Following Up: Nursing Home Deaths Still Dominating U.S. CCP Virus Fatalities

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assisted living facilities, CCP Virus, CDC, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, coronavirus, COVID 19, Following Up, Foundation for Research on Equal Opportunity, Kaiser Family Foundation, lockdowns, nursing homes, shutdowns, The New York Times, Worldometer.com, Wuhan virus

Given the recent U.S. surge in reported CCP Virus infections (but not yet U.S. deaths, according to sources such as the Worldometers.com website), I thought it was time to take another look at the nursing homes dimension of the pandemic. Depressingly, most of the evidence signals that it’s still at least as central to America’s virus fatality story.

RealityChek‘s last update, from mid-August, found that, since the pandemic’s early stages, the share of CCP Virus deaths linked with these facilities had more than doubled – to at least 41 percent. The phrase “at least” matters a lot because U.S. states’ reporting of these losses is far from uniform.

The New York Times, which had been doing an admirable job of tracking the scattered statistics that are available, hasn’t focused on the issue since then, but several others have stepped into the breach and some suggest that the problem has worsened.

In early September, the non-partisan Kaiser Family Foundation reported that “People in long-term care facilities make up 8 percent of coronavirus cases, but 45 percent of all COVID-19 deaths.” And worrisomely, Kaiser found signs, as of August, of an uptick.

Moreover, in a second September report, Kaiser examined another set of institutions in which senior citizens are heavily concentrated – assisted living facilities. It concluded that, despite data even less complete than for nursing homes, CCP Virus deaths were strongly increasing among residents and staff alike between June and August.

Similar figures were published in late August by the Foundation for Research on Equal Opportunity, a think tank that bills itself as non-partisan but that looks like of right-of-center-ish to me. (“Not that there’s anything wrong with that.”). Actually, the organization published three sets of figures, each using a different methodology and each covering both nursing homes and assisted living facilities. The low end number pegged virus deaths associated with both at 42.1 percent, the middle at 42.7 percent, and the high end estimate was 46.9 percent.

What says the U.S. government, you might ask? Nothing terribly helpful. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) does try to monitor the situation, and its data are more recent than those of the other two outfits – bringing the story up to October 18. But it only includes information from the relatively small number of states that voluntarily send in their numbers. That is, there’s no reporting requirement. The two private sector organizations discussed above use other sources, like press accounts – which are admittedly not definitive.

If you do look up these numbers, however, you’ll find that the agency pegs the nursing home death toll at 61,765 as of October 18. But you’ll also find that no overall U.S. death total is provided for that date.

The Worldometers site’s number for the day is 224,792. Do the math, and nursing home deaths as a share of total deaths comes to 27.47 percent. Yet not only is the result missing many states’ fatalities. It doesn’t include assisted living facilities, either.

I’ve argued in my previous posts that the high share of total U.S. virus-connected deaths is argues strongly for concentrating prevention and mitigation efforts on such unusually vulnerable populations, rather than the economy or the society as a whole. As new infections climb once more, and talk of major lockdown increase just as quickly, this still sounds like the strategy to choose.

Im-Politic: Biden’s Massive China Fakery

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2020 election, Biden, CCP Virus, CDC, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, China, China trade deal, coronavirus, COVID 19, currency, currency manipulation, Hunter Biden, Im-Politic, Joe Biden, Obama, Trade, travel ban, WHO, World Health Organization, World Trade Organization, WTO, Wuhan virus, xenophobia

Imagine the gall that would’ve been required had Republican nominee Mitt Romney campaigned for President in 2012 by blaming incumbent Barack Obama for the financial crisis and Great Recession of 2007-09. Not only did these economic disasters erupt well before Obama took office, but the White House at that time had been held for eight years by the GOP. (The Democrats did win control of the House and Senate in the 2006 midterm elections, but still….) 

Multiply that gall many times over and you get this year’s presumptive Democratic candidate for President, Joe Biden, charging that Donald Trump is largely responsible for the devastating hit the nation is taking from the CCP Virus because Mr. Trump has been too soft on China. The Biden claims are much more contemptible because whereas Romney played no role in bringing on the Wall Street meltdown and subsequent near-depression, Biden has long supported many of the China policies that have both greatly enriched and militarily strengthened the People’s Republic, and sent key links in America’s supply chains for producing vital healthcare-related goods offshore – including to a China that has threatened the United States with healthcare supplies blackmail.

The Biden campaign’s most comprehensive indictment of President Trump’s China and CCP Virus policies was made in this release, titled “Trump Rolled Over for China.” Its core claim:

“We’d say Trump is weak on China, but that’s an understatement. Trump rolled over in a way that has been catastrophic for our country. He did nothing for months because he put himself and his political fortunes first. He refused to push China on its coronavirus response and delayed taking action to mitigate the crisis in an effort not to upset Beijing and secure a limited trade deal that has largely gone unfulfilled.”

More specifically, the Biden organization claims that even long before the pandemic broke out, Mr. Trump has “never followed through” on his 2016 campaign’s “big promises about being tough on China” and simply conducted “reckless trade policies that pushed farmers and manufacturers to the brink” before he was “forced to make concessions to China without making any progress toward a level playing field for American industry.”

