ANDREW CUOMO FOR PRESIDENT

So does the guy who says that they were simply "streamlining" the NSC, and that it wouldn't affect their response to a disease outbreak, think we're doing a good job of responding to the current pandemic?

“We worked very well with that office,” Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institutes of Health’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, told Congress on March 11. “It would be nice if the office was still there.” - Time, March 19, 2020

“The Global Health Security directorate was absorbed into another directorate where similar responsibilities still exist at the National Security Council but under different titles,” a senior administration official tells TIME, insisting that the NSC continues to be “staffed by officials with extensive experience and expertise including in virology, infectious disease epidemiology, global health security, public health, and emergency response.” The official spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak publicly.

But others say that dismantling that team, and downgrading the role of its director, sent a signal to the entire U.S. government that the post no longer mattered. “What it did was it told everyone in the interagency that Bolton and the President don’t value this because they took away the senior director position, and gave it to worker bees,” Bernard says.

As I shared back in January in the "Are numbers mounting" topic, a quote from an article from the Washington Post from 2018:

The top White House official responsible for leading the U.S. response in the event of a deadly pandemic has left the administration, and the global health security team he oversaw has been disbanded under a reorganization by national security adviser John Bolton.

The abrupt departure of Rear Adm. Timothy Ziemer from the National Security Council means no senior administration official is now focused solely on global health security. Ziemer’s departure, along with the breakup of his team, comes at a time when many experts say the country is already underprepared for the increasing risks of a pandemic or bioterrorism attack.

Also from that Washington Post article:

Pandemic preparedness and global health security are issues that require government-wide responses, experts say, as well as the leadership of a high-ranking official within the White House who is assigned only this role.

“Health security is very fragmented, with many different agencies,” said J. Stephen Morrison, senior vice president at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “It means coordination and direction from the White House is terribly important.”

His exit comes against the backdrop of other administration actions critics say have weakened health security preparedness, including dwindling financing for early preventive action against infectious disease threats abroad.

Trump disbanded NSC pandemic unit that experts had praised
By DEB RIECHMANN, AP News | March 14, 2020

Before Trump’s inauguration, a warning: ‘The worst influenza pandemic since 1918’
In a tabletop exercise days before an untested new president took power, officials briefed the incoming administration on a scenario remarkably like the one he faces now.
By NAHAL TOOSI, DANIEL LIPPMAN and DAN DIAMOND, Politico | 03/16/2020

Obama officials walked Trump aides through global pandemic exercise in 2017: report
By Zack Budryk, The Hill | 03/17/20

Pandemic Disease Is a Threat to National Security
Washington Should Treat It Like One
By Lisa Monaco, Foreign Affairs | March 3, 2020

On January 13, 2017, national security officials assembled in the White House to chart a response to a global pandemic. A new virus was spreading with alarming speed, causing global transportation stoppages, supply-chain disruptions, and plunging stock prices. With a vaccine many months away, U.S. health-care infrastructure was severely strained.

No, I didn’t get that date wrong. This happened: it was part of a transition exercise that outgoing officials from the administration of President Barack Obama convened for the benefit of the incoming team of President Donald Trump. As Homeland Security and Counterterrorism Adviser to President Obama, I led the exercise, in which my colleagues and I sat side by side with the incoming national security team to discuss the most pressing homeland security concerns they would face. Obama and Vice President Joseph Biden made ensuring a professional transition a top priority, so we followed the excellent example of our predecessors, who held a similar exercise in 2009. After 9/11, congressional legislation mandated such efforts in order to safeguard the country’s security through presidential transitions.

During the exercise, we put together plausible scenarios and offered lessons learned. Although the exercise was required, the specific scenarios we chose were not. We included a pandemic scenario because I believed then, and I have warned since, that emerging infectious disease was likely to pose one of the gravest risks for the new administration.

Moreover, for the first time since 9/11, the White House lacks a Homeland Security Adviser empowered to oversee its response to the top transnational threats of terrorism, cyberwarfare, and pandemic disease.

The Facts on Trump’s Travel Restrictions
By Robert Farley, FactCheck.org | Posted on March 6, 2020

Trump and his administration had plenty of heads-up that this was a very real possibility and to prepare for it. They made choices that caused us to be less prepared. Moreover, as it began to take off, Trump downplayed this calling it a hoax perpetrated by Democrats to ruin his re-election. Then he said it was no big deal and would "go away soon." His press briefing at the CDC was cringe-worthy. His round-table with pharmaceutical companies disturbing (no, you cannot use a flu vaccine to fight the coronavirus, and you can't rush a vaccine to production in anything less than 18 months).

That South Korea had tested over 220,000 people in the time we'd tested 25,000 people is an appalling embarrassment; why did we not get the tests that other countries were using that worked? Why are we still not mass-testing so we can get a handle on how many people are actually infected, do contact tracing, and quarantine those who need to be rather than having to mass shelter-in-place entire counties in multiple states (and soon, whole states).

They can't even seem to manage the Strategic National Stockpile efficiently in order to help hospitals already hit hard by patients. Instead, we see nurses and doctors begging people to sew make-shift face masks for them since they're reusing single-use supplies and putting themselves at greater risk for becoming infected while trying to care for patients.
Here’s Why Florida Got All the Emergency Medical Supplies It Requested While Other States Did Not
The Department of Health and Human Services has come under fire as several states’ requests for supplies from the emergency medical stockpile go unfulfilled. A chaotic distribution plan is buckling under a big problem: Nobody has enough.

Medical providers, fearing equipment shortages, tap into secret national supply network

The Strategic National Stockpile: Origin, Policy Foundations, and Federal Context

He and his administration have mishandled this crisis and will cause additional deaths and serious harm to our economy. Hell, he can't even handle a softball lobbed his way from a reporter that should've been a homerun scoring political points reassuring the American people that he cared about their suffering and was doing everything he could to help us all through this crisis; instead, he chose to attack the reporter for his question.

Malignant narcissists make terrible leaders in tough times. To be fair, he inherited a healthcare system that was still broken, and that this virus got out of control and has made it to over 100 other countries infecting over 300,000 people is absolutely on China and their suppression of early warnings, and ongoing lying about the stats and origin of the outbreak (they can f*** all the way off trying to say that this is a U.S. created and targeted bioweapon). There damn well better be some repercussions for them for all that. But, he and his party continue every effort to dismantle the ACA for millions of Americans, he spent a crucial several first weeks trying to downplay how serious this was rather than taking immediate steps to ramp up preparation for infections, and continues to dismiss science when convenient for them and their dark money donors.

Bill Gates gets it, and has been working to prepare the world for this for years. The CDC and WHO have been cautioning people to continue to get vaccinated for all the other diseases we suffer but can prevent as they've watched immunization rates go down due to misinformation campaigns that cause parents to irrationally choose not to immunize, disease outbreaks increase, and outright hostility to science and scientists get worse.

The next outbreak? We’re not ready | Bill Gates
TED Talk, Apr 3, 2015