All things CoronaVirus

[CU88]

Watch this:

https://twitter.com/SheWhoRises/status/ ... 7256765440

Of course he knew!

[RedFromMI]

Watch this:

https://twitter.com/SheWhoRises/status/ ... 7256765440

Of course he knew!

Parts of that video should be incessantly up for fall elections by Bloomberg...

[old salt]

Still defending the decisions to develop US tests rather than scaling up fast with what was already available.

As if these were mutually exclusive.

No, we could have been testing far more with what was available and then moved to "better" tests once developed and tested. Assuming actually better.

I have no idea on what planet it made sense to turn down help in the form of WHO Covid-19 test kits one month ago. Take the tests while developing our own. It has worked for South Korea.

Ask the CDC official(s) who made that decision. There will be plenty of time for 2nd guessing that decision in the inevitable Congressional show trials & scapegoating. Likewise with the FDA officials who enforced the existing EUA regs re new local lab developed tests.

Hopefully we have Benghazi style hearings as to who made the call.

You can bet on it. Testing is just the handy stick being used by partisans to beat Trump, at the moment.

Testing is just one facet of our overall shortfall in a system that developed to deal with previous epidemics, which never came to our shores as a pandemic of this magnitude.

Of course, all the necessary brainpower resided solely within a now disestablished office within the Obama NSC, rather than throughout the rest of the Federal govt.


obtw -- Dr Fouchy just said the following about the need for widespread testing (in response to a NBC reporter) ;
We tend to think we're not going to be able to mitigate or contain without testing. They complement each other in some respects but their separate channels. Even if we had no testing, we should be doing what we're doing now. The question you're asking, so I won't evade it, specifically -- would it be important outside of a doctor-patient coming in together, knowing what's out there, under the
radar screen ? The answer is -- Yes. So let me tell you what the CDC is doing right now -- they're going out there to get a feel for whats out there that wasn't a part of the corona virus. When you do that, you're also going to get a feel for what the penetration level is in society. So we are heading, with the high throughput things you've been hearing about, to get an answer to your question.

Getting rid of the Pandemic response committee’s chain of command and support didn’t help either. Blame it on Obamer. The buck stops over there

Right. That corner of the NSC contained the only resident expertise capable of making decisions in this field.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions ... se-office/

No, the White House didn’t ‘dissolve’ its pandemic response office. I was there.

Tim Morrison is a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute and former senior director for counterproliferation and biodefense on the National Security Council.

President Trump gets his share of criticism — some warranted, much not. But recently the president’s critics have chosen curious ground to question his response to the coronavirus outbreak since it began spreading from Wuhan, China, in December.

It has been alleged by multiple officials of the Obama administration, including in The Post, that the president and his then-national security adviser, John Bolton, “dissolved the office” at the White House in charge of pandemic preparedness. Because I led the very directorate assigned that mission, the counterproliferation and biodefense office, for a year and then handed it off to another official who still holds the post, I know the charge is specious.

Now, I’m not naive. This is Washington. It’s an election year. Officials out of power want back into power after November. But the middle of a worldwide health emergency is not the time to be making tendentious accusations.

When I joined the National Security Council staff in 2018, I inherited a strong and skilled staff in the counterproliferation and biodefense directorate. This team of national experts together drafted the National Biodefense Strategy of 2018 and an accompanying national security presidential memorandum to implement it; an executive order to modernize influenza vaccines; and coordinated the United States’ response to the Ebola epidemic in Congo, which was ultimately defeated in 2020.

It is true that the Trump administration has seen fit to shrink the NSC staff. But the bloat that occurred under the previous administration clearly needed a correction. Defense Secretary Robert Gates, congressional oversight committees and members of the Obama administration itself all agreed the NSC was too large and too operationally focused (a departure from its traditional role coordinating executive branch activity). As The Post reported in 2015, from the Clinton administration to the Obama administration’s second term, the NSC’s staff “had quadrupled in size, to nearly 400 people.” That is why Trump began streamlining the NSC staff in 2017.

One such move at the NSC was to create the counterproliferation and biodefense directorate, which was the result of consolidating three directorates into one, given the obvious overlap between arms control and nonproliferation, weapons of mass destruction terrorism, and global health and biodefense. It is this reorganization that critics have misconstrued or intentionally misrepresented. If anything, the combined directorate was stronger because related expertise could be commingled.

The reduction of force in the NSC has continued since I departed the White House. But it has left the biodefense staff unaffected — perhaps a recognition of the importance of that mission to the president, who, after all, in 2018 issued a presidential memorandum to finally create real accountability in the federal government’s expansive biodefense system.

The NSC is really the only place in government where there is a staff that ensures the commander in chief gets all the options he needs to make a decision, and then makes sure that decision is actually implemented. I worry that further reductions at the NSC could impair its capabilities, but the current staffing level is fully up to the job.

You might ask: Why does all this matter? Won’t it just be a historical footnote?
It matters because when people play politics in the middle of a crisis, we are all less safe.
We are less safe because public servants are distracted when they are dragged into politics.
We’re less safe because the American people have been recklessly scared into doubting the competence of their government to help keep them safe, secure and healthy.
And we’re less safe because when we’re focused on political gamesmanship, we’re not paying enough attention to the real issues.

And we should be united in demanding to know why the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) was aware of the coronavirus outbreak in Wuhan early in December, maybe even November, and didn’t tell the rest of the world, when stopping the deadly spread might have been possible.
Just as the United States has fought against fake information aimed at our elections, we should fight back against CCP propagandists. They are not only campaigning against the use of the term “Wuhan virus” (a more geographically accurate description than “Spanish flu” ever was about the 1918 pandemic) but now also promoting the false claim that covid-19 was created by the U.S. Army. Public health officials have pinpointed a wild-animal market in Wuhan as the outbreak’s origin.

There are real threats emanating from this pandemic. We need to focus on getting our response right and save the finger-pointing for what comes after.

[foreverlax]

Was on the phone so I didn't catch all of the presser. Just catching the tail end. Night and day between today's and everything last week. The administration deserves kudos for starting to get the "communication" part of this business right - or at least moving in the right direction.

When the presser started, the market was going down. It dropped below 20K a few minutes into the presser, it has rebounded as the presser has gone on. That should act as positive reinforcement for Trump.

Markets loved the Fed actions and has complete faith in Powell...they still have some tools that could make liquidity a non-issue.

Markets are still waiting for "helicopter" money. It's coming...has to be soon, in the right pockets and enough $$. Even Tom Cotton wants it to be big.

[CU88]

Good God! No wonder his staff has been trying to keep him off camera! LIES LIES LIES

Unbelievable. Seriously. From “hoax” to “I always knew” in what, a week?

Trump: “I felt it was a pandemic long before it was declared a pandemic.”
https://twitter.com/_janpostma_/status/ ... 8741519360

[calourie]

Watch this:

https://twitter.com/SheWhoRises/status/ ... 7256765440

Of course he knew!