I’d say “the mind reels” but that phrase doesn’t begin to capture the mendacity at work here. Not to mention the sheer incompetence. After all, the trade deal was signed on January 15. It was only two weeks before that China told the World Health Organization (WHO) that an unknown illness had appeared in Wuhan. On January 3, China officially notified the U.S. government. It was only the day before the trade deal signing that WHO broadcast to the world China’s claim (later exposed as disastrously erroneous – at best) that no evidence of person-to-person transmission had been found. It wasn’t until the very day of the deal signing that the individual who became the first known American virus case left Wuhan and arrived in the United States. It wasn’t until January 21 that the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) confirmed him as the first American victim.  (See this timeline for specifics.)

So evidently the Biden folks don’t know how to read a calendar.

Meanwhile, in early January, The New York Times has reported, CDC offered to send a team of its specialists to China to observe conditions and offer assistance. China never replied. On January 7, four days after Washington received its first CCP Virus notification, but two weeks before it identified the first U.S. virus case, the CDC began planning for tests. We now know that it bungled this challenge badly.

But did Trump coddle China in order to keep Beijing from terminating the agreement? Surely Biden’s team isn’t calling that failure an effort to appease China. It’s also true that on February 7, the Trump administration announced its readiness to provide Beijing with $100 million worth of anti-virus aid to China (and other countries), and had just sent nearly 18 tons of medical supplies (including protective gear) to help the People’s Republic combat the pandemic. But is the Biden campaign condemning these actions? From its indictment, it’s clear that its focus instead is on the numerous Trump statements praising China’s anti-virus performance and transparency, and reassuring the American public that the situation was under control.

Where, however, is the evidence that these remarks amounted to the President treating China with kid gloves, and stemmed from desperation to save the trade deal? Just as important, here we come to a fundamental incoherence in Biden’s treatment of the agreement – descriptions that are so flatly contradictory that they reek of flailing. After all, on the one hand, the Phase One agreement is dismissed as a fake that fails to safeguard American trade and broader economic interests adequately. On the other, it assumes that China has been eager from the start to call the whole thing off. Yet if Phase One had accomplished so little from the U.S. standpoint, wouldn’t Beijing actually have been focused on sustaining this charade?

But even if the Biden read on trade deal politics is correct, how to explain the January 31 Trump announcement of major restrictions on inbound travel from China that went into effect February 2? Clearly China didn’t like it. Or were these reactions part of a secret plot between the American and Chinese Presidents to snow their respective publics and indeed the entire world?

How, moreover, to explain such Trump administration policies as the continuing crackdown on Chinese telecommunications giant Huawei, and its effort to kick out of the U.S. market  Chinese services provider China Telecom? Or the ongoing intensification of the Justice Department’s campaign against Chinese espionage efforts centered on U.S. college and university campuses? Or yesterday’s administration announcement that although some payments of U.S. tariffs on imports would be deferred in order to help hard-pressed American retailers survive the CCP Virus-induced national economic shutdown, the steep tariffs on literally hundreds of billions of dollars’ worth of prospective imports from China would remain firmly in place?

In addition, all these measures of course put the lie to another central Biden claim – that Mr. Trump is not only soft on China today, but has been soft since his inauguration. A bigger goof – or whopper – can scarcely be imagined.

Unless it’s the companion Biden insistence that the Trump trade wars have devastated American agriculture and manufacturing? When, as documented painstakingly here, U.S. farm prices began diving into the dumps well before the Trump 2016 victory (when Biden himself was second-in-command in America)? When manufacturing, as documented equally painstakingly, went through the mildest recession conceivable, when its output was clearly hobbled by Boeing’s completely un-tradewar-related safety woes), and when every indication during the pre-virus weeks pointed to rebound? When the raging inflation widely predicted to stem from the tariffs has been absolutely nowhere in sight?

Which leaves the biggest lies of all: The claim that Biden is being tough on China now – the promise that he’ll “hold China accountable,” and the implication that he’s always been far-sighted and hard-headed in dealing with Beijing

According to the campaign’s Trump indictment, the former Vice President “publicly warned Trump in February not to take China’s word” on its anti-virus efforts. But this Biden warning didn’t come until February 26. As to making China pay, the campaign offers zero specifics – and given Biden’s staunch opposition to Mr. Trump’s tariffs (and silence on the other, major elements of the Trump approach to China) it’s legitimate to ask what on earth he’s talking about. In addition, Biden insinuated that the Trump curbs on travel from China were “xenophobia” the very day they were announced – before pushback prompted him to endorse them.

Finally, the Biden China record has been dreadful by any real-world standards. In the words of this analysis from the Cato Institute, “he voted consistently to maintain normal trade relations with China, including permanent NTR in 2000” – meaning that he favored the disastrous decision to admit China into the World Trade Organization (WTO), which gave Beijing invaluable protection against unilateral U.S. efforts to combat its pervasive trade predation. He did apparently vote once for sanctions to punish China for its currency manipulation (which has artificially under-priced goods made in China and thereby given them government-created advantages against any competition), but many such Senate trade votes were purely for show. (I apologize for not being able to find the specific reference, and will nail down the matter in an addendum and post as soon as possible.)  

Revealingly, once he was in the Obama administration, he failed to lift a finger to continue the battle against this Chinese exchange-rate protectionism, and served as the President’s “leading pitchman” for the Trans-Pacific Partnership, whose provisions would have handed China many of the benefits of membership without imposing any of the obligations. More generally, there’s no evidence of any Biden words or actions opposing an Obama strategy that greatly enriched the People’s Republic, and therefore supercharged its military potential and actual power. 

