~a column by Colleen O’Brien
The CDC is the leading national health institute. It is a federal agency (think Deep State˟), where in 2018, the top national security officials handling pandemics left abruptly, did not say why and have not been replaced by this administration.
The former administration set up that Pandemic Preparedness and Response Directorate within the National Security Council during the ebola outbreak of 2014. It was dedicated to handling pandemics. In 2018, it was dismantled by the new administration, along with offices that had been set up worldwide. There is now no unit within the NSC or anyplace else specifically to oversee preparedness for pandemics, which is why we have little coherent response to the coronavirus.
A while ago, chief of staff Mick Mulvaney was talking about his president’s language crudeness and told us that lots of people swear, and there are more important things the president is doing than coarsening the language.
Well, yes, that’s one way to look at it. For example, last Friday, Trump talked at the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta about the coronavirus without swearing. In an aside to the doctors and scientists clumped around him at the CDC microphones, our 45th president said, “I like this stuff. I really get it. Every one of those doctors back there”—he pointed behind himself—“asked me, ‘How do you know so much about this?’”
Something in me said no doc asked him that. And the looks (desperation, disbelief and dumbfoundedness) on the faces of the scientists and doctors standing around him ratified my feeling. But 45 wasn’t watching them; he was continuing in that personal way of his. “Maybe I have a natural ability,” he said.
Number 45’s natural ability to be a confidence man didn’t seem to be working with the scientists, except perhaps for the director of the Institute, Dr. Robert R. Redfield, who looked at his president with worship as if he’d been injected with the “you better say something nice” serum that White House spokesperson Kellyanne Conway and Republican Senator from South Carolina Lindsay Graham were inoculated with three years ago.
Number 45 said to his Fox News whisperer Sean Hannity: “Now—and this is just my hunch—but based on a lot of conversations with a lot of people that do this because a lot of people will have this and it’s very mild, they’ll get better very rapidly.”
I’m not sure what 45 said there, but I myself have a hunch that whatever it is we need to be doing in case of pandemic is not going to be revealed to us by 45, who also mentioned that the coronavirus test kits are as perfect as his Ukrainian phone call. Who would say that? Is there some connection to the virus we don’t know? I never could figure out what a perfect phone call was anyway. I wonder if I’ve ever made one? Have you?
I would like to hear from the scientists what’s going on, partly because former head of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sibelius said flat out: “We’re in a dangerous period if he continues to block scientists. The American public doesn’t trust what’s going on.”
There is a tiny ray of hope from one guy in a once important sector that hasn’t worked for three years. A least one member of the U.S. Senate was nervous enough to say something.
Chairman of the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn), said to Trump and Vice President Mike Pence, “Let the experts do the talking.”
I think he could have used a mild crudity just for emphasis, possibly not as crude as what their president might use but effective merely from the shock value of someone standing up to 45. “Just shut up!” would be nice to hear.
Alexander will be out in the cold anyway, so he had nothing to lose by being forceful.
Against common sense and three years of experience, I find myself ignoring reality in order to believe there is hope. GOP strategist Rick Wilson, when he learned that Mike Mulvaney is now removed from his White House position, said, “You know, everything Trump touches dies.”
˟The Deep State is merely the Washington bureaucracy, the thousands of government employees who work at the departments of Agriculture, Commerce, Defense, Education, Energy, Health and Human Services, Homeland, Housing, Interior, Justice, Labor, State, Treasury, Transportation, Veterans Affairs.