Parts of that video should be incessantly up for fall elections by Bloomberg...

The Lincoln Project is going to make sure videos of all Trumps idiocies are front and center all over, particularly on Fox.

[Typical Lax Dad]

Still defending the decisions to develop US tests rather than scaling up fast with what was already available.

As if these were mutually exclusive.

No, we could have been testing far more with what was available and then moved to "better" tests once developed and tested. Assuming actually better.

I have no idea on what planet it made sense to turn down help in the form of WHO Covid-19 test kits one month ago. Take the tests while developing our own. It has worked for South Korea.

Ask the CDC official(s) who made that decision. There will be plenty of time for 2nd guessing that decision in the inevitable Congressional show trials & scapegoating. Likewise with the FDA officials who enforced the existing EUA regs re new local lab developed tests.

Hopefully we have Benghazi style hearings as to who made the call.

You can bet on it. Testing is just the handy stick being used by partisans to beat Trump, at the moment.

Testing is just one facet of our overall shortfall in a system that developed to deal with previous epidemics, which never came to our shores as a pandemic of this magnitude.

Of course, all the necessary brainpower resided solely within a now disestablished office within the Obama NSC, rather than throughout the rest of the Federal govt.


obtw -- Dr Fouchy just said the following about the need for widespread testing (in response to a NBC reporter) ;
We tend to think we're not going to be able to mitigate or contain without testing. They complement each other in some respects but their separate channels. Even if we had no testing, we should be doing what we're doing now. The question you're asking, so I won't evade it, specifically -- would it be important outside of a doctor-patient coming in together, knowing what's out there, under the
radar screen ? The answer is -- Yes. So let me tell you what the CDC is doing right now -- they're going out there to get a feel for whats out there that wasn't a part of the corona virus. When you do that, you're also going to get a feel for what the penetration level is in society. So we are heading, with the high throughput things you've been hearing about, to get an answer to your question.

Getting rid of the Pandemic response committee’s chain of command and support didn’t help either. Blame it on Obamer. The buck stops over there

Right. That corner of the NSC contained the only resident expertise capable of making decisions in this field.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions ... se-office/

No, the White House didn’t ‘dissolve’ its pandemic response office. I was there.

Tim Morrison is a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute and former senior director for counterproliferation and biodefense on the National Security Council.

President Trump gets his share of criticism — some warranted, much not. But recently the president’s critics have chosen curious ground to question his response to the coronavirus outbreak since it began spreading from Wuhan, China, in December.

It has been alleged by multiple officials of the Obama administration, including in The Post, that the president and his then-national security adviser, John Bolton, “dissolved the office” at the White House in charge of pandemic preparedness. Because I led the very directorate assigned that mission, the counterproliferation and biodefense office, for a year and then handed it off to another official who still holds the post, I know the charge is specious.

Now, I’m not naive. This is Washington. It’s an election year. Officials out of power want back into power after November. But the middle of a worldwide health emergency is not the time to be making tendentious accusations.

When I joined the National Security Council staff in 2018, I inherited a strong and skilled staff in the counterproliferation and biodefense directorate. This team of national experts together drafted the National Biodefense Strategy of 2018 and an accompanying national security presidential memorandum to implement it; an executive order to modernize influenza vaccines; and coordinated the United States’ response to the Ebola epidemic in Congo, which was ultimately defeated in 2020.

It is true that the Trump administration has seen fit to shrink the NSC staff. But the bloat that occurred under the previous administration clearly needed a correction. Defense Secretary Robert Gates, congressional oversight committees and members of the Obama administration itself all agreed the NSC was too large and too operationally focused (a departure from its traditional role coordinating executive branch activity). As The Post reported in 2015, from the Clinton administration to the Obama administration’s second term, the NSC’s staff “had quadrupled in size, to nearly 400 people.” That is why Trump began streamlining the NSC staff in 2017.

One such move at the NSC was to create the counterproliferation and biodefense directorate, which was the result of consolidating three directorates into one, given the obvious overlap between arms control and nonproliferation, weapons of mass destruction terrorism, and global health and biodefense. It is this reorganization that critics have misconstrued or intentionally misrepresented. If anything, the combined directorate was stronger because related expertise could be commingled.

The reduction of force in the NSC has continued since I departed the White House. But it has left the biodefense staff unaffected — perhaps a recognition of the importance of that mission to the president, who, after all, in 2018 issued a presidential memorandum to finally create real accountability in the federal government’s expansive biodefense system.

The NSC is really the only place in government where there is a staff that ensures the commander in chief gets all the options he needs to make a decision, and then makes sure that decision is actually implemented. I worry that further reductions at the NSC could impair its capabilities, but the current staffing level is fully up to the job.

You might ask: Why does all this matter? Won’t it just be a historical footnote?
It matters because when people play politics in the middle of a crisis, we are all less safe.
We are less safe because public servants are distracted when they are dragged into politics.
We’re less safe because the American people have been recklessly scared into doubting the competence of their government to help keep them safe, secure and healthy.
And we’re less safe because when we’re focused on political gamesmanship, we’re not paying enough attention to the real issues.

And we should be united in demanding to know why the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) was aware of the coronavirus outbreak in Wuhan early in December, maybe even November, and didn’t tell the rest of the world, when stopping the deadly spread might have been possible.
Just as the United States has fought against fake information aimed at our elections, we should fight back against CCP propagandists. They are not only campaigning against the use of the term “Wuhan virus” (a more geographically accurate description than “Spanish flu” ever was about the 1918 pandemic) but now also promoting the false claim that covid-19 was created by the U.S. Army. Public health officials have pinpointed a wild-animal market in Wuhan as the outbreak’s origin.

There are real threats emanating from this pandemic. We need to focus on getting our response right and save the finger-pointing for what comes after.

I noticed it’s under “opinion” and I also notice he said “I believe”. More resources are better than fewer.

[6ftstick]

Still defending the decisions to develop US tests rather than scaling up fast with what was already available.

As if these were mutually exclusive.

No, we could have been testing far more with what was available and then moved to "better" tests once developed and tested. Assuming actually better.

I have no idea on what planet it made sense to turn down help in the form of WHO Covid-19 test kits one month ago. Take the tests while developing our own. It has worked for South Korea.

Ask the CDC official(s) who made that decision. There will be plenty of time for 2nd guessing that decision in the inevitable Congressional show trials & scapegoating. Likewise with the FDA officials who enforced the existing EUA regs re new local lab developed tests.

Hopefully we have Benghazi style hearings as to who made the call.

You can bet on it. Testing is just the handy stick being used by partisans to beat Trump, at the moment.

Testing is just one facet of our overall shortfall in a system that developed to deal with previous epidemics, which never came to our shores as a pandemic of this magnitude.