For good measure, despite constant bragging that his personal contact with numerous foreign leaders during his Senate and Vice Presidential years, he completely misjudged Xi Jinping, writing in a 2011 article that the Chinese dictator (then heir apparent to the top job in Beijing) “agrees” that “we have a stake in each other’s success” and that “On issues from global security to global economic growth, we share common challenges and responsibilities — and we have incentives to work together.”

There clearly are many valid reasons to support Biden’s Presidential bid.  But if China’s rise and its implications worry you (as they should), then the former Vice President’s record of dealing with Beijing just as clearly shouldn’t be one of them. 

Following Up: Why the Economy Shutdown vs Restart Debate is Still Idiotic

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CCP Virus, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, coronavirus, COVID 19, drug abuse, Following Up, healthcare, Im-Politic, infant mortality, mortality, opioids, poverty, restart, suicide, Tim Mullaney, Trump, Wuhan virus

The heated debate over whether it’s more important to open the economy relatively quickly, or wait until the CCP Virus really is under control slogs on. And I mean slogs on, since once it became clear that the pandemic wasn’t going to be even close to a Black Death-like catastrophe, everyone with a working brain should have recognized that immense uncertainties are all around, and that both approaches therefore entail terrible risk.

One built-in complication, though, continues to muddy the waters. And even though decisive clarity can’t be gleaned from the available data, it’s worth pointing out: CCP Virus deaths are relatively easy to calculate – even if not perfectly identifiable, because single causes of death tend to be difficult and controversial to pinpoint for victims with important underlying health problems, and therefore different U.S. states have (not surprisingly) come up with different standards for counting them.

Deaths from a prolonged economic slump like the one into which America has been plunged are much harder to determine, and data are therefore more controversial. But no one should doubt that they’re noteworthy, and worth taking into account in any economy restart decisions.

As commonsensical as these observations sound, however, they continue being vigorously disputed, and one of the few such arguments I’ve seen that try to quantify relative rates of loss has come from economics journalist Tim Mullaney. Full disclosure: I’ve criticized Mullaney here before, finding him to be an extreme hater even by Never Trumper standards. But I hope you’ll trust me when I say I’m singling out his latest article simply because it makes the “restart later” argument in such data-dependent terms.

According to Mullaney, President Trump and other prominent conservatives are blowing the most deceitful smoke imaginable by insisting “You have to reopen the economy despite the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic, quickly, lest a wave of suicides, domestic battery and the like overwhelm even the death toll from coronavirus.”

His evidence? The CCP Virus daily U.S. death toll when he wrote his article (2,763) dwarfs the numbers of lives lost each day in the United States to economic-related causes (like many suicides), as well as the numbers lost daily during the nation’s wars. (As of yesterday, daily national CCP Virus deaths hit a much higher 4,591.) * SEE CORRECTION BELOW

The war comparisons are sobering – no doubt about it. But if you look at them realistically, so is what we know of the death toll from various forms of economic privation. For example, it’s true that “only” 132 Americans took their lives each day in 2018 (the last year for which statistics are available, as is the case with all the following numbers). And there’s no way to know how many were due to the victims’ economic circumstances. But it’s also true that, as of 2017, 1.4 million Americans tried and failed to commit suicide. There’s no way to know the reason for each one, but the daily figure comes to 3,865. Surely economics had something to do with many of them.

The clear implication: If not for circumstances unrelated to the economy, the numbers of  suicides and of economy-related suicides would be much higher. Therefore, economic-induced extreme despair is undoubtedly much more widespread than the actual suicide rates indicate. And they signal the presence of huge economy-related mental health problems. Further, given the stigma society still attaches to suicide, it’s fair to assume that the attempt numbers in particular are undercounted.

That same year, 192 Americans each day died of drug overdoses. Of these, 130 came from opioids – the category most likely influenced by worsening economic circumstances and prospects. And just as with suicides and attempted suicides, the numbers of overdose deaths are dwarfed by the attempted overdose numbers. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention don’t provide absolute annual figures, but they do note that “For every drug overdose that results in death, there are many more nonfatal overdoses….” Chalk lots of them up to economic despair, too.

You can also learn a lot from estimates of annual lives lost to poverty as such. In 2011, a Columbia University study pegged them at 671 per day in 2000 – not a matter of thousands, but not bupkis, either. And here’s another poverty-related mortality statistic: In 2018, about 59 newborn American babies died each day. Were all due to poverty? Of course not. But they’re most heavily concentrated in racial and ethnic minority groups with the highest poverty rates, so that’s pretty revealing.

Infant mortality, moreover, points to another health and death rate reality that’s strongly affected by the state of a national economy: the state of its healthcare system.

Given America’s vast wealth and annual healthcare expenditures, and its continuing major healthcare problems, there’s no doubt that money is no panacea for better health and lower death rates. Structures of national healthcare systems matter critically. At the same time, does anyone seriously believe that the U.S. healthcare system is going to do a better job on mortality and other fronts the worse the economy fares and the longer the current downturn lasts?

Which brings up a related question: What’s likelier to happen first? Indeed, much likelier to happen first? The kinds of major economic and social policy reforms needed to alleviate American poverty significantly, or to cure what ails the healthcare system? Or finding anti-CCP Virus vaccine or cure? If you’re not sure, you just haven’t been paying attention.

