President Trump has consistently and repeatedly vocalized his surprize at the scale and magnitude of the coronavirus as it has made its way across the globe and in turn across the United States.
“I would view it as something that just surprised the whole world,” he said in a press conference earlier this month. “Nobody knew there would be a pandemic or epidemic of this proportion.”
In a separate briefing, Trump said: “I just think this is something … that you can never really think is going to happen.”
However, the national security council would have an issue with those statements as the Trump administration was unquestionably warned about the risk of a potential pandemic and the danger it could pose to American citizens.
Politico reported that as far back as Trumps much maligned predecessor Barrack Obama’s (much maligned by Trump himself) tenure, there was a 69-page “playbook on fighting pandemics” compiled by the national security council in the wake of the 2016 Ebola outbreak.
This document contained advice on tracking the spread of a new virus, how to ensure testing was conducted effectively and the need to stockpile emergency resources.
You may be saying to yourself that this plan was written in the Obama era and only in relation to the Ebola outbreak in 2016 so therefore President Trump can’t be blamed for his statements.
The problem is that not only was the plan called a “playbook on fighting pandemics” not just Ebola, according to an anonymous official quoted by Politico, the incoming Trump administration was briefed on the playbook but it was “thrown on to a shelf”
And perhaps his administration could be forgiven for this slip up due to the unprecedented nature of the current situation, that is until you learn this wasn’t the only time they had been warned about the potential threats posed by a pandemic.
Last October, an internal federal government report warned how underprepared and underfunded the US would be in terms of tackling a virus without a cure. A position we find ourselves in just a few months later.