Of course, all the necessary brainpower resided solely within a now disestablished office within the Obama NSC, rather than throughout the rest of the Federal govt.


obtw -- Dr Fouchy just said the following about the need for widespread testing (in response to a NBC reporter) ;
We tend to think we're not going to be able to mitigate or contain without testing. They complement each other in some respects but their separate channels. Even if we had no testing, we should be doing what we're doing now. The question you're asking, so I won't evade it, specifically -- would it be important outside of a doctor-patient coming in together, knowing what's out there, under the
radar screen ? The answer is -- Yes. So let me tell you what the CDC is doing right now -- they're going out there to get a feel for whats out there that wasn't a part of the corona virus. When you do that, you're also going to get a feel for what the penetration level is in society. So we are heading, with the high throughput things you've been hearing about, to get an answer to your question.

Getting rid of the Pandemic response committee’s chain of command and support didn’t help either. Blame it on Obamer. The buck stops over there

Right. That corner of the NSC contained the only resident expertise capable of making decisions in this field.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions ... se-office/

No, the White House didn’t ‘dissolve’ its pandemic response office. I was there.



Tim Morrison is a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute and former senior director for counterproliferation and biodefense on the National Security Council.

President Trump gets his share of criticism — some warranted, much not. But recently the president’s critics have chosen curious ground to question his response to the coronavirus outbreak since it began spreading from Wuhan, China, in December.

It has been alleged by multiple officials of the Obama administration, including in The Post, that the president and his then-national security adviser, John Bolton, “dissolved the office” at the White House in charge of pandemic preparedness. Because I led the very directorate assigned that mission, the counterproliferation and biodefense office, for a year and then handed it off to another official who still holds the post, I know the charge is specious.

Now, I’m not naive. This is Washington. It’s an election year. Officials out of power want back into power after November. But the middle of a worldwide health emergency is not the time to be making tendentious accusations.

When I joined the National Security Council staff in 2018, I inherited a strong and skilled staff in the counterproliferation and biodefense directorate. This team of national experts together drafted the National Biodefense Strategy of 2018 and an accompanying national security presidential memorandum to implement it; an executive order to modernize influenza vaccines; and coordinated the United States’ response to the Ebola epidemic in Congo, which was ultimately defeated in 2020.

It is true that the Trump administration has seen fit to shrink the NSC staff. But the bloat that occurred under the previous administration clearly needed a correction. Defense Secretary Robert Gates, congressional oversight committees and members of the Obama administration itself all agreed the NSC was too large and too operationally focused (a departure from its traditional role coordinating executive branch activity). As The Post reported in 2015, from the Clinton administration to the Obama administration’s second term, the NSC’s staff “had quadrupled in size, to nearly 400 people.” That is why Trump began streamlining the NSC staff in 2017.

One such move at the NSC was to create the counterproliferation and biodefense directorate, which was the result of consolidating three directorates into one, given the obvious overlap between arms control and nonproliferation, weapons of mass destruction terrorism, and global health and biodefense. It is this reorganization that critics have misconstrued or intentionally misrepresented. If anything, the combined directorate was stronger because related expertise could be commingled.

The reduction of force in the NSC has continued since I departed the White House. But it has left the biodefense staff unaffected — perhaps a recognition of the importance of that mission to the president, who, after all, in 2018 issued a presidential memorandum to finally create real accountability in the federal government’s expansive biodefense system.

The NSC is really the only place in government where there is a staff that ensures the commander in chief gets all the options he needs to make a decision, and then makes sure that decision is actually implemented. I worry that further reductions at the NSC could impair its capabilities, but the current staffing level is fully up to the job.

You might ask: Why does all this matter? Won’t it just be a historical footnote?
It matters because when people play politics in the middle of a crisis, we are all less safe.
We are less safe because public servants are distracted when they are dragged into politics.
We’re less safe because the American people have been recklessly scared into doubting the competence of their government to help keep them safe, secure and healthy.
And we’re less safe because when we’re focused on political gamesmanship, we’re not paying enough attention to the real issues.

And we should be united in demanding to know why the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) was aware of the coronavirus outbreak in Wuhan early in December, maybe even November, and didn’t tell the rest of the world, when stopping the deadly spread might have been possible.
Just as the United States has fought against fake information aimed at our elections, we should fight back against CCP propagandists. They are not only campaigning against the use of the term “Wuhan virus” (a more geographically accurate description than “Spanish flu” ever was about the 1918 pandemic) but now also promoting the false claim that covid-19 was created by the U.S. Army. Public health officials have pinpointed a wild-animal market in Wuhan as the outbreak’s origin.

There are real threats emanating from this pandemic. We need to focus on getting our response right and save the finger-pointing for what comes after.

And at todays Press Conference the task force blew up the whole WHO testing story as well.

[foreverlax]

Still defending the decisions to develop US tests rather than scaling up fast with what was already available.

As if these were mutually exclusive.

No, we could have been testing far more with what was available and then moved to "better" tests once developed and tested. Assuming actually better.

I have no idea on what planet it made sense to turn down help in the form of WHO Covid-19 test kits one month ago. Take the tests while developing our own. It has worked for South Korea.

Ask the CDC official(s) who made that decision. There will be plenty of time for 2nd guessing that decision in the inevitable Congressional show trials & scapegoating. Likewise with the FDA officials who enforced the existing EUA regs re new local lab developed tests.

Hopefully we have Benghazi style hearings as to who made the call.

You can bet on it. Testing is just the handy stick being used by partisans to beat Trump, at the moment.

Testing is just one facet of our overall shortfall in a system that developed to deal with previous epidemics, which never came to our shores as a pandemic of this magnitude.

Of course, all the necessary brainpower resided solely within a now disestablished office within the Obama NSC, rather than throughout the rest of the Federal govt.


obtw -- Dr Fouchy just said the following about the need for widespread testing (in response to a NBC reporter) ;
We tend to think we're not going to be able to mitigate or contain without testing. They complement each other in some respects but their separate channels. Even if we had no testing, we should be doing what we're doing now. The question you're asking, so I won't evade it, specifically -- would it be important outside of a doctor-patient coming in together, knowing what's out there, under the
radar screen ? The answer is -- Yes. So let me tell you what the CDC is doing right now -- they're going out there to get a feel for whats out there that wasn't a part of the corona virus. When you do that, you're also going to get a feel for what the penetration level is in society. So we are heading, with the high throughput things you've been hearing about, to get an answer to your question.

Getting rid of the Pandemic response committee’s chain of command and support didn’t help either. Blame it on Obamer. The buck stops over there

Right. That corner of the NSC contained the only resident expertise capable of making decisions in this field.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions ... se-office/

No, the White House didn’t ‘dissolve’ its pandemic response office. I was there.

Tim Morrison is a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute and former senior director for counterproliferation and biodefense on the National Security Council.

President Trump gets his share of criticism — some warranted, much not. But recently the president’s critics have chosen curious ground to question his response to the coronavirus outbreak since it began spreading from Wuhan, China, in December.

It has been alleged by multiple officials of the Obama administration, including in The Post, that the president and his then-national security adviser, John Bolton, “dissolved the office” at the White House in charge of pandemic preparedness. Because I led the very directorate assigned that mission, the counterproliferation and biodefense office, for a year and then handed it off to another official who still holds the post, I know the charge is specious.