Those wanting a substantial economy restart sooner rather than later can legitimately point out that the above economy-related mortality numbers overlap a great deal. And that’s true. Second and even third waves, as they warn, seem all too likely as well. But it’s also true that, when you add them all up, they’re significant, and at best can’t be too far away from the CCP Virus death figures in which much more confidence is justified.

How far away? Honestly, why should anyone care? They’re clearly close enough to warrant concern that, as Mullaney’s conservative targets contend, a prolonged mandated economic slump will exact terrible human health costs – and that the longer it lasts, the higher it will grow. It’s also crucial to remember that the CCPVirus death toll shows signs of trending down – however horrific it will ultimately be – and that absolutely no one who anyone’s listening to is urging a total national economy restart all at once. 

All of which reinforces conclusions I’ve been pushing since the CCP Virus became a genuine crisis: It confronts Americans will trade-offs as tragic as they are difficult to figure out, and that anyone arguing to the contrary is more interested in taking cheap, invariably partisan, shots than in finding solutions.

*CORRECTION.  The 4,591 U.S. deaths figure I reported here was not for April 17, but for April 16.  The April 17 figure was actually 3,856, and today’s figure is only 1,891.  Moreover, as explained here, “The spike in mid-April is due to New York City authorities adding probable cases to the city’s death tally.”  So this is the kind of correction that clearly works in favor of my argument, since these numbers indicate even more strongly that this still terrible daily figure is on the way down, and that any gap between it and comparable figures due to economically-induced mortality is even smaller than previously apparent.

Glad I Didn’t Say That: Chicken Little Warnings About Tariffs & Sanitizer Shortages

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CCP Virus, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, coronavirus, COVID 19, disinfectants, Glad I Didn't Say That!, hand sanitizers, Mainstream Media, MSM, soap, tariffs, The Wall Street Journal, Trade, Trump, water, Wuhan virus

“Widespread shortages of hand sanitizer, disinfectants and other products needed to combat the spread of the coronavirus are being exacerbated by the Trump administration’s tariffs on Chinese imports, according to public filings by companies asking for exemptions from the levies.”

– The Wall Street Journal, April 10, 2020

“CDC recommends washing hands with soap and water whenever possible because handwashing reduces the amounts of all types of germs and chemicals on hands. But if soap and water are not available, using a hand sanitizer with at least 60% alcohol can help you avoid getting sick and spreading germs to others.”

– Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, March 3, 2020

(Sources: “U.S. Tariffs Hamper Imports of Sanitizer, Disinfectants,” by Katy Stech Ferek and Josh Zumbrun , The Wall Street Journal, April 20, 2020, https://www.wsj.com/articles/u-s-tariffs-hamper-imports-of-sanitizer-disinfectants-11586683800?mod=hp_lead_pos5 and “Show Me the Science – When & How to Use Hand Sanitizer in Community Settings,” Centers for Disease Control and Prevention,” as updated through March 3, 2020, https://www.cdc.gov/handwashing/show-me-the-science-hand-sanitizer.html)

Following Up: The Mainstream Media’s One-Sided CCP Virus Blame Game Continues

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Anthony S. Fauci, CCP Virus, CDC, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, China, coronavirus, COVID 19, Following Up, Mainstream Media, MSM, Robert Redfield, testing, The Washington Post, Trump, Wuhan virus

I’m well on the way toward formulating a new Law of Life: “If you’re hoping for accurate information about anything, always read to the very end of a relevant news item.” And I got a lot closer to final endorsement upon opening my Washington Post today and seeing the banner headline topping the front page blaring “70 days of denial, delays and dysfunction.” The subhead helped, too: “From the White House to the CDC, political and institutional failures cascaded as the virus spread. Despite being better prepared than many countries, the U.S. saw opportunities to mitigate the crisis slip away.”

Honestly: Why didn’t the Post just lead off with “Why the Bozo in the Oval Office Needs to be Impeached Immediately or Defeated in November”? What else could the newspaper’s real intent have been?

At this point, let me just note that I don’t keep focusing (in part) on the Mainstream Media’s (MSM) performance during this CCP Virus crisis because I don’t like their journalists, or because I’m a supporter of many of the President’s policies and I think (correctly, in my opinion) that these news organizations have done an especially poor and biased job in covering the Russia collusion and related impeachment stories.

Instead, I keep focusing on the MSM because they’re the main way the nation receives not only news but much information of any kind, and this goes double for the current situation – even taking into account the daily presidential press briefings (which, not coincidentally, have been directed toward the…press).

In this vein, here’s some crucial information that you find out if you make it all the way to the end of this looooong story, which maintains in the fifth paragraph (which comes on the front page of that print edition lead story, “Warnings were sounded, including at the highest levels of government, but the president was deaf to them until the enemy had already struck.” For good measure, in the seventh paragraph, the Post reporting team emphasizes that

“it took 70 days from that initial notification [from China on January 3 – from a health official to the head of the U.S. Center for Disease Control and Prevention – CDC – that something new and dangerous was spreading in Wuhan] for Trump to treat the coronavirus not as a distant threat or harmless flu strain well under control, but as a lethal force that had outflanked America’s defenses and was poised to kill tens of thousands of citizens. That more-than-two-month stretch now stands as critical time that was squandered.”

