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clip from long article - This is why the 2020 pandemic is, at its root, the story of two deeply flawed leaders, Xi Jinping and Donald Trump, who for too long minimized the coronavirus threat—and who, because of the enormous, largely unaccountable power they wield, must share responsibility for its global scale. At key moments when their mutual transparency and collaboration might have spared the world a catastrophic pandemic, the world’s two most powerful men fought a war of words over trade policies, and charged each other with responsibility for the spread of the disease. When scientists worldwide could have benefited from details of China’s new disease, perhaps thereby preventing thousands of hospitalizations and deaths, the Chinese Communist Party’s instincts were to arrest conveyors of information, shut down social media, and prohibit visiting teams of World Health Organization and foreign disease-control experts. For its part, the United States was uniquely positioned, thanks to the chronology of the outbreak, to learn from China’s initial mistakes, and heed the example of the Xi regime’s belated epidemic control efforts. The order of the day, as all sorts of public health experts and officials from past administrations had stressed at the time, was to kick on-the-ground prevention and containment efforts into high gear. To begin with, Trump officials should have been preparing lab tests, hospital infection control plans, supply chains of vital equipment, and implementing a chain-of-command reordering of governance on an emergency footing. They should also have been securing budget proposals for emergency funds, and overseeing fuller coordination with state and local health departments across American states and territories. Instead, the main message of the Trump White House was stunningly oblivious to the real emergency the country was facing. Addressing a press conference at the World Economic Forum on January 22, President Trump insisted that when it came to the coronavirus threat, “We have it totally under control,” despite the Washington state case. “It’s one person coming in from China. We have it under control. It’s going to be just fine,” he said. For good measure, he added that he had a “great relationship” with Xi, who assured him China’s epidemic was also controlled. … But that February 7 message bore almost no substantive relation to the Trump administration’s own coronavirus response. Trump and his senior advisers remained confident that border closures and airplane shutdowns would keep Covid-19 out of America—and so the White House took almost no interest in the potential of a pandemic sweeping America. In 2018, Trump had eliminated most of the Obama-era pandemic response capacities inside federal agencies, especially the National Security Council and Department of Homeland Security—which meant that Trump was dangerously insulated from critical sources of information about America’s acute vulnerability to emerging viral threats. The Trump administration had no coordination of information and analysis in the National Security Council, no command operation inside the Department of Homeland Security, a diminished set of global health and epidemic programs at the CDC, lapsed funding for training grassroots medical personnel in infection control, and a weakened capacity to rush diagnostics, drugs, and vaccines through FDA safety checks and approval. Despite warnings <https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/national-security/u-s-intel-agencies-warned-rising-risk-outbreak-coronavirus-n1144891> from his own national intelligence community that Covid-19 displayed “pandemic potential,” the President insisted the Chinese outbreak posed no threat to America. Some critics have labeled this call “the worst intelligence failure in U.S. history,” comparing it to past American leaders’ neglect of crucial reports of hostile activity prior to the bombing of Pearl Harbor and the 9/11 attacks on the Pentagon and World Trade Center. It is tragic and perverse that animosities between two egotistical leaders and their sycophantic circles of advisers have placed the entire world in grave peril. Trade disputes between Washington and Beijing were already producing widespread global fallout before the emergence of Covid-19. True, conventional diplomatic initiatives can control some of this damage but it’s also the case that no reasonable dialogue between the United States and China can transpire unless both sides are willing to start the conversation based on valid science. Neither Beijing nor Washington seems remotely inclined to take on this humbling challenge to the actual legacies of their respective Covid-19 programs. President Donald Trump refuses to grasp scientific principle, on any topic, and openly contradicts his leading public health and scientific research advisers. For his part, President Xi Jinping remains determined to change the conversation regarding the origins of SARS-CoV-2, removing all references to its linkage to Wuhan. But Covid-19 won’t simply disappear if the wealthy world is left to its own devices, manufacturing costly vaccines that are only affordable to fully insured residents of the 30 richest nations on Earth. What we collectively face is the need to execute the largest mass immunization program in world history, deploying teams of vaccinators to every nook and cranny of the planet, rich or poor. https://newrepublic.com/article/157118/trump-xi-jinping-america-china-blame-coronavirus-pandemic _________________________________________________________ Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm Set your options at: https://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
