.

Getting the Trump Team’s Attention

After Mr. Trump’s election, Ms. Monaco arranged an extensive exercise for high-level incoming officials — including Rex W. Tillerson, the nominee for secretary of state; John F. Kelly, designated to become homeland security secretary; and Rick Perry, who would become energy secretary — gaming out the response to a deadly flu outbreak.

She asked Tom Bossert, who was preparing to come in as Mr. Trump’s homeland security adviser, to run the event alongside her.

“We modeled a new strain of flu in the exercise precisely because it’s so communicable,” Ms. Monaco said. “There is no vaccine, and you would get issues like nursing homes being particularly vulnerable, shortages of ventilators.”

Ms. Monaco was impressed by how seriously Mr. Bossert, her successor, appeared to take the threat, as did many of the 30 or so Trump team members who participated in the exercise, details of which were reported by Politico.

But by the time the current crisis hit, almost all of the leaders at the table — Mr. Tillerson, Mr. Kelly and Mr. Perry among them — had been fired or moved on.

In 2018, Mr. Trump’s national security adviser at the time, John R. Bolton, ousted Mr. Bossert and eliminated the National Security Council directorate, folding it into an office dedicated to weapons of mass destruction in what Trump officials called a logical consolidation.

Asked about that shift on March 13, Mr. Trump told a reporter that it was “a nasty question,” before adding: “I don’t know anything about it.” Writing on Twitter the next day, Mr. Bolton lashed out at critics who said the shift had reflected disinterest in pandemic threats.

“Claims that streamlining NSC structures impaired our nation’s bio defense are false,” Mr. Bolton tweeted. “Global health remained a top NSC priority.”

In a statement, the National Security Council said it “has directors and staff whose full-time job it is to monitor, plan for, and respond to pandemics, including an infectious disease epidemiologist and a virologist.”

But in testimony to Congress last week, Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, suggested that ending the stand-alone directorate was ill-advised. “It would be nice if the office was still there,” he said.

On Feb. 10, nearly three weeks after the first coronavirus case was diagnosed in the United States, Mr. Trump submitted a 2021 budget proposal that called for a $693.3 million reduction in funding for the C.D.C., or about 9 percent, although there was a modest increase for the division that combats global pandemics.

‘Crimson Contagion’

The Crimson Contagion planning exercise run last year by the Department of Health and Human Services involved officials from 12 states and at least a dozen federal agencies. They included the Pentagon, the Department of Veterans Affairs and the National Security Council. Groups like the American Red Cross and American Nurses Association were invited to join, as were health insurance companies and major hospitals like the Mayo Clinic.

The war game-like exercise was overseen by Robert P. Kadlec, a former Air Force physician who has spent decades focused on biodefense issues. After stints on the Bush administration’s Homeland Security Council and the staff of the Senate Intelligence Committee, he was appointed assistant secretary of Health and Human Services for Preparedness and Response.

“He recognized early that we have a big problem and we needed much bigger budgets to prepare,” said Richard Danzig, the secretary of the Navy in the Clinton administration, who had worked with Mr. Kadlec.

The exercise played out in four separate stages, starting in January 2019.

The events were supposedly unspooling in real time — with the worst-case scenario underway as of Aug. 13, 2019 — when, according to the script, 12,100 cases had already been reported in the United States, with the largest number in Chicago, which had 1,400.

The fictional outbreak involved a pandemic flu, which the Department of Health and Human Services says was “very different than the novel coronavirus.” The staged outbreak had started when a group of 35 tourists visiting China were infected and then flew home to Australia, Kuwait, Malaysia, Thailand, Britain and Spain, as well as to the United States, with some developing respiratory symptoms and fevers en route.

A 52-year-old man from Chicago, who was on the tour, had “low energy and a dry cough” upon his return home. His 17-year-old son on that same day went out to a large public event in Chicago, and the chain of illnesses in the United States started.

Many of the moments during the tabletop exercise are now chillingly familiar.