And let’s not forget the charge that “Trump’s baseless assertions in those weeks, including his claim that it would all just ‘miraculously’ go away, sowed significant public confusion and contradicted the urgent messages of public health experts.”

Again, what could be more awful?

Elsewhere in the article, however, we learn that

>”On Jan. 6, [CDC chief, Robert Redfield] sent a letter to the Chinese offering to send help, including a team of CDC scientists. China rebuffed the offer for weeks, turning away assistance and depriving U.S. authorities of an early chance to get a sample of the virus, critical for developing diagnostic tests and any potential vaccine. China impeded the U.S. response in other ways, including by withholding accurate information about the outbreak.”

>Nor did China’s obstructionism end there: it reported on January 14 that it had seen “no clear evidence of human-to-human transmission.”

>As of late January, “The Chinese were still refusing to share the viral samples they had collected and were using to develop their own tests. In frustration, U.S. officials looked for other possible routes.

“A biocontainment lab at the University of Texas medical branch in Galveston had a research partnership with the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) head of preparedness and response hoped that scientists at the two labs “could arrange a transaction on their own without government interference. At first, the lab in Wuhan agreed, but officials in Beijing intervened Jan. 24 and blocked any lab-to-lab transfer.

“There is no indication that officials sought to escalate the matter or enlist Trump to intervene.”

And in a major omission, this lengthy Post account ignored compelling evidence that the first CCP Virus case in China dates from November 17.

>On the purely American side, regarding testing, the CDC had developed “an institutional arrogance, a sense that even in the face of a potential crisis there was no pressing need to involve private labs, academic institutions, hospitals and global health organizations also capable of developing tests.”

In other words, these CDC failings long pre-dated the Trump presidency.

>In a meeting in the Situation Room in mid-February, [head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Anthony S.] “Fauci and Redfield told White House officials that there was no evidence yet of worrisome person-to-person transmission in the United States. In hindsight, it appears almost certain that the virus was taking hold in communities at that point.”

The point of this post isn’t to add to the blame game, but rather to underscore how one-sided the MSM’s participation has been. And even though the proverbial buck in the United States rightly stops with the President, and consequently it doesn’t sound terribly convincing to claim that many long-serving experts in the U.S. bureaucracy have let him down, in this case, here’s an episode where it has the added virtue of lots of truth.

Im-Politic: The Latest Trump CCP Virus Fake News

Tags

Beth Cameron, CCP Virus, CDC, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, China, coronavirus, COVID 19, ebola, Im-Politic, National Security Council, NSC, Obama administration, pandemic, Politico, Tim Morrison, TIME, Trump, Washington Post, WHO, World Health Organization, Wuhan virus

I’m getting sick and tired of debunking Mainstream Media myths spread about the Trump administration’s failures in dealing with the CCP Virus (as I have now taken to calling it, in honor of the Chinese Communist Party regime’s role in covering it up and thereby preventing timely responses all over the world). And maybe you’re getting sick and tired of reading them.

All the same, the attacks keep coming, and three in particular that have appeared in the last week – which happen to be closely related to each other – are screaming out for pushback.

Off the bat, though, some essential context: As I’ve tweeted repeatedly, I agree that the President’s anti-Wuhan Virus (another monicker I’ve been using) policy has been flawed. Chiefly, Mr. Trump does deserve criticism for claiming until recently that everything’s under control – although I can’t help but continuing to note that the World Health Organization (WHO) didn’t declare the situation to be a global pandemic until March 11. That’s a grand total of nine days ago.

In addition, testing of course took off way too slowly. I strongly suspect that this stemmed from outmoded guidelines and manufacturing processes at the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) that predated the Trump inauguration. But the buck in the U.S. government ultimately and rightly stops on the President’s desk, and a Chief Executive who’s described himself as a Can-do-type disrupter should have stopped the agency’s business-as-usual approach faster.

As for the broadsides with much less, if any, merit? The first concerns the claim that the administration foolishly abolished the National Security Council (NSC) office that it inherited from the Obama administration that focused on protecting the country from pandemics. This allegation, first made by that office’s first director, has been (to put it charitably) exposed as misleading by one of her NSC successors, Tim Morrison.

He’s explained that the office’s responsibilities were merged into a new office that looked at pandemics more holistically, because they’re closely related to challenges like those posed by weapons of mass destruction generally. And Morrison has contended – credibly – that thanks to various preparations made by this reorganized NSC, an Ebola outbreak was quashed quickly.

To be sure, as I’ve pointed out, the emergence of diseases in regions like Central Africa, which have scant connections with the global economy, and in places like China, which have extensive connections, pose dramatically different challenges. And I continue to think, as argued, that bureaucratic reforms involving such tiny government agencies are game-changers in real-world terms. But you’d think that the initial accuser, Beth Cameron, might consider apologizing. And that the Washington Post would acknowledge a huge fact-checking failure (though it did run the rejoinder).

What’s even less well known – and has gone even more scantily reported than the Morrison observations – is that Mr. Trump’s predecessors approved decisions that actually do look like genuine pandemic defense downgrades. According to this TIME magazine post:

“The Trump Administration has become the third White House in a row to downgrade or eliminate the senior White House personnel tasked with tracking disease and bioterrorism threats, according to Kenneth Bernard, a retired Rear Admiral and physician, who served as a special assistant to the president for security and health during the Clinton and George W. Bush administrations.”

