| | | Trump Didn’t Just Botch the Coronavirus Response. He Enabled Its Spread.
Michael Daly
The Daily Beast•February 28, 2020
Even as China was announcing that its deaths from the novel coronavirus had surpassed its toll from SARS, President Donald Trump released a proposed budget for 2021 that slashed funding for our chief defender against epidemics by 18 percent.
Within the overall proposed cuts detailed on Feb. 10 for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention was a reduction in spending to guard against “emerging and zoonotic diseases” from $635,772,000 to $550,464,000.
Zoonotic diseases are those that have crossed from animals to humans, as the novel coronavirus is believed to have done. The $85,308,000 proposed budget cut is less than the cost of 5 miles of border wall.
The budget proposal would save the cost of another 2 miles of border wall by zeroing out a $40 million funding line for the Epidemic and Lab Capacity Program. The ELCP supports state labs that monitor health emergencies at the local level. A state lab in Texas confirmed the first case of Ebola in the U.S. in 2014.
For the cost of less than 7 miles of border wall, the proposed budget would leave all of us less protected against a potential epidemic. The Trump administration made its priorities even more explicit when Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar discounted a suggestion that border wall funds could be diverted to fight the spread of the coronavirus.
We might have had earlier warning of the outbreak, but previous budget cuts caused the CDC to end its global security program in China in 2017.
In another failure of foresight two years ago, the White House eliminated the National Security Council’s position for combating global health crises. The NSC’s Senior Director for Global Health Security and Biothreats post was held by the highly regarded Rear Admiral Tim Ziemer—whose sudden departure in May of 2018 happened to coincide with a new Ebola outbreak in Africa.
That outbreak proved to be no threat to America, so most of us quickly forgot about it. So what if there was no longer anybody on the security council to guard against such threats? And as long as the rich are getting their tax breaks and the stock market is booming, who cares if the CDC is being cut year after year?
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