April 4, 2020

USA: The United States Was Ranked The BEST-Prepared Country In The World To Handle A Pandemic In Late 2019 By The Johns Hopkins Center For Health Security And NTI.

Fox News
written by Gregg Re and Associated Press
Wednesday March 25, 2020

The United States was ranked the best-prepared country in the world to handle a pandemic in late 2019 by the Nuclear Threat Initiative (NTI) and the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security (JHCHS) -- an assessment seemingly at odds with claims by Democrats that the Trump administration left the country vulnerable to the ongoing coronavirus outbreak.

The Global Health Security Index was was "developed with guidance from an international panel of experts from 13 countries, with research by the Economist Intelligence Unit" from 2018 to 2019, The Washington Post reported last year. "More than 100 researchers spent a year collecting and validating publicly available data.”

At the same time, the paper noted that the U.S. score was still not perfect, and that "factors driving down the U.S. score include the risks of social unrest and terrorism, and low public confidence in government."

President Trump's campaign has argued in recent days that misinformation may be one of the leading causes of that lack of confidence. For example, Trump's team has pointed to claims by presidential contender Joe Biden that "no one on the National Security Council staff was put in charge" of pandemic preparedness, based on a report that in May 2018, then-National Security Adviser John Bolton eliminated the NSC’s Office of Global Health Security and Biodefense in a reorganization effort.

Rear Adm. R. Timothy Ziemer reportedly was ousted as senior director, and no replacement was named. But, FactCheck.org has determined that the matter amounted to a reorganization, and that “some team members [of the NSC pandemic office] were shifted to other groups, and others took over some of [the top official’s] duties.”

The White House says the NSC remains involved in responding to the coronavirus pandemic. A senior administration official said earlier this month that the NSC’s global health security directorate was absorbed into another division where similar responsibilities still exist, but under different titles. The work of coordinating policy and making sure that decisions made by Trump’s coronavirus task force are implemented is still the job of the NSC.

Separately, the Biden team has repeatedly argued that the president once referred to coronavirus as a "hoax." That claim has been refuted by numerous fact-checkers, including the Post's, which found that Trump was clearly referring to Democrats' efforts to blame him for the pandemic, not the virus itself.

Additionally, numerous Democrats, including Biden, have falsely claimed that the president cut the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) budget. The Associated Press has noted that those claims "distort" the facts.

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 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.

Nevertheless, misleading reports about the Trump campaign's pandemic response efforts have continued to spread. A recent report by Reuters that the U.S. had recently terminated a CDC position in China was widely cited by Democrats and reporters as evidence of a lack of preparedness, and formed the basis for a reporter's question at a recent White House coronavirus briefing.

But, the article itself made clear that experts didn't think the move had anything to do with the spread of coronavirus in the United States.

"One disease expert told Reuters he was skeptical that the U.S. resident adviser would have been able to get earlier or better information to the Trump administration, given the Chinese government’s suppression of information," the outlet noted.

“In the end, based on circumstances in China, it probably wouldn’t have made a big difference,” former CDC epidemiologist and Emory University professor Scott McNabb told Reuters.

“The problem was how the Chinese handled it," McNabb continued. "What should have changed was the Chinese should have acknowledged it earlier and didn’t.”

Regardless, some lawmakers are pushing for more action out of an abundance of caution. Rep. Gerald Connolly, D-Va., and Rep. Steve Chabot, R-Ohio, have introduced a bill that would require future administrations to have experts always in place to prepare for new pandemics.

“Two years ago, the administration dismantled the apparatus that had been put in place five years before in the face of the Ebola crisis,” Connolly said. “I think, in retrospect, that was an unwise move. This bill would restore that and institutionalize it.”

Connolly said the bill is not meant to be critical of the Trump administration. He said it’s a recognition that Trump had to name a coronavirus responder just like Obama had to name one for Ebola in 2014. “We can’t go from pandemic to pandemic,” Connolly said.