TIME continues:

Bernard “served in the top role in the Clinton National Security Council, only to be ignored by the incoming George W. Bush Administration, which eliminated his special advisor position.

“But after the 9/11 attacks on New York and Washington spurred fears Al-Qaeda would follow up with a bioweapons attack, and the anthrax attacks of 2001, the Bush Administration re-established the office, bringing Bernard back to serve as the first former Special Assistant to the President for Biodefense, as a subset of the White House’s Homeland Security Council (HSC), which later helped combat outbreaks of SARS and the Avian Influenza.”

And as for the Obama record:

“Under Obama’s NSC, Bernard says the office was downgraded again, until the 2014 Ebola crisis emerged, and President Barack Obama appointed ‘Ebola Czar’ Ron Klain. National Security Advisor Susan Rice later institutionalized the office in 2015, calling it the Directorate for Global Health and Security and Biodefense.”

Not exactly a model of foresight.

The next two myths were propagated (and weirdly invalidated at the same time) by this supposed Politico scoop about a transition-period Obama administration warning to the incoming Trump administration to ramp up for an inevitable big-time pandemic. The thrust of the article, written by Nahal Toosi, Daniel Lippman, and Dan Diamond, is that outgoing Obama officials held a briefing with soon-to-be Trump counterparts on the potential dangers of the kind of bio-threat being faced by the nation right now, and that the Trump-ers were decidedly uninterested.

The allegedly clear implication, as the article quoted former national security advisor Susan E. Rice as recently writing: “Rather than heed the warnings, embrace the planning and preserve the structures and budgets that had been bequeathed to him, the president ignored the risk of a pandemic.”

As noted above, the structures and budgets point is bogus. But so is the warnings point. And we know this in part because, as Politico stated (in paragraph 18), “None of the sources argued that one meeting three years ago could have dramatically altered events today.”

Also important to note: The authors presented documents presented at the meeting, and they make clear the phoniness of both the charge that Trump officials were (uniquely) caught flat-footed by CCP Virus testing requirements, and that the leadership vacuum they’ve created has given the states no choice but to fill a gap that’s not their responsibility.

Except the documents say absolutely nothing about boosting testing capabilities or modifying CDC guidelines. And they specify that “State and local governments lead public health response,” especially when it comes to “hospital preparedness and response.”

Recent news reports have created some optimism that effective anti-CCP Virus medicines may be developed sooner than initially expected.  Too bad there’s no reason to think that another serious malady – Trump Derangement Syndrome – will soon come under control.

Im-Politic: No U.S. Politicians Own China Virus Bragging Rights (& That’s Not a Scandal)

Tags

Biden, budgets, CDC, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, China, China virus, coronavirus, Democrats, election 2020, health security, Im-Politic, Joe Biden, public health, Trump

Since the coronavirus’ serious threat to Americans’ health and their economy became clear, a blizzard of charges has accused President Trump of being caught flat-footed by the pandemic. I agree that the President didn’t expect a dangerous plague to break out overseas and swiftly cross America’s borders. I’ve also written that Mr. Trump made a big mistake in cutting funding for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) – but mainly for political reasons. For the amounts of money involved are so small that they couldn’t possibly even move the needle in terms of reining in federal spending and cutting deficits.

In fact, given the tiny sums, the picture looks pretty good when it comes to the latest Trump budget request for the CDC programs that actually deal with coronavirus-type threats. Check out the line items for “Emerging Infectious Diseases” and “Global Disease Detection and Other Programs.” The former is down only marginally from actual spending levels previously agreed to by Congress (including of course its Democrats) and the latter is up significantly.

But more important, the allegations seem to assume that the American political system has been chock full of leaders who can boast the foresight the President lacked, and that the nation’s response would have been much more effective had one of them occupied the Oval Office. Is there any actual evidence for this proposition?

One crucial test is whether well before the virus became front-page news any of the leading recent and current Democratic candidates for President rolled out plans for beefing up American capabilities to respond to pandemics before the virus’ breakout in China. And do you know how many did? None – with the possible exception of former New York City Mayor and media magnate Michael Bloomberg.

That’s based on checking the polcy sections of the websites of former Vice President Joe Biden, Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, and drop-out Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren. Drop-outs Minnesota Senator Amy Klobuchar and South Bend, Indiana Mayor Pete Buttigieg have taken all the content down from their sites.  But a wide-ranging media survey of their positions reveals no attention paid to pandemics, either.

I describe drop-out Bloomberg as a possible exception because his site did Mr. Trump’s “erratic leadership, go-it-alone approach, and distrust of science” for putting the country “in a vulnerable position should a major public health emergency, such as the novel coronavirus…materialize.” And he outlined what can fairly be called a plan.

Yet it’s not clear when these Bloomberg proposals were unveiled, and there’s no evidence that he was thinking about such matters before COVID 19’s appearance.

The same goes for Warren and Klobuchar, whose plans only dated from late January. Biden published an op-ed detailing his own ideas at about the same time. (See this post for links.)

I don’t believe that any of these politicians (including those with long years of public service) deserve any blame for failing to anticipate the virus threat on a timely basis – and for the same fundamental reason I don’t believe Mr. Trump should be pilloried. Because this kind of pandemic (coming from a country with extensive ties with the U.S. and global economies, like China, as opposed to regions like Central and West Africa, with almost no such ties) really couldn’t be anticipated adequately.

