you need to go by factual history instead of what that BLOWHARD trump says...
Contrary to Trump’s suggestion that the Obama administration did “nothing,” officials declared a public health emergency early in the H1N1 outbreak, secured funding from Congress and ultimately declared a national emergency, as we’ll explain below.
On top of that, the CDC sequenced the new virus, created testing kits, and the Food and Drug Administration approved multiple vaccines, among other actions.
Rep. Michael Burgess, a Republican from Texas, praised the CDC at a House hearing in 2016 for quickly developing a vaccine for the swine flu in about six months — in time for the start of the school year in September 2009. “So that’s a 6-month time frame if I’m doing my math correctly that you were able to identify the genetic sequence of the virus, reverse engineer a vaccine, test it, assure its safety and efficacy, and get it to school teachers on the second week of school. That’s pretty impressive,” he said.
Trump said in a tweet that the Obama administration’s response to the 2009 H1N1 pandemic “was a full scale disaster.” While he can have that opinion, there is little to support such a negative view.
A New York Times article from January 2010 said that while some mistakes were made, a variety of experts thought the administration had generally handled things well.
William Schaffner of Vanderbilt University School of Medicine told the Times that officials deserved “at least a B-plus,” while Mount Sinai virologist Peter Palese called the overall response “excellent.”
Obama’s Emergency DeclarationsIn one tweet, Trump quoted Fox Business Network’s Lou Dobbs as misleadingly claiming that it “took 6 months for President Obama to declare a National Emergency” for the H1N1 “swine flu” outbreak that “killed 12,000 Americans.” It’s true that Obama didn’t declare a national emergency for six months, but that ignores several other steps the administration took, including declaring a public health emergency the same month that the novel H1N1 infections were first reported. |
