By the end of 2020, there were over 350,000 deaths from Covid-19 in the U.S. according to the CDC. For the first three months of 2020, President Trump insisted he knew better than the experts and did almost nothing. Canada, Australia, South Korea, and Japan followed the advice of epidemic and virus experts. They took actions starting in the beginning of the year. They had far lower overall and per capita infection and death rates than the US.
Based on comparisons with better adapted nations, in February 2021,The Lancet reported that if the U.S. government had taken strong action to contain the virus in the beginning, it could have avoided 40 percent of those deaths. That’s about 160,000 lost lives. A Columbia University study reported similar stating that between 130,000 and 210,000 deaths were because of government inaction in the critical beginning stages of the pandemic.
This wasn’t just incompetent denial and fumbling by this president. Throughout his presidency, Trump took many actions to lay the foundation for this catastrophe. The American tragedy started in 2016 as follows:
- Bill Gates warned President Trump in 2016 and 2018 about the dangers of a future pandemic. He ignored the warnings and did worse than nothing.
- The Obama administration left a 69-page Playbook for “Early Response to High Consequence Infectious Disease Threats”. They created this to avoid the errors experienced dealing with Ebola. They briefed the Trump administration on the playbook’s existence in 2017. Trump did not use it.
- His administration, through John Bolton dismantled the pandemic preparedness office in the National Security Council (NSC) set up by Obama after the Ebola epidemic. The 69-page Playbook went with it.
- On April 15, 2019, he ordered a halt to funding the World Health Organization (WHO) that he was already behind on. On July 6, 2020, the Trump administration officially notified UN Secretary-General of its intention to withdraw from WHO membership. They did this while COVID-19 cases and deaths were skyrocketing in the US and around the world.
- He gradually reduced 11 CDC staffers in China with the last leaving in July, 2019, creating a lack of intelligence when COVID-19 began to emerge.
- He ignored a pandemic simulation study, “Crimson Contagion” done by the Department of Health and Human services (HHS) in 2019 that showed how ill prepared the US was to deal with a pandemic.
- He proposed funding cuts annually for the CDC (Centers for Disease Control) and NIH (National Institutes for Health) annually, but congress overrode them with spending increases.
- Trump introduced his fiscal year 2021 budget proposal with cuts to the NIH and CDC on Feb. 10, 2020, just 11 days after the World Health Organization (WHO) declared the coronavirus outbreak a public health emergency of international concerns. NIH coronavirus research was vital to the development of Covid vaccines. CDC monitored the pandemic and provided important guidelines.
- He ignored warnings from the WHO and CDC of the pandemic as it emerged. He insisted Covid-19 was just another routine Flu type virus. He even called it a Democrat hoax for two months doing nothing when he could have promoted production of ventilators, N-95 respiratory masks, face shields and test kits that were in serious short supply.
- As the scientific community sounded the alarm, Trump insisted he knew better and that Covid-19 would go away with warmer weather, as Flu epidemics do, but the infections and deaths skyrocketed as the exponential growth of the infections continued.
- His administration did finally inject billions of dollars into vaccine development, starting in May 2020 under the name “Operation Warp Speed”. They should have done this months earlier. Fortunately, Pfizer was developing a vaccine on its own. The funding encouraged Pfizer and boosted Moderna’s efforts, but it could not bring back Trump’s dead victims.
For a Running Timeline of How the Trump Administration Ignored Warnings, Misled the Public and made the Coronavirus Crisis Worse click here.