And incidentally, this point is also relevant to the charge made by Biden and others that the President not only cut the budget for the CDC, but for the country’s foreign aid agency, and also dismantled the White House global health security team created during the Obama years.

But anyone honestly believing that a little office somewhere in the Executive Office of the President would have made a meaningful difference in preventing or fighting the virus is guilty of drinking the policy wonk kool-aid claiming that augmenting bureaucratic flow-charts in any way amounts to solving problems – even those that emerge suddenly. As for the foreign aid cuts, the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) has been working on helping prevent the spread of infectious diseases like the coronavirus, but Beijing made clear early on that American government help wasn’t wanted. (Nor was World Health Organization help.)

In other words, life is full of unpleasant surprises and shocks, and from time to time they’re big. Human beings don’t come with perfectly functioning crystal balls in their heads, and learning curves are rarely as steep as we’d like because lessons from experience and history tend to be excruciatingly difficult to draw. Hindsight can be superb, but says nothing about clairvoyance. Governments, moreover, although indispensable in such situations, are often not the most efficient actors, and in crises, they’re often forced to scramble.

That’s not to say that the President may not pay a political price for his coronavirus record, or that Americans don’t have a right to be frustrated with his actions to date, much less that he deserves reelection on any grounds. Indeed,  here’s a great suggestion for the kind of speech Mr. Trump should have made by now, and still should make – which urges him to use the virus crisis as an opportunity both to stimulate the economy and prepare better for future pandemics with major spending and other measures to bolster national health security.

But it is is to warn that none of President Trump’s critics or challengers can legitimately claim to have done better, let alone that they’ll act more effectively when the next black swan – biological or not -flies into our lives.

Im-Politic: Why the Haters are Wrong About Trump and the Coronavirus

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CDC, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, coronavirus, Council on Foreign Relations, Im-Politic, impeachment, pandemic, public health, Senate, The New York Times, Think Global Health, Trump, WHO, World Health Organization

President Trump sure is getting slammed for his response to the coronavirus outbreak, both by the Mainstream Media, many Democratic Party politicians, and even some public health specialists. (See here and here.) Their main indictments: He’s been hopelessly behind the curve. Or has it been that he’s been too alarmist? Both charges have been made, making clear that the substance doesn’t matter much to the critics.

One allegation seems justified to me: The President’s latest (fiscal 2021) budget request included a 16 percent cut in outlays for the Centers for Disease Control, the branch of the Cabinet-level federal Department of Health and Human Services in charge of the nation’s health security. The budget document was made public eleven days after the World Health Organization declared the outbreak to be an international public health emergency, and six days after Mr. Trump promised in his State of the Union address to take “all necessary steps” to protect Americans from the disease.

But the main problem with the CDC decision, as I see it, is political. Clearly, the timing was terrible, and was bound to be jumped on by reasonable and unreasonable critics alike. Indeed, all of the President’s budget requests have sought such cuts – which also deserves criticism even though Mr. Trump eventually accepted higher funding in the final budget deals each time.

Substantively, however, it’s inconceivable that had any of the sought cuts been actually made, they would have made a discernible difference in the nation’s early-stage anti-coronavirus efforts at least. After all, how could even more money have enabled the agency to predict or identify the virus once it broke out, since it cught China itself by surprise; and since Beijing still refusedsto let U.S. officials as such into the country to aid its own efforts?

It’s true that last year, the Trump administration ended a program in the U.S. government’s foreign aid agency aimed precisely at improving the detection of corona-type viruses “with pandemic potential.” According to ABC News, the program (called PREDICT) “is credited with identifying nearly a thousand” of these maladies since its creation in 2009. Which sounds great. Except the coronavirus clearly wasn’t one of them.

But as for being slow on the coronavirus uptake (a line of attack that’s – understandably – shown more staying power than the “overreaction” claims), timelines showing milestones in the virus’ identification and spread, and principal Trump administration responses demonstrate nothing of the kind. (My main sources are the Think Global Health initiative of the Council on Foreign Relations, a leading U.S. think tank; and The New York Times.)

They remind us that the first recorded onset of symptoms, in Wuhan, China, came on December 1, that Chinese authorities first told the World Health Organization (WHO) that something was rotten in that city on December, 31, and that Beijing took its own first anti-virus action the following day – closing a seafood market thought to have been the the origin point.

On January 21, the United States confirmed finding the first domestic American case of the virus – in a man who had traveled to Wuhan. By this time, China had reported six virus-related deaths, and several hundred cases.

A day later, WHO convened its first coronavirus meeting, and ultimately decided against declaring the outbreak to be a Public Health Emergency of International Concern. On January 23 came the first Chinese travel restrictions and quarantines.

Between January 24 and 26, Washington identified four more American cases, and on the 27^th, by which time 3,000 victims around the world had contracted the disease and 60 had died, announced screening programs at domestic airports that handled 90 percent of passengers coming from China along with CDC initiatives “to identify potential cases.” In addition, a high level State Department travel advisory had been announced for Wuhan, and President Trump had spoken with Chinese leader Xi Jinping and offered assistance.

