Yes, it's not just the current heel in the top job, but there were a lot of unforced errors owing to his team's problems.
Trump's a germaphobe, & a deregulator, & big on border security.
But he left the pandemic office in the White House go unfilled, & his CDC eliminated an in-China monitoring position, & he proposed additional cuts.
After initially considering people like FDA critic & aggressive deregulator Balaji Srinivasan as FDA Chair, that was ignored as a priority – & FDA delays in approving alternate, distributed diagnostics added weeks or months of delay to testing capabilities. Even now FDA inspection delays have medical supplies from reliable, longtime suppliers held from delivery. The steps the FDA has finally taken are waivers they could have granted by administrative fiat months ago. And key discoveries of community-spread in the US required researchers to disregard CDC guidance. (The agency designed to sound the alarm had instead removed the batteries from the smoke detector!)
And while countries with a sense of seriousness about foreign disease threats have closely monitored visitors by origin-of-travel, recent countries visited, and fever-monitoring from early-on, even when Italy was in full outbreak there were no health-screenings or fever-monitoring on US arrivals from there. Trump responded late, with crude bans by entire country-of-origin, even when those countries have no greater prevalence-of-community-spread than the US itself.
So yes, the rot is deep and crosses multiple administrations. But the current Administration is also especially inept, even in areas like disease, deregulation, and borders where they've touted their vigilance.
Trump's a germaphobe, & a deregulator, & big on border security.
But he left the pandemic office in the White House go unfilled, & his CDC eliminated an in-China monitoring position, & he proposed additional cuts.
After initially considering people like FDA critic & aggressive deregulator Balaji Srinivasan as FDA Chair, that was ignored as a priority – & FDA delays in approving alternate, distributed diagnostics added weeks or months of delay to testing capabilities. Even now FDA inspection delays have medical supplies from reliable, longtime suppliers held from delivery. The steps the FDA has finally taken are waivers they could have granted by administrative fiat months ago. And key discoveries of community-spread in the US required researchers to disregard CDC guidance. (The agency designed to sound the alarm had instead removed the batteries from the smoke detector!)
And while countries with a sense of seriousness about foreign disease threats have closely monitored visitors by origin-of-travel, recent countries visited, and fever-monitoring from early-on, even when Italy was in full outbreak there were no health-screenings or fever-monitoring on US arrivals from there. Trump responded late, with crude bans by entire country-of-origin, even when those countries have no greater prevalence-of-community-spread than the US itself.
So yes, the rot is deep and crosses multiple administrations. But the current Administration is also especially inept, even in areas like disease, deregulation, and borders where they've touted their vigilance.