The politics of pandemic planning have become increasingly pitched as the U.S. virus death toll rises. President Trump claims he inherited a “broken' system from the Obama administration. Critics counter that Trump had three years in office to prepare.
President Donald Trump speaks about the coronavirus in the Rose Garden of the White House, Friday, May 15, 2020, in Washington.
Obama has been a persistent foil for Trump on a number of issues, but in the case of planning for the pandemic he has devoted little attention to the 69-page “playbook” from the Obama administration about the threat of a viral outbreak that might include Ebola or an airborne respiratory illness like coronavirus. And the Obama administration could draw from a similar document written during the administration of George W. Bush in 2006.
Beth Cameron, who worked on pandemic planning in the Obama administration, said the playbook that the Obama administration presented to the Trump administration “was given, briefed and discussed with the incoming administration, explicitly.” She said it was intended to provide the White House with a set of questions it should ask early on in an emerging epidemic or pandemic threat.
She said that in 2018 the Trump administration issued its own pandemic crisis action plan and last summer conducted Crimson Contagion 2019, a simulation to test the nation’s ability to respond to a large-scale outbreak. In January, the Department of Health and Human Services issued an after-action report.
The Trump administration’s 36-page National Biodefense Strategy, issued in September 2018, was a self-described “call to action.” Among the many goals was bolstering preparedness to save lives through “medical countermeasures,” such as vaccines, ventilators, diagnostic tests and personal protective equipment like medical gowns and masks that were in short supply in the early days of the pandemic.
Obama worked on the Ebola epidemic and also on H1N1 and the Zika virus. In 2014, Obama stood up the White House’s National Security Council Directorate for Global Health Security and Biodefense to coordinate government resources in preparation for the next disease outbreak and prevent it from becoming a pandemic.
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