Now, I’m not naive. This is Washington. It’s an election year. Officials out of power want back into power after November. But the middle of a worldwide health emergency is not the time to be making tendentious accusations.

When I joined the National Security Council staff in 2018, I inherited a strong and skilled staff in the counterproliferation and biodefense directorate. This team of national experts together drafted the National Biodefense Strategy of 2018 and an accompanying national security presidential memorandum to implement it; an executive order to modernize influenza vaccines; and coordinated the United States’ response to the Ebola epidemic in Congo, which was ultimately defeated in 2020.

It is true that the Trump administration has seen fit to shrink the NSC staff. But the bloat that occurred under the previous administration clearly needed a correction. Defense Secretary Robert Gates, congressional oversight committees and members of the Obama administration itself all agreed the NSC was too large and too operationally focused (a departure from its traditional role coordinating executive branch activity). As The Post reported in 2015, from the Clinton administration to the Obama administration’s second term, the NSC’s staff “had quadrupled in size, to nearly 400 people.” That is why Trump began streamlining the NSC staff in 2017.

One such move at the NSC was to create the counterproliferation and biodefense directorate, which was the result of consolidating three directorates into one, given the obvious overlap between arms control and nonproliferation, weapons of mass destruction terrorism, and global health and biodefense. It is this reorganization that critics have misconstrued or intentionally misrepresented. If anything, the combined directorate was stronger because related expertise could be commingled.

The reduction of force in the NSC has continued since I departed the White House. But it has left the biodefense staff unaffected — perhaps a recognition of the importance of that mission to the president, who, after all, in 2018 issued a presidential memorandum to finally create real accountability in the federal government’s expansive biodefense system.

The NSC is really the only place in government where there is a staff that ensures the commander in chief gets all the options he needs to make a decision, and then makes sure that decision is actually implemented. I worry that further reductions at the NSC could impair its capabilities, but the current staffing level is fully up to the job.

You might ask: Why does all this matter? Won’t it just be a historical footnote?
It matters because when people play politics in the middle of a crisis, we are all less safe.
We are less safe because public servants are distracted when they are dragged into politics.
We’re less safe because the American people have been recklessly scared into doubting the competence of their government to help keep them safe, secure and healthy.
And we’re less safe because when we’re focused on political gamesmanship, we’re not paying enough attention to the real issues.

And we should be united in demanding to know why the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) was aware of the coronavirus outbreak in Wuhan early in December, maybe even November, and didn’t tell the rest of the world, when stopping the deadly spread might have been possible.
Just as the United States has fought against fake information aimed at our elections, we should fight back against CCP propagandists. They are not only campaigning against the use of the term “Wuhan virus” (a more geographically accurate description than “Spanish flu” ever was about the 1918 pandemic) but now also promoting the false claim that covid-19 was created by the U.S. Army. Public health officials have pinpointed a wild-animal market in Wuhan as the outbreak’s origin.

There are real threats emanating from this pandemic. We need to focus on getting our response right and save the finger-pointing for what comes after.

He is a lawyer....gmafb, he has no standing based on no expertise.

[Typical Lax Dad]

Still defending the decisions to develop US tests rather than scaling up fast with what was already available.

As if these were mutually exclusive.

No, we could have been testing far more with what was available and then moved to "better" tests once developed and tested. Assuming actually better.

I have no idea on what planet it made sense to turn down help in the form of WHO Covid-19 test kits one month ago. Take the tests while developing our own. It has worked for South Korea.

Ask the CDC official(s) who made that decision. There will be plenty of time for 2nd guessing that decision in the inevitable Congressional show trials & scapegoating. Likewise with the FDA officials who enforced the existing EUA regs re new local lab developed tests.

Hopefully we have Benghazi style hearings as to who made the call.

You can bet on it. Testing is just the handy stick being used by partisans to beat Trump, at the moment.

Testing is just one facet of our overall shortfall in a system that developed to deal with previous epidemics, which never came to our shores as a pandemic of this magnitude.

Of course, all the necessary brainpower resided solely within a now disestablished office within the Obama NSC, rather than throughout the rest of the Federal govt.


obtw -- Dr Fouchy just said the following about the need for widespread testing (in response to a NBC reporter) ;
We tend to think we're not going to be able to mitigate or contain without testing. They complement each other in some respects but their separate channels. Even if we had no testing, we should be doing what we're doing now. The question you're asking, so I won't evade it, specifically -- would it be important outside of a doctor-patient coming in together, knowing what's out there, under the
radar screen ? The answer is -- Yes. So let me tell you what the CDC is doing right now -- they're going out there to get a feel for whats out there that wasn't a part of the corona virus. When you do that, you're also going to get a feel for what the penetration level is in society. So we are heading, with the high throughput things you've been hearing about, to get an answer to your question.

Getting rid of the Pandemic response committee’s chain of command and support didn’t help either. Blame it on Obamer. The buck stops over there

Right. That corner of the NSC contained the only resident expertise capable of making decisions in this field.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions ... se-office/

No, the White House didn’t ‘dissolve’ its pandemic response office. I was there.



Tim Morrison is a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute and former senior director for counterproliferation and biodefense on the National Security Council.

President Trump gets his share of criticism — some warranted, much not. But recently the president’s critics have chosen curious ground to question his response to the coronavirus outbreak since it began spreading from Wuhan, China, in December.

It has been alleged by multiple officials of the Obama administration, including in The Post, that the president and his then-national security adviser, John Bolton, “dissolved the office” at the White House in charge of pandemic preparedness. Because I led the very directorate assigned that mission, the counterproliferation and biodefense office, for a year and then handed it off to another official who still holds the post, I know the charge is specious.

Now, I’m not naive. This is Washington. It’s an election year. Officials out of power want back into power after November. But the middle of a worldwide health emergency is not the time to be making tendentious accusations.

When I joined the National Security Council staff in 2018, I inherited a strong and skilled staff in the counterproliferation and biodefense directorate. This team of national experts together drafted the National Biodefense Strategy of 2018 and an accompanying national security presidential memorandum to implement it; an executive order to modernize influenza vaccines; and coordinated the United States’ response to the Ebola epidemic in Congo, which was ultimately defeated in 2020.

It is true that the Trump administration has seen fit to shrink the NSC staff. But the bloat that occurred under the previous administration clearly needed a correction. Defense Secretary Robert Gates, congressional oversight committees and members of the Obama administration itself all agreed the NSC was too large and too operationally focused (a departure from its traditional role coordinating executive branch activity). As The Post reported in 2015, from the Clinton administration to the Obama administration’s second term, the NSC’s staff “had quadrupled in size, to nearly 400 people.” That is why Trump began streamlining the NSC staff in 2017.

