(03-16-2020 07:37 AM)Momus Wrote: Did he fail to have testing kits or a coherent testing regiment set up in the face of a global pandemic with the potential to kill millions of Americans?
So this is apparently what constitutes Trump's "failure of leadership"? And the reason why cutting CDC's budget was such a terrible decision?
Interesting, since it appears that CDC was the source of the problem. Like good bureaucrats, they made two horrible decisions, 1) we're going to develop our own test instead of using the WHO test (apparently because the WHO test yields too many false positives, which may account in part for the large numbers elsewhere), and 2) we're going to control the testing ourselves instead of farming it out to state and local governments and private entities, who have far more resources than we do (Dr. Chu in Washington state, who developed her own test that first detected the problem in the Seattle area, was given a "cease and desist" order by CDC). Now, if Trump imposed either one of those decisions on CDC, then I would say he is at fault. But I've seen no evidence that he did so. Have you? And last Friday he announced things that pretty much reversed both those decisions, way before CV-19 came anywhere close to killing millions of Americans, or even thousands, or even hundreds.
I wouldn't say the response has been perfect. If I had been Trump I would have ordered CDC to use the WHO test until its own could be developed, to bring in state and local government and private sector labs ASAP (including fast-tracking certification, if needed), and focus primarily on vaccines and antidotes rather than testing, since we already had a test (realizing full well that the isolating the virus, as required for testing, is a useful step toward developing a cure). Also, if the hysteria and fear that the media and democrats are mongering started to catch on, I would have done what we did after 9/11, called for a one to two week stand down while we got the best people from government, medicine, and industry together to figure out solutions. Have the exchanges shut down trading for a week to stop the wild swings. Cancel large events for a couple of weeks. Look at what we are doing and figure out what is working and what isn't, and go forward. I get the sense from Friday that some of this latter has taken place.
Long-term, the problem with this as with every emergency is that we have no agency anywhere dedicated to emergency response. So we always get off to a slow start. The folks he fired at CDC, would they have been able to produce tests or process testing faster? Maybe, maybe there were some worker bees in there who could have pumped out 2 or 3 more a day, but I don't think so. My proposal for the long term is to repurpose the National Guard from a reserve Army/Air Force reserve to a civil defense and emergency response team. It has people that we don't have to pay 24/7/365, but can be trained and equipped and ready to hit the ground running in an emergency. Train on earthquakes and mud slides and brush fires in California, hurricanes along the Gulf Coast, floods and tornadoes in the Midwest, snow storms in the northeast, and have medical units trained and available to help in any event. And if the "wrong" kind of event hits your area, bring in help from outside. In this case, you deploy the medical units to set up mobile testing units in available parking lots and you have industry produce the testing kits
en masse, starting with the WHO kits, so you get way ahead on testing early.
OK, so I don't give Trump and A+ on this. And I'm not really throwing CDC under the bus. The reality is that they aren't set up to handle this. We need someone who is. The political question is whether Biden or Sanders would have done better. Have we heard anything from either one of them suggesting that they would have? I haven't. I haven't heard either of them propose anything that I have outlined here.
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