The House Foreign Affairs Committee on March 4 passed the measure, which is co-sponsored by 37 Democrats and five Republicans.
👇 I took a snapshot of John Hopkins rankings for you 👇

Here is Dr. Fauci on January 10, 2020 in VOA interview in video above:
I just found out that People's Television Network, Inc has blocked this video from being played on my website because this VOA News video has some of their content. So, you need to click the link on the video for it to open up on YouTube. (emphasis mine)
"Interesting thing about the current virus that we're seeing in Wuhan, China does not appear to spread certainly not readily and maybe not at all from human to human because there have been no cases of infection of healthcare workers who were taking care of the people with this disease unlike SARS in which the healthcare workers were vulnerable to getting infected when they were taking care of people with this disease."

VOA news then continues to report in the video above:

The outbreak comes just days before the lunar New Year when millions of Chinese will be traveling by train, plain, or bus to celebrate the holidays. An official from the transportation ministry says the agency will begin efforts to disinfect public transportation stations and cargo isles to prevent the spread of the virus.

Fox10 Phoenix published January 15, 2020: "Did you get your pen": Pelosi hands out pens LIKE CANDY after signing Impeachment articles.
NBC SF Bay Area
Monday February 24, 2020

Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi toured San Francisco's Chinatown Monday to send a message. She said there's no reason tourists or locals should be staying away from the area because of coronavirus concerns.

"That’s what we’re trying to do today is to say everything is fine here," Pelosi said. "Come because precautions have been taken. The city is on top of the situation."

Pelosi visited The Wok Shop, a temple and the Golden Gate Fortune Cookie Factory, which was started 58 years ago by owner Kevin Chan's mother and uncle.

Chan said his business is losing about $500-$800 a day, or about 70% on average. He believes the fear of the virus is racially motivated.

"I think it's because even if I walk out and cough a little bit — my throat is itchy — they look at me, 'Oh,' like this, 'scary,'" he said.

As Pelosi walked from the Golden Gate Fortune Cookie Factory to lunch at a dim sum restaurant, she hugged friends and waved to onlookers. She downplayed the racism issue, saying she understands people are concerned about China – the epicenter of the novel coronavirus.

"But that shouldn’t be carried over to Chinatown in San Francisco," she said. "I hope that it’s not that. But all I can say is, 'I’m here.' We feel safe and sound, so many of us coming here."

Pelosi did say she was concerned that President Donald Trump's budget cuts 19% of funding for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Back in February both Joe Biden and Mike Bloomberg (who hadn’t dropped out of the Democratic primary yet) accused President Trump of cutting funding to critical health agencies during a primary debate. “There’s nobody here to figure out what the hell we should be doing. And he’s defunded — he’s defunded Centers for Disease Control, CDC, so we don’t have the organization we need. This is a very serious thing," Bloomberg claimed.

The Obama-Biden administration "increased the budget of the CDC. We increased the NIH budget. ... He’s wiped all that out. ... He cut the funding for the entire effort," Biden claimed.

They were both wrong.

According to an Associated Press fact-check, proposed budget cuts never happened, and funding increased. They acknowledged that some public health experts believe that a bigger concern than White House budgets “is the steady erosion of a CDC grant program for state and local public health emergency preparedness,” but, they note, “that decline was set in motion by a congressional budget measure that predates Trump.”

The AP also noted that “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.”
Grabien News
written by Tom Elliott
Saturday March 21, 2020

When the Coronavirus entered most Americans’ radars, the deadly pandemic was largely contained to China. To try to keep the virus from entering America, President Trump on January 31st announced a ban on travel from China to the U.S.

The move was almost reflexively panned as “racist,” “xenophobic,” and not in line with science.

More than a month and a half later, it’s now widely acknowledged that limiting travel from “cluster” regions is one of the only ways to slow the virus’ rapid spread, and that this travel ban helped the United States gain time to prepare its defenses.

