Pandemic planning becomes political weapon
WASHINGTON years of his presidency, Donald Trump did not publicly utter the words “pandemic” or “preparedness.” Not in speeches, rallies or his many news conferences, planned and impromptu.
But on Friday, the White House pointed to ex tensive planning exercises the administration conducted and reports it wrote warning of the threat in 2018.
Still, Trump has repeatedly said that the blame f or the federal government having inadequate stockpiles of crucial supplies and machines needed to cope with an outbreak lay with his predecessor, Barack Obama.
Obama has been a persistent foil for Trump on a number of issues, but in the case of planning for the pandemic he has devoted little attention to the 69-page “playbook” from the Obama administration about the threat of a viral outbreak that might include Ebola or an airborne respiratory illness like corona virus. And t he Obama administration could draw from a similar
document written during the administration of George W. Bush in 2006.
The politics of pandemic planning have gotten increasingly pitched as the COVID-19 death toll continues to mount in the United States.
Trump claims he inherited a “broken, terrible” system from Obama. Critics counter that Trump had three years in office to prepare — more than enough time to build on the pandemic strategies he inherited.
The friction was laid bare in the Rose Garden and the White House briefing room on Friday.
Trump, at a midday event outside the Oval Office, declared: “I inherited nothing. I inherited practically nothing from the previous administration, unfortunately.”
His spokeswoman, Kayleigh McEnany, later displayed a copy of the Obama plan dismissively during a briefing in the White House press room before hoisting two binders of what she called the superior Trump plans.
Beth Cameron, who worked on pandemic planning in the Obama administration, said the playbook that the Obama administration presented to the Trump administra - tion “was given, briefed and discussed with the incoming administration, explicitly.” She said it was intended to provide the White House with a set of questions it should ask early on in an emerging epidemic or pandemic threat.
“It outlined who should come together to answer those questions and to be prepared to anticipate what was coming next ... to get moving,” Cameron said. She said the Trump administration was slow to respond to COVID-19 and that Obama's playbook could have helped the administration get ahead of an emerging threat like the coronavirus.
Cameron said the Bush and Obama administrations both did extensive planning for pandemics and many of those plans were passed to the Trump White House. “They were not political. They were non-partisan,” she added.
McEnany styled the Trump administration' s response to COVID- 1 9 as“unprecedented .” She referred to Obama's plan as a “thin packet of paper” that was replaced by“two detailed, robust pandemic response reports commissioned by the Trump administration.”
She said that in 2018 the Trump administration issued its own pandemic crisis action plan and last summer conducted Crimson Contagion 2019, a simulation to test the nation' s ability to respond to a large-scale outbreak. In January, the Department of Health and Human Services issued an after-action report.
“This exercise expounded upon — exposed rather — the shortcomings in legacy planning documents, which inform President Trump's coronavirus response beginning as early as January,” McEnany said.
Her comments drew criticism from Ron Klain, who was the U.S. Ebola response coordinator during the Obama administration and now advises Democratic presidential hopeful Joe Biden.