One such move at the NSC was to create the counterproliferation and biodefense directorate, which was the result of consolidating three directorates into one, given the obvious overlap between arms control and nonproliferation, weapons of mass destruction terrorism, and global health and biodefense. It is this reorganization that critics have misconstrued or intentionally misrepresented. If anything, the combined directorate was stronger because related expertise could be commingled.

The reduction of force in the NSC has continued since I departed the White House. But it has left the biodefense staff unaffected — perhaps a recognition of the importance of that mission to the president, who, after all, in 2018 issued a presidential memorandum to finally create real accountability in the federal government’s expansive biodefense system.

The NSC is really the only place in government where there is a staff that ensures the commander in chief gets all the options he needs to make a decision, and then makes sure that decision is actually implemented. I worry that further reductions at the NSC could impair its capabilities, but the current staffing level is fully up to the job.

You might ask: Why does all this matter? Won’t it just be a historical footnote?
It matters because when people play politics in the middle of a crisis, we are all less safe.
We are less safe because public servants are distracted when they are dragged into politics.
We’re less safe because the American people have been recklessly scared into doubting the competence of their government to help keep them safe, secure and healthy.
And we’re less safe because when we’re focused on political gamesmanship, we’re not paying enough attention to the real issues.

And we should be united in demanding to know why the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) was aware of the coronavirus outbreak in Wuhan early in December, maybe even November, and didn’t tell the rest of the world, when stopping the deadly spread might have been possible.
Just as the United States has fought against fake information aimed at our elections, we should fight back against CCP propagandists. They are not only campaigning against the use of the term “Wuhan virus” (a more geographically accurate description than “Spanish flu” ever was about the 1918 pandemic) but now also promoting the false claim that covid-19 was created by the U.S. Army. Public health officials have pinpointed a wild-animal market in Wuhan as the outbreak’s origin.

There are real threats emanating from this pandemic. We need to focus on getting our response right and save the finger-pointing for what comes after.

And at todays Press Conference the task force blew up the whole WHO testing story as well.

Put on a happy face

[Matnum PI]

Unbelievable. Seriously. From “hoax” to “I always knew” in what, a week?
Trump: “I felt it was a pandemic long before it was declared a pandemic.”
https://twitter.com/_janpostma_/status/ ... 8741519360

https://twitter.com/SheWhoRises/status/ ... 7256765440
Of course he knew!

It's amazing...

[jhu72]

Still defending the decisions to develop US tests rather than scaling up fast with what was already available.

As if these were mutually exclusive.

No, we could have been testing far more with what was available and then moved to "better" tests once developed and tested. Assuming actually better.

I have no idea on what planet it made sense to turn down help in the form of WHO Covid-19 test kits one month ago. Take the tests while developing our own. It has worked for South Korea.

Ask the CDC official(s) who made that decision. There will be plenty of time for 2nd guessing that decision in the inevitable Congressional show trials & scapegoating. Likewise with the FDA officials who enforced the existing EUA regs re new local lab developed tests.

Hopefully we have Benghazi style hearings as to who made the call.

You can bet on it. Testing is just the handy stick being used by partisans to beat Trump, at the moment.

Testing is just one facet of our overall shortfall in a system that developed to deal with previous epidemics, which never came to our shores as a pandemic of this magnitude.

Of course, all the necessary brainpower resided solely within a now disestablished office within the Obama NSC, rather than throughout the rest of the Federal govt.


obtw -- Dr Fouchy just said the following about the need for widespread testing (in response to a NBC reporter) ;
We tend to think we're not going to be able to mitigate or contain without testing. They complement each other in some respects but their separate channels. Even if we had no testing, we should be doing what we're doing now. The question you're asking, so I won't evade it, specifically -- would it be important outside of a doctor-patient coming in together, knowing what's out there, under the
radar screen ? The answer is -- Yes. So let me tell you what the CDC is doing right now -- they're going out there to get a feel for whats out there that wasn't a part of the corona virus. When you do that, you're also going to get a feel for what the penetration level is in society. So we are heading, with the high throughput things you've been hearing about, to get an answer to your question.

Getting rid of the Pandemic response committee’s chain of command and support didn’t help either. Blame it on Obamer. The buck stops over there

Right. That corner of the NSC contained the only resident expertise capable of making decisions in this field.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions ... se-office/

No, the White House didn’t ‘dissolve’ its pandemic response office. I was there.



Tim Morrison is a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute and former senior director for counterproliferation and biodefense on the National Security Council.

President Trump gets his share of criticism — some warranted, much not. But recently the president’s critics have chosen curious ground to question his response to the coronavirus outbreak since it began spreading from Wuhan, China, in December.

It has been alleged by multiple officials of the Obama administration, including in The Post, that the president and his then-national security adviser, John Bolton, “dissolved the office” at the White House in charge of pandemic preparedness. Because I led the very directorate assigned that mission, the counterproliferation and biodefense office, for a year and then handed it off to another official who still holds the post, I know the charge is specious.

Now, I’m not naive. This is Washington. It’s an election year. Officials out of power want back into power after November. But the middle of a worldwide health emergency is not the time to be making tendentious accusations.

When I joined the National Security Council staff in 2018, I inherited a strong and skilled staff in the counterproliferation and biodefense directorate. This team of national experts together drafted the National Biodefense Strategy of 2018 and an accompanying national security presidential memorandum to implement it; an executive order to modernize influenza vaccines; and coordinated the United States’ response to the Ebola epidemic in Congo, which was ultimately defeated in 2020.

It is true that the Trump administration has seen fit to shrink the NSC staff. But the bloat that occurred under the previous administration clearly needed a correction. Defense Secretary Robert Gates, congressional oversight committees and members of the Obama administration itself all agreed the NSC was too large and too operationally focused (a departure from its traditional role coordinating executive branch activity). As The Post reported in 2015, from the Clinton administration to the Obama administration’s second term, the NSC’s staff “had quadrupled in size, to nearly 400 people.” That is why Trump began streamlining the NSC staff in 2017.

One such move at the NSC was to create the counterproliferation and biodefense directorate, which was the result of consolidating three directorates into one, given the obvious overlap between arms control and nonproliferation, weapons of mass destruction terrorism, and global health and biodefense. It is this reorganization that critics have misconstrued or intentionally misrepresented. If anything, the combined directorate was stronger because related expertise could be commingled.

The reduction of force in the NSC has continued since I departed the White House. But it has left the biodefense staff unaffected — perhaps a recognition of the importance of that mission to the president, who, after all, in 2018 issued a presidential memorandum to finally create real accountability in the federal government’s expansive biodefense system.

The NSC is really the only place in government where there is a staff that ensures the commander in chief gets all the options he needs to make a decision, and then makes sure that decision is actually implemented. I worry that further reductions at the NSC could impair its capabilities, but the current staffing level is fully up to the job.

You might ask: Why does all this matter? Won’t it just be a historical footnote?
It matters because when people play politics in the middle of a crisis, we are all less safe.
We are less safe because public servants are distracted when they are dragged into politics.
We’re less safe because the American people have been recklessly scared into doubting the competence of their government to help keep them safe, secure and healthy.
And we’re less safe because when we’re focused on political gamesmanship, we’re not paying enough attention to the real issues.