Americans themselves quickly began practicing “social distancing,” limiting their exposure to large groups of people where the virus can quickly spread exponentially. These common-sense measures were likewise derided as “racist.”

On the day the travel ban was announced, Joe Biden said: “The American people need to have a president who they can trust what he says about it, that he is going to act rationally about it. In moments like this, this is where the credibility of the president is most needed as he explains what we should and should not do. This is no time for Donald Trump’s record of hysteria xenophobia — hysterical xenophobia and fear-mongering.”

When Americans began practicing “social distancing,” Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) accused them of racism.

“Honestly, it sounds almost so silly to say, but there’s a lot of restaurants that are feeling the pain of racism, where people are literally not patroning [sic] Chinese restaurants, they’re not patroning [sic] Asian restaurants because of just straight up racism around the Coronavirus,” she said on Instagram Live.

Her Democratic colleague, Rep. Ayanna Pressley (D-Mass.) likewise accused Americans of being “racist” for practicing what are now widely accepted as the best practices to prevent Coronavirus’ spread.

“You know, since the beginning of the COVID-19 outbreak, we’ve seen not only the spreading of the virus but also a rapid spreading of racism and xenophobia,” the lawmaker said during a congressional oversight hearing. “We have witnessed it at the highest levels and, in fact, the Republican Party fanning, irresponsibly, these flames. One colleague tweeted that, ‘Everything you need to know about the Chinese Coronavirus.’ My district is home to nearly 32 percent foreign-born residents, with more than a quarter immigrating from Asia. This painful rhetoric has consequences. Restaurants across Boston’s Chinatown have seen up to an 80% drop in business. And I believe this has everything to do with the rapid spread of misinformation and paranoia.”

Americans, and Trump, were likewise attacked in the media. On CNN, contributor Jeff Yang said Americans were being racist for avoiding crowds and especially those sneezing and coughing.

“A lot of Asian-Americans and Asians in other countries, who are experiencing I guess you could say a metaphorically cold shoulder when it comes to being in public and simply being, you know, Chinese in a crowded space,” Yang said. “It’s something that causes people to part like the red sea, daring to cough or sneeze causes people to actually shy away from you. There is a sense in which people feel very much like there’s a kind of racial profiling occurring, simply because the disease so is far has been primarily limited in terms of fatalities.”

Yang additionally attacked Americans for connecting the spread of the Coronavirus to Chinese eating habits, even as scientists and China’s communist government agree that the virus can be traced back to “wet markets” where wild animals are sold for human consumption. “It is simply just beyond extreme and not held up by scientific data,” Yang said.

TV talking heads also claimed Trump’s Chinese travel ban is oppositional to science. The founding dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine and frequent MSNBC guest, Peter Hotez, said: “Historically travel bans tend not to work very well, they tend to be counter productive.”

The health and biopharma news site, STAT, claimed the travel ban would help spread the virus further:

“The Trump administration’s decision to ban most foreign nationals who had been to China in the last two weeks from traveling to the United States amid an accelerating outbreak of a novel coronavirus there was preceded by calls for similar policies from conservative lawmakers and far-right supporters of the president. Public health experts, however, warn that the move could do more harm than good.

The administration’s public health emergency declaration also requires U.S. citizens returning from China to undergo some level of quarantine, depending on where they had been in China.

Vox “reported” the evidence proves these travel bans don’t work:
BuzzFeed called the travel ban an “overreaction,” which the Heritage Foundation’s Lyndsey Fifield recently recalled:
👇 GREAT LONG THREAD TO READ 👇
click Lyndsey's tweet below and scroll down.
UPDATE 4/4/20 at 8:39pm: Added info below.
👇 WHO delcared Global Pandemic on March 11. 👇
first case of human to human transmission in US on Feb 26.
President Trump declared China travel ban on January 31.

Posted by Princess Mononoke at 5:32 PM

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