In the fictional pandemic, as the virus spread quickly across the United States, the C.D.C. issued guidelines for social distancing, and many employees were told to work from home.

But federal and state officials struggled to identify which employees were essential and what equipment was needed to effectively work from home.

There also was confusion over how to handle school children. The C.D.C. recommended that states delay school openings — the exercise took place toward the end of the summer. But some school districts decided to go ahead with the start of school while others followed the federal advice, causing the same types of confusion and discrepancies that have marked the response to the coronavirus.

The exercise from last year then went on to predict how the situation on the ground in the United States would worsen as the weeks passed.

Confusion emerged as state governments began to turn in large numbers to Washington for help to address shortages of antiviral medications, personal protective equipment and ventilators. Then states started to submit requests to different branches of the federal government, leading to bureaucratic chaos.

Friction also emerged between the Federal Emergency Management Agency, which is traditionally in charge of disaster response, and the Department of Health and Human Services, another scenario playing out now.

But the problems were larger than bureaucratic snags. The United States, the organizers realized, did not have the means to quickly manufacture more essential medical equipment, supplies or medicines, including antiviral medications, needles, syringes, N95 respirators and ventilators, the agency concluded.

Congress was briefed in December on some of these findings, including the inability to quickly replenish certain medical supplies, given that much of the product comes from overseas.

These concerns turned more urgent at a hearing last Thursday on Capitol Hill, as lawmakers peppered officials with the Department of Health and Human Services with questions that sounded almost as if they had read the script from the fictional exercise, reflecting the shortage of respirators and protective gear.

Senator Mitt Romney, Republican of Utah, said last week that he blamed Congress and prior administrations for not increasing stockpiles of this type of equipment.

“That is an area we ought to consider making an investment in,” he added, making a point, apparently unknown to him, that the administration’s own simulation had made clear five months earlier.

LINK

Donald Trump’s Only Strategy Is to Create Crisis and Claim to Fix It

On border security, as on health care, Trump's big play for 2020 is to confuse everyone and create a sense of panic.

truthout.org

Donald Trump's Only Strategy Is to Create Crisis and Claim to Fix It

On border security, as on health care, Tr

President Trump speaks during a campaign rally in Grand Rapids, Michigan, on March 28, 2019.

Nicholas Kamm / AFP / Getty Images

By

Sophia Tesfaye,

Salon

Published

April 2, 2019

“I alone can fix it.”

Donald Trump’s declaration during his nomination acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention in 2016 was ostensibly meant to sell the political neophyte as uniquely situated to solve the intransigence that has plagued both parties. But in practice, another Trump tagline — “I love chaos” — has served as the president’s prevalent guidance since his party took huge losses in the midterms.

First, he needlessly shut down the federal government to make a case for his border wall. Now, unhappy with the accelerating rate of illegal border crossings, Trump is threatening to shut down all legal border crossings, a move that poses a major threat to the U.S. and Mexican economies. 

The administration argues that Central American migrants, apparently undeterred by years of tough talk by Trump, continue to flood the U.S.-Mexico border and have caused an increase of apprehension at the border by more than 30 percent year over year. But those migrants being detained are coming here to seek legal asylum, and would not have been detained under any other presidential administration until Trump’s zero-tolerance policy led to the creation of internment camps in Texas.

Acting White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney on Sunday said that closing the border would allow agents working at legal points of entry to go out and patrol in the desert where there is no wall. That makes little sense to solve the push of migrants, however, because many immigrants deliberately seek to be detained so that they can apply for asylum.

So, yes, Trump is literally creating the border “crisis” with his policies. It’s a classic con: Create a problem, and then sell a fix to that problem that allows a leader to consolidate more power. If you get people afraid enough of the problem, the theory goes, they’ll be so desperate for your fix that they’ll forget that you’re the one who created the problem in the first place.

Chaos is a tool used to maintain control. In this particular situation, Trump’s created chaos keeps his allies in the Republican Party and his detractors in the Democratic Party off balance and confused about his plans, allowing him to step in and save the day. “I alone can fix it.”