And we should be united in demanding to know why the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) was aware of the coronavirus outbreak in Wuhan early in December, maybe even November, and didn’t tell the rest of the world, when stopping the deadly spread might have been possible.
Just as the United States has fought against fake information aimed at our elections, we should fight back against CCP propagandists. They are not only campaigning against the use of the term “Wuhan virus” (a more geographically accurate description than “Spanish flu” ever was about the 1918 pandemic) but now also promoting the false claim that covid-19 was created by the U.S. Army. Public health officials have pinpointed a wild-animal market in Wuhan as the outbreak’s origin.

There are real threats emanating from this pandemic. We need to focus on getting our response right and save the finger-pointing for what comes after.

And at todays Press Conference the task force blew up the whole WHO testing story as well.

TOTAL HORSESHlT. You don't know what you are talking about. They didn't answer the question.

[6ftstick]

Still defending the decisions to develop US tests rather than scaling up fast with what was already available.

As if these were mutually exclusive.

No, we could have been testing far more with what was available and then moved to "better" tests once developed and tested. Assuming actually better.

I have no idea on what planet it made sense to turn down help in the form of WHO Covid-19 test kits one month ago. Take the tests while developing our own. It has worked for South Korea.

Ask the CDC official(s) who made that decision. There will be plenty of time for 2nd guessing that decision in the inevitable Congressional show trials & scapegoating. Likewise with the FDA officials who enforced the existing EUA regs re new local lab developed tests.

Hopefully we have Benghazi style hearings as to who made the call.

You can bet on it. Testing is just the handy stick being used by partisans to beat Trump, at the moment.

Testing is just one facet of our overall shortfall in a system that developed to deal with previous epidemics, which never came to our shores as a pandemic of this magnitude.

Of course, all the necessary brainpower resided solely within a now disestablished office within the Obama NSC, rather than throughout the rest of the Federal govt.


obtw -- Dr Fouchy just said the following about the need for widespread testing (in response to a NBC reporter) ;
We tend to think we're not going to be able to mitigate or contain without testing. They complement each other in some respects but their separate channels. Even if we had no testing, we should be doing what we're doing now. The question you're asking, so I won't evade it, specifically -- would it be important outside of a doctor-patient coming in together, knowing what's out there, under the
radar screen ? The answer is -- Yes. So let me tell you what the CDC is doing right now -- they're going out there to get a feel for whats out there that wasn't a part of the corona virus. When you do that, you're also going to get a feel for what the penetration level is in society. So we are heading, with the high throughput things you've been hearing about, to get an answer to your question.

Getting rid of the Pandemic response committee’s chain of command and support didn’t help either. Blame it on Obamer. The buck stops over there

Right. That corner of the NSC contained the only resident expertise capable of making decisions in this field.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions ... se-office/

No, the White House didn’t ‘dissolve’ its pandemic response office. I was there.



Tim Morrison is a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute and former senior director for counterproliferation and biodefense on the National Security Council.

President Trump gets his share of criticism — some warranted, much not. But recently the president’s critics have chosen curious ground to question his response to the coronavirus outbreak since it began spreading from Wuhan, China, in December.

It has been alleged by multiple officials of the Obama administration, including in The Post, that the president and his then-national security adviser, John Bolton, “dissolved the office” at the White House in charge of pandemic preparedness. Because I led the very directorate assigned that mission, the counterproliferation and biodefense office, for a year and then handed it off to another official who still holds the post, I know the charge is specious.

Now, I’m not naive. This is Washington. It’s an election year. Officials out of power want back into power after November. But the middle of a worldwide health emergency is not the time to be making tendentious accusations.

When I joined the National Security Council staff in 2018, I inherited a strong and skilled staff in the counterproliferation and biodefense directorate. This team of national experts together drafted the National Biodefense Strategy of 2018 and an accompanying national security presidential memorandum to implement it; an executive order to modernize influenza vaccines; and coordinated the United States’ response to the Ebola epidemic in Congo, which was ultimately defeated in 2020.

It is true that the Trump administration has seen fit to shrink the NSC staff. But the bloat that occurred under the previous administration clearly needed a correction. Defense Secretary Robert Gates, congressional oversight committees and members of the Obama administration itself all agreed the NSC was too large and too operationally focused (a departure from its traditional role coordinating executive branch activity). As The Post reported in 2015, from the Clinton administration to the Obama administration’s second term, the NSC’s staff “had quadrupled in size, to nearly 400 people.” That is why Trump began streamlining the NSC staff in 2017.

One such move at the NSC was to create the counterproliferation and biodefense directorate, which was the result of consolidating three directorates into one, given the obvious overlap between arms control and nonproliferation, weapons of mass destruction terrorism, and global health and biodefense. It is this reorganization that critics have misconstrued or intentionally misrepresented. If anything, the combined directorate was stronger because related expertise could be commingled.

The reduction of force in the NSC has continued since I departed the White House. But it has left the biodefense staff unaffected — perhaps a recognition of the importance of that mission to the president, who, after all, in 2018 issued a presidential memorandum to finally create real accountability in the federal government’s expansive biodefense system.

The NSC is really the only place in government where there is a staff that ensures the commander in chief gets all the options he needs to make a decision, and then makes sure that decision is actually implemented. I worry that further reductions at the NSC could impair its capabilities, but the current staffing level is fully up to the job.

You might ask: Why does all this matter? Won’t it just be a historical footnote?
It matters because when people play politics in the middle of a crisis, we are all less safe.
We are less safe because public servants are distracted when they are dragged into politics.
We’re less safe because the American people have been recklessly scared into doubting the competence of their government to help keep them safe, secure and healthy.
And we’re less safe because when we’re focused on political gamesmanship, we’re not paying enough attention to the real issues.

And we should be united in demanding to know why the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) was aware of the coronavirus outbreak in Wuhan early in December, maybe even November, and didn’t tell the rest of the world, when stopping the deadly spread might have been possible.
Just as the United States has fought against fake information aimed at our elections, we should fight back against CCP propagandists. They are not only campaigning against the use of the term “Wuhan virus” (a more geographically accurate description than “Spanish flu” ever was about the 1918 pandemic) but now also promoting the false claim that covid-19 was created by the U.S. Army. Public health officials have pinpointed a wild-animal market in Wuhan as the outbreak’s origin.

There are real threats emanating from this pandemic. We need to focus on getting our response right and save the finger-pointing for what comes after.

And at todays Press Conference the task force blew up the whole WHO testing story as well.

TOTAL HORSESHlT. You don't know what you are talking about. They didn't answer the question.

Start at 1:23:15

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ZrTqBNtGFM

[Typical Lax Dad]

Still defending the decisions to develop US tests rather than scaling up fast with what was already available.

As if these were mutually exclusive.