On January 28 and 29, the United States began evacuating its nationals from Wuhan – dates which are significant because it wasn’t until the following day that WHO finally decided to declare the virus an official public health emergency. On the 31^st, as The New York Times reported, the administration announced that it “would bar entry by most foreign nationals who had recently visited China and put some American travelers under a quarantine as it declared a rare public health emergency.” At the time, worldwide deaths totaled 213 and cases approached 9,800 (eleven in the United States). Also significant – these actions came a day before the first coronavirus death outside China was reported (in the Philippines).

Official U.S. actions by no means stopped then. On February 5, all Peace Corps volunteers were evacuated from China and the CDC starting sending diagnostic kits to more than one hundred laboratories in the United States. (The Food & Drug Administration authorized the tests to be conducted by the kits the day before.) Two days later, on the seventh, the administration pledged $100 million to the global coronavirus fight.

The last week of January, incidentally, was kind of interesting for another reason: President Trump was being tried in the Senate on two articles of impeachment – which themselves represented the culmination of what I’m sure we’ll all agree was a great deal of work by Democrats in the House and Senate, as well as voluminous reporting by the national media. The journalism of course, included the publication of scoops of any number of supposed bombshell revelations about the President’s misdeeds, and even though acquittal seemed certain to most, they clearly sent the President and his top aides scrambling on an ongoing basis and surely occupied a great deal of their time.

Moreover, the trial didn’t end (with the acquittal vote) until February 5 – the date that the Peace Corps volunteers were being evacuated and the CDC diagnostic kits were being issued.

I fully accept that Presidents need to be able to walk and chew gum at the same time, and that indeed, the ability to manage crises successfully, and during the worst of circumstances, is the most important qualification for the job. It’s also possible that the administration has already lost crucial time in the anti-coronavirus fight, and that consequently it will never catch up.

But the above timelines reveal to me, anyway, that the American record so far measures up well versus that of any other national government, and especially well versus that of WHO, which is supposed to be the tip of the spear here. Moreover, the Trump administration response seems all the more alert upon remembering that, as the virus was breaking out, the President was, if not literally fighting for his own life, relentlessly besieged by adversaries both inside and outside his government.  I suspect that posterity, as a result, will need to struggle to judge his initial coronavirus policy decisions as failures.

Im-Politic: How Trump is Letting the China Virus Crisis Go to Waste

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CDC, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, China, China trade deal, China virus, coronavirus, Im-Politic, National Institutes of Health, pandemics, pharmaceuticals, Phase One, Trump, Wuhan, Wuhan virus, Xi JInPing

As tragic as the coronavirus has been for victims in China and elsewhere and their loved ones, both the humanitarian and the Machiavellian in me can’t help but think that President Trump is squandering some great and closely related opportunities being created by the outbreak.

To be sure, the President hasn’t completely ignored the disease. He tweeted yesterday that “China has been working very hard to contain the Coronavirus. The United States greatly appreciates their efforts and transparency. It will all work out well. In particular, on behalf of the American People, I want to thank President Xi!.”

He stated at a January 22 press conference at the big global economy conference in Davos, Switzerland that the U.S. government has a plan to contain the virus in the United States. The federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and National Institutes of Health say they’re working on a cure – in tandem with the U.S. pharmaceutical industry.

But given that the United States is the world leader in medical research, and given that the President has just (justifiably) eaten China’s lunch with the new Phase One trade deal, it seems like much more could and should be done, and in a much higher profile way.

For example, the President, who isn’t shy about broadcasting his achievements and intentions, should announce that’s he’s directing federal research agencies to treat the coronavirus threat as a top priority, as well as seek a similar commitment from U.S. medical schools and drug companies. And how about a summit of American medical research leaders from the public and private sectors to brainstorm both on addressing the present danger and the overall growing threat of pandemics resulting from the ever smaller world being created every day by increasing worldwide commerce and travel?

In fact, why even restrict this meeting to American participants? The President should think about either inviting their foreign counterparts to the session as well, or to a follow-up meeting.

That’s what my humanitarian instincts tell me.

And my more political self? It would advise the President explicitly and publicly to offer his buddy, Chinese leader Xi Jinping, whatever assistance the Chinese need. For good measure, he should propose sending a team of American scientists and public health experts from the government and private sector to China to assess the situation first-hand (including the status of the disease and China’s progress in combating it) and develop recommendations to improve the Chinese response.

Clearly, these actions would serve humanitarian ends. But they would also put Beijing’s dictators in quite the pickle. Right after having their clocks cleaned in the trade negotiations, they’d be put in a position of accepting American help (which would involve a huge loss of the face so critical in Chinese culture), or declining assistance (which can only further anger a Chinese public that’s already not thrilled with the crisis management skills of either the central government or local officials). In other words, either way, the United States scores political points with public opinion both worldwide and in China in particular.

Meanwhile, no one could legitimately criticize Mr. Trump for declaring that all agriculture imports from China are being banned, since the CDC admits that, although it lacks “any evidence to suggest that animals or animal products imported from China pose a risk for spreading 2019-nCoV [the technical name for the virus in question] in the United States,” that “This is a rapidly evolving situation.”

It’s become a well-worn cliché that the Chinese word for “crisis” combines the characters for “danger” and “opportunity.” But even though this specific claim seems questionable at best, the underlying idea and logic are compelling, and need to be applied to U.S. coronavirus policy liji (Chinese for “immediately”).  There’s no excuse, to quote former Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel, for letting the opportunity go to waste.