AP Fact-Check Slams Democrats For Lying About Coronavirus Readiness
Democrats have been tripping over themselves looking for ways to paint Trump as a disaster or an incompetent with respect to Coronavirus. As if they haven’t been looking for smears since day one. They got caught lying.
And this time, the news is even calling them out for it!
You know how Schumer is accusing Trump of ‘towering and dangerous incompetence’? Not so fast.
Is there no issue serious enough that politicians won’t make false claims about it for political benefit? https://t.co/4mBov3MkGE
— Brit Hume (@brithume) February 27, 2020
Via the AP:
THE FACTS: They’re both wrong to say the agencies have seen their money cut. Bloomberg is repeating the false allegation in a new ad that states the U.S. is unprepared for the virus because of “reckless cuts” to the CDC. Trump’s budgets have proposed cuts to public health, only to be overruled by Congress, where there’s strong bipartisan support for agencies such as the CDC and NIH. Instead, financing has increased.
Indeed, the money that government disease detectives first tapped to fight the latest outbreak was a congressional fund created for health emergencies.
Some public health experts say a bigger concern than White House budgets is the steady erosion of a CDC grant program for state and local public health emergency preparedness — the front lines in detecting and battling new disease. But that decline was set in motion by a congressional budget measure that predates Trump.
The broader point about there being “nobody here” to coordinate the response sells short what’s in place to handle an outbreak.
The public health system has a playbook to follow for pandemic preparation — regardless of who’s president or whether specific instructions are coming from the White House. Those plans were put into place in anticipation of another flu pandemic, but are designed to work for any respiratory-borne disease.
Among the health authorities overseeing the work are Dr. Anne Schuchat, CDC’s principal deputy director and a veteran of previous outbreaks, and Dr. Anthony Fauci, NIH’s infectious disease chief who has advised six presidents.
“The CDC’s response has been excellent, as it has been in the past,” said John Auerbach, president of the nonpartisan Trust for America’s Health, which works with government at all levels to improve the nation’s response to high-risk health crises. Some Democrats have charged that Trump decimated the nation’s public health leadership, but Auerbach said CDC’s top scientific ranks have remained stable during the past three years.
If Congress weren’t so busy pushing an impeachment charade that everyone KNEW wasn’t going anywhere, maybe they could have taken the time required to look into such things as preparedness. Instead, the entire Senate was locked down to the singular purpose of hearing Schiff ramble on… obviously in love with the spotlight and the sound of his own voice.
As for our ‘unreadiness’ … let’s see what John’s Hopkins has to say about it.
To develop the index, a process that took two and a half years from start to finish, the project team created a framework of 140 questions, organized into six categories and 34 indicators to assess a country’s capabilities. Out of a possible score of 100, the average score of all countries assessed was 40.2.
The U.S. scored 83.5 and ranked No. 1 in five of six categories: prevention, early detection and reporting, rapid response and mitigation, sufficient and robust health system, and compliance with international norms. It ranks 19th in overall risk environment and vulnerability to biological threats, a category that assesses political and security risk, socioeconomic resilience, the adequacy of infrastructure, environmental risks, and public health vulnerabilities that may inhibit a country’s ability to prevent or respond to an epidemic or pandemic.
Is there still a ways to go, with steps that still need to be taken? Certainly.
But there isn’t a single nation on the planet that his Democrat critics can say ‘why didn’t you do what THEY did to take this threat seriously’ — because he HAS taken it seriously.
Or have we already forgotten how he took heat for closing travel to people who had been in affected areas very early on?
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