No, we could have been testing far more with what was available and then moved to "better" tests once developed and tested. Assuming actually better.

I have no idea on what planet it made sense to turn down help in the form of WHO Covid-19 test kits one month ago. Take the tests while developing our own. It has worked for South Korea.

Ask the CDC official(s) who made that decision. There will be plenty of time for 2nd guessing that decision in the inevitable Congressional show trials & scapegoating. Likewise with the FDA officials who enforced the existing EUA regs re new local lab developed tests.

Hopefully we have Benghazi style hearings as to who made the call.

You can bet on it. Testing is just the handy stick being used by partisans to beat Trump, at the moment.

Testing is just one facet of our overall shortfall in a system that developed to deal with previous epidemics, which never came to our shores as a pandemic of this magnitude.

Of course, all the necessary brainpower resided solely within a now disestablished office within the Obama NSC, rather than throughout the rest of the Federal govt.


obtw -- Dr Fouchy just said the following about the need for widespread testing (in response to a NBC reporter) ;
We tend to think we're not going to be able to mitigate or contain without testing. They complement each other in some respects but their separate channels. Even if we had no testing, we should be doing what we're doing now. The question you're asking, so I won't evade it, specifically -- would it be important outside of a doctor-patient coming in together, knowing what's out there, under the
radar screen ? The answer is -- Yes. So let me tell you what the CDC is doing right now -- they're going out there to get a feel for whats out there that wasn't a part of the corona virus. When you do that, you're also going to get a feel for what the penetration level is in society. So we are heading, with the high throughput things you've been hearing about, to get an answer to your question.

Getting rid of the Pandemic response committee’s chain of command and support didn’t help either. Blame it on Obamer. The buck stops over there

Right. That corner of the NSC contained the only resident expertise capable of making decisions in this field.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions ... se-office/

No, the White House didn’t ‘dissolve’ its pandemic response office. I was there.



Tim Morrison is a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute and former senior director for counterproliferation and biodefense on the National Security Council.

President Trump gets his share of criticism — some warranted, much not. But recently the president’s critics have chosen curious ground to question his response to the coronavirus outbreak since it began spreading from Wuhan, China, in December.

It has been alleged by multiple officials of the Obama administration, including in The Post, that the president and his then-national security adviser, John Bolton, “dissolved the office” at the White House in charge of pandemic preparedness. Because I led the very directorate assigned that mission, the counterproliferation and biodefense office, for a year and then handed it off to another official who still holds the post, I know the charge is specious.

Now, I’m not naive. This is Washington. It’s an election year. Officials out of power want back into power after November. But the middle of a worldwide health emergency is not the time to be making tendentious accusations.

When I joined the National Security Council staff in 2018, I inherited a strong and skilled staff in the counterproliferation and biodefense directorate. This team of national experts together drafted the National Biodefense Strategy of 2018 and an accompanying national security presidential memorandum to implement it; an executive order to modernize influenza vaccines; and coordinated the United States’ response to the Ebola epidemic in Congo, which was ultimately defeated in 2020.

It is true that the Trump administration has seen fit to shrink the NSC staff. But the bloat that occurred under the previous administration clearly needed a correction. Defense Secretary Robert Gates, congressional oversight committees and members of the Obama administration itself all agreed the NSC was too large and too operationally focused (a departure from its traditional role coordinating executive branch activity). As The Post reported in 2015, from the Clinton administration to the Obama administration’s second term, the NSC’s staff “had quadrupled in size, to nearly 400 people.” That is why Trump began streamlining the NSC staff in 2017.

One such move at the NSC was to create the counterproliferation and biodefense directorate, which was the result of consolidating three directorates into one, given the obvious overlap between arms control and nonproliferation, weapons of mass destruction terrorism, and global health and biodefense. It is this reorganization that critics have misconstrued or intentionally misrepresented. If anything, the combined directorate was stronger because related expertise could be commingled.

The reduction of force in the NSC has continued since I departed the White House. But it has left the biodefense staff unaffected — perhaps a recognition of the importance of that mission to the president, who, after all, in 2018 issued a presidential memorandum to finally create real accountability in the federal government’s expansive biodefense system.

The NSC is really the only place in government where there is a staff that ensures the commander in chief gets all the options he needs to make a decision, and then makes sure that decision is actually implemented. I worry that further reductions at the NSC could impair its capabilities, but the current staffing level is fully up to the job.

You might ask: Why does all this matter? Won’t it just be a historical footnote?
It matters because when people play politics in the middle of a crisis, we are all less safe.
We are less safe because public servants are distracted when they are dragged into politics.
We’re less safe because the American people have been recklessly scared into doubting the competence of their government to help keep them safe, secure and healthy.
And we’re less safe because when we’re focused on political gamesmanship, we’re not paying enough attention to the real issues.

And we should be united in demanding to know why the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) was aware of the coronavirus outbreak in Wuhan early in December, maybe even November, and didn’t tell the rest of the world, when stopping the deadly spread might have been possible.
Just as the United States has fought against fake information aimed at our elections, we should fight back against CCP propagandists. They are not only campaigning against the use of the term “Wuhan virus” (a more geographically accurate description than “Spanish flu” ever was about the 1918 pandemic) but now also promoting the false claim that covid-19 was created by the U.S. Army. Public health officials have pinpointed a wild-animal market in Wuhan as the outbreak’s origin.

There are real threats emanating from this pandemic. We need to focus on getting our response right and save the finger-pointing for what comes after.

And at todays Press Conference the task force blew up the whole WHO testing story as well.

TOTAL HORSESHlT. You don't know what you are talking about. They didn't answer the question.

Start at 1:23:15

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ZrTqBNtGFM

You mean the “no use crying over spilled milk” comments.....Put on a happy face

[jhu72]

Good God! No wonder his staff has been trying to keep him off camera! LIES LIES LIES

Unbelievable. Seriously. From “hoax” to “I always knew” in what, a week?

Trump: “I felt it was a pandemic long before it was declared a pandemic.”
https://twitter.com/_janpostma_/status/ ... 8741519360

Yup. That GEM came out of mouth after I gave him a KUDO for doing better.

[6ftstick]

Still defending the decisions to develop US tests rather than scaling up fast with what was already available.

As if these were mutually exclusive.

No, we could have been testing far more with what was available and then moved to "better" tests once developed and tested. Assuming actually better.

I have no idea on what planet it made sense to turn down help in the form of WHO Covid-19 test kits one month ago. Take the tests while developing our own. It has worked for South Korea.

Ask the CDC official(s) who made that decision. There will be plenty of time for 2nd guessing that decision in the inevitable Congressional show trials & scapegoating. Likewise with the FDA officials who enforced the existing EUA regs re new local lab developed tests.

Hopefully we have Benghazi style hearings as to who made the call.

You can bet on it. Testing is just the handy stick being used by partisans to beat Trump, at the moment.

Testing is just one facet of our overall shortfall in a system that developed to deal with previous epidemics, which never came to our shores as a pandemic of this magnitude.

