Obama Says Trump 'Ignored' Pandemic Playbook He Gave To Him
Source: Huff Post
Oct 20, 2024, 11:53 AM EDT
Former President Barack Obama said he gave ex-President Donald Trump a pandemic playbook when Trump took office — but he disregarded it.
“He ignored it,” Obama said during a rally for Vice President Kamala Harris in Las Vegas on Saturday. “And three years later, a pandemic hits.”
He said the COVID-19 pandemic was a “generational pandemic” and that any president would have had a hard time before noting how the United States’ death rate compared to countries like Canada that responded proactively to the global outbreak.
“But if you look at a country like Canada, their per capita death rate was 40% lower than it was here in the United States. So just do the math. That’s more than 400,000 people,” Obama said. “People’s grandmothers, people’s fathers, people’s moms who would have been alive if Donald Trump had just paid attention and tried to follow the plan that we gave him.”
Read more: https://www.huffpost.com/entry/obama-trump-pandemic-playbook_n_67150febe4b0ae82147fd9ed
= new reply since forum marked as read
By — Victoria Knight, Kaiser Health News
May 15, 2020 1:08 PM EDT
(snip)
The playbook lists types of infectious disease threats that could emerge. “Novel coronaviruses” were among pathogens flagged as having potential to cause heightened concern.
Lurie said that there were tabletop exercises, which included planning for a pandemic-like situation, during the transition between the Obama and Trump administrations. (The Trump administration also conducted an exercise — known as “Crimson Contagion” — in 2019.)
Other Obama-era officials offered similar stories in interviews this week with CNN: “They were extensively briefed, to the extent that they paid attention to these things during the transition,” said Jeremy Konyndyk, who directed USAID’s Office of U.S. Foreign Disaster Assistance.
“We absolutely did leave a plan. It was called a playbook,” said Lisa Monaco, former homeland security adviser to President Obama. The goal, she said, was to share the lessons learned during the Ebola and Zika outbreaks.
(snip)
Then-Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany holding the plan up at the press on May 14, 2020 and whining-
(still taken from CSPAN video from May 14, 2020 - https://www.c-span.org/video/?472141-1/president-trump-white-house-departure)
Playbook (PDF) - https://assets.documentcloud.org/documents/6819268/Pandemic-Playbook.pdf
was what was given to 45 during the transition between administrations. I provided a link to a PDF copy of what is being discussed.
With the passage of H.R.3448 - Public Health Security and Bioterrorism Preparedness and Response Act of 2002
there was the development of how to deal with "bioterrorism" in the aftermath of the Anthrax mailings (and I have participated in some of those "table-top" exercises within my agency after that came out). That became a foundation for any future plans going forward.
But what the Obama/Biden administration did was to develop a document - notably after the media-driven Ebola hysteria, where Crispy Creme kept a nurse (Kacy Hicox) quarantined "in isolation" in NJ -
where there was an obvious need to address "quarantines" and the earlier epidemics /pandemics like the H1N1 outbreak.