And even if his latest is merely an idle threat, it serves the same purpose. He can say something like “I’ve closed 96% of the border” and leave open all the border crossings. After all, they are narrow and far apart; they make up very little of the actual length of the border. He can order the border closed, confident that within a few hours a federal court will likely issue an injunction to reopen it. Then, Trump can go to his rallies and rail against the “liberal” courts and Democrats, blocking his plans to protect the country. It’s the ultimate troll, which is why he’ll do it. For Trump, it’s a political win-win.

As Media Matters researcher Matt Gertz illustrated, Trump’s public calls to close the border came after Fox Business host Lou Dobbs and right-wing pundit Rush Limbaugh, appearing on Fox News’ “Hannity,” implored the president to do as much. It’s an appeal to the base meant to make him look the only man in Washington willing to do something about illegal immigration.

This isn’t about only policy, however, it’s also about Trump’s need for attention.

According to a new poll released by NBC News and The Wall Street Journal on Sunday, 48 percent of voters say they would rather vote for the Democratic nominee over the current sitting president — while a 41 percent say they’d “definitely” or “likely” vote to re-elect Trump. He needs an immigration crisis in order to push that latter number closer to the margin of error.

That’s the only plausible explanation for the State Department’s announcement on Saturday that it’s ending support for programs in Honduras, El Salvador and Guatemala that had been expected to cost at least $500 million, including money to support law-enforcement efforts against gangs, all but guaranteeing that the flow of asylum seekers becomes a flood.

Trump’s brand is crisis, and that brand’s currency is chaos. The long-term damage being done by making America “great again” has not yet been fully appreciated. It will take many years to repair.

LINK

No arguing this. Fact check. All true. Stolen from a friend:

For the record, NO ONE is blaming the President for the virus. Let me repeat. Coronavirus is not Trump’s fault. Here’s a detailed list of what we are blaming him for:

Trump declined to use the World Health Organization’s test like other nations. Back in January, over a month before the first Co-vid19 case, the Chinese posted a new mysterious virus and within a week, Berlin virologists had produced the first diagnostic test. By the end of February, the WHO had shipped out tests to 60 countries. Oh, but not our government. 

We declined the test even as a temporary bridge until the CDC could create its own test.

 The question is why? We don’t know but what to look for is which pharmaceutical company eventually manufactures the test and who owns the stock. Keep tuned.

The Trump administration fired the U.S. pandemic response team in 2018 to cut costs.

In 2018 Trump fired Homeland Security Advisor Tom Bossart, whose job was to coordinate a response to global pandemics. He was not replaced.

In 2018 Dr. Luciana Borio, the NSC director for medical and bio-defense preparedness left the job. Trump did not replace Dr. Borio.

In 2019 the NSC’s Senior Director for Global Health Security and bio-defense, Tim Ziemer, left the position and Trump did not replace the Rear Admiral.

Trump shut down the entire Global Health Security and Bio-defense agency.

Amid the explosive worldwide outbreak of the virus Trump proposed a 19% cut to the budget of the Centers of Disease Control and Prevention plus a 10% cut to Public Health Services and a 7% cut to Global Health Services. Those happen to be the organizations that responds to public health threats. Yes congress said GTFOH but he still PROPOSED.

Trump didn’t appoint a doctor to oversee the US response to the pandemic. He appointed Mike Pence.

Trump has on multiple occasions sowed doubt about the severity of the virus even using the word hoax at events and rallies. He even did it at an event where the virus was being spread. Trump has put out zero useful information concerning the health risks of the virus.

Trump pretended the virus had been contained.

Trump left a cruise ship at sea for days, denying them proper hospital care, rather than increase his numbers in America.

Repeat. We do not blame Trump for the virus. We blame him for gutting the nation’s preparations to deal with it. We blame him for bungling testing and allowing it to spread uninhibited. We blame him for wasting taxpayer money on applause lines at his rallies (like The Wall). We blame him for putting his own political life over American human life.
I hope this clears things up.