Of course, all the necessary brainpower resided solely within a now disestablished office within the Obama NSC, rather than throughout the rest of the Federal govt.


obtw -- Dr Fouchy just said the following about the need for widespread testing (in response to a NBC reporter) ;
We tend to think we're not going to be able to mitigate or contain without testing. They complement each other in some respects but their separate channels. Even if we had no testing, we should be doing what we're doing now. The question you're asking, so I won't evade it, specifically -- would it be important outside of a doctor-patient coming in together, knowing what's out there, under the
radar screen ? The answer is -- Yes. So let me tell you what the CDC is doing right now -- they're going out there to get a feel for whats out there that wasn't a part of the corona virus. When you do that, you're also going to get a feel for what the penetration level is in society. So we are heading, with the high throughput things you've been hearing about, to get an answer to your question.

Getting rid of the Pandemic response committee’s chain of command and support didn’t help either. Blame it on Obamer. The buck stops over there

Right. That corner of the NSC contained the only resident expertise capable of making decisions in this field.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions ... se-office/

No, the White House didn’t ‘dissolve’ its pandemic response office. I was there.



Tim Morrison is a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute and former senior director for counterproliferation and biodefense on the National Security Council.

President Trump gets his share of criticism — some warranted, much not. But recently the president’s critics have chosen curious ground to question his response to the coronavirus outbreak since it began spreading from Wuhan, China, in December.

It has been alleged by multiple officials of the Obama administration, including in The Post, that the president and his then-national security adviser, John Bolton, “dissolved the office” at the White House in charge of pandemic preparedness. Because I led the very directorate assigned that mission, the counterproliferation and biodefense office, for a year and then handed it off to another official who still holds the post, I know the charge is specious.

Now, I’m not naive. This is Washington. It’s an election year. Officials out of power want back into power after November. But the middle of a worldwide health emergency is not the time to be making tendentious accusations.

When I joined the National Security Council staff in 2018, I inherited a strong and skilled staff in the counterproliferation and biodefense directorate. This team of national experts together drafted the National Biodefense Strategy of 2018 and an accompanying national security presidential memorandum to implement it; an executive order to modernize influenza vaccines; and coordinated the United States’ response to the Ebola epidemic in Congo, which was ultimately defeated in 2020.

It is true that the Trump administration has seen fit to shrink the NSC staff. But the bloat that occurred under the previous administration clearly needed a correction. Defense Secretary Robert Gates, congressional oversight committees and members of the Obama administration itself all agreed the NSC was too large and too operationally focused (a departure from its traditional role coordinating executive branch activity). As The Post reported in 2015, from the Clinton administration to the Obama administration’s second term, the NSC’s staff “had quadrupled in size, to nearly 400 people.” That is why Trump began streamlining the NSC staff in 2017.

One such move at the NSC was to create the counterproliferation and biodefense directorate, which was the result of consolidating three directorates into one, given the obvious overlap between arms control and nonproliferation, weapons of mass destruction terrorism, and global health and biodefense. It is this reorganization that critics have misconstrued or intentionally misrepresented. If anything, the combined directorate was stronger because related expertise could be commingled.

The reduction of force in the NSC has continued since I departed the White House. But it has left the biodefense staff unaffected — perhaps a recognition of the importance of that mission to the president, who, after all, in 2018 issued a presidential memorandum to finally create real accountability in the federal government’s expansive biodefense system.

The NSC is really the only place in government where there is a staff that ensures the commander in chief gets all the options he needs to make a decision, and then makes sure that decision is actually implemented. I worry that further reductions at the NSC could impair its capabilities, but the current staffing level is fully up to the job.

You might ask: Why does all this matter? Won’t it just be a historical footnote?
It matters because when people play politics in the middle of a crisis, we are all less safe.
We are less safe because public servants are distracted when they are dragged into politics.
We’re less safe because the American people have been recklessly scared into doubting the competence of their government to help keep them safe, secure and healthy.
And we’re less safe because when we’re focused on political gamesmanship, we’re not paying enough attention to the real issues.

And we should be united in demanding to know why the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) was aware of the coronavirus outbreak in Wuhan early in December, maybe even November, and didn’t tell the rest of the world, when stopping the deadly spread might have been possible.
Just as the United States has fought against fake information aimed at our elections, we should fight back against CCP propagandists. They are not only campaigning against the use of the term “Wuhan virus” (a more geographically accurate description than “Spanish flu” ever was about the 1918 pandemic) but now also promoting the false claim that covid-19 was created by the U.S. Army. Public health officials have pinpointed a wild-animal market in Wuhan as the outbreak’s origin.

There are real threats emanating from this pandemic. We need to focus on getting our response right and save the finger-pointing for what comes after.

And at todays Press Conference the task force blew up the whole WHO testing story as well.

TOTAL HORSESHlT. You don't know what you are talking about. They didn't answer the question.

Start at 1:23:15 Watch it to the end

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ZrTqBNtGFM

[seacoaster]

Very interesting paper on the utility of mitigation and suppression strategies in the absence of a vaccine:

https://www.imperial.ac.uk/media/imperi ... 3-2020.pdf

[Trinity]

Trump today: "I've felt it was a pandemic before it was called a pandemic. All you had to do was look at other countries...I have always viewed it as very serious."


GASLIGHTING ABOVE.

[old salt]

6ft:
And at todays Press Conference the task force blew up the whole WHO testing story as well.

Yep. The PHS Admiral said :
When I became involved in the testing world, I called as many senior officials at the WHO that I could find, to understand what the situation was. Aas far as I can tell, from sources that should know, no one ever offered a test that we refused. This is a research grade test that was not approved, not submitted to the FDA, that was supplied in tens of thousands in quantity, to a hundred countries in the world. There's a lot being said about this based on rumor & myth. Nothing was offered that we refused. It was a research test that was not approved. It was a small amount that we have greatly surpassed in a short amount of time.

Maybe we won't need to wait for a Congressional show trial. When it comes to disinformation, the Russians & Chinese can't hold a candle to the (D) hacks & their MSM handmaidens. Never let a good crisis go to waste.

[Typical Lax Dad]

6ft:
And at todays Press Conference the task force blew up the whole WHO testing story as well.

Yep. The PHS Admiral said :
When I became involved in the testing world, I called as many senior officials at the WHO that I could find, to understand what the situation was. Aas far as I can tell, from sources that should know, no one ever offered a test that we refused. This is a research grade test that was not approved, not submitted to the FDA, that was supplied in tens of thousands in quantity, to a hundred countries in the world. There's a lot being said about this based on rumor & myth. Nothing was offered that we refused. It was a research test that was not approved. It was a small amount that we have greatly surpassed in a short amount of time.

Maybe we won't need to wait for a Congressional show trial. When it comes to disinformation, the Russians & Chinese can't hold a candle to the (D) hacks & their MSM handmaidens. Never let a good crisis go to waste.

I will wait for the hearings. The words “As far as I can tell” are not necessary for what reason?