[entee]

I can't upvote this enough. We HAD a plan, both Bush and Obama put together pandemic response plans. We had serious issues in logistics and deployment for sure. We had some screw-ups in early testing for sure. Maybe we should grant some margin for error when there's a lot of uncertainty early on, but after about March or so, the errors are on pure government failure. The CDC isn't solely responsible here, but it has been an embarrassment given the skills it should have had and claimed to have.

[bourgwaletariat]

Again, you're rewriting history. https://www.politico.com/news/2020/05/04/joe-biden-contain-h...

[melling]

Can you be specific to what you are referring to? I’m not sure what’s the point?

“‘Listen, we need to be aggressive early on this,’” Biden announced, according to Brennan.

The next week, Biden made good on his pledge — and set off a deluge of criticism. In an interview on NBC’s “Today,” Biden said he wouldn’t advise his family to fly on planes or ride the subway.

[bourgwaletariat]

I am specifically saying that the pandemic plan you say was in place prior to Trump would not have been effective with COVID, as evidenced by the statements of those who implemented that plan before.

"It is purely a fortuity that this isn’t one of the great mass casualty events in American history,” Ron Klain, who was Biden’s chief of staff at the time, said of H1N1 in 2019. “It had nothing to do with us doing anything right. It just had to do with luck."

[entee]

A couple other perhaps more useful quotes from the same article:

“Despite Trump’s assertions, few close observers of Obama’s and Biden’s response to H1N1 consider it a “full scale disaster.” And Biden, despite his early messaging problems, played a role in mobilizing the administration and ensuring enough resources were devoted to defeating the pandemic.”

And just some of the “lessons learned” section:

“ To keep Ebola from spreading further beyond Africa, the administration, which already had dispatched 3,000 troops to West Africa to help contain the spread, had to send public health workers to the affected countries via commercial airlines. This would not be dangerous unless a person was exposed to the blood or other bodily fluids of an Ebola victim. But pilots, passengers, airport workers and others in American cities from which the workers came and went had to be put at ease about the possible spread of the contagion.”

“Fauci was dispatched to cable news shows. Employing another lesson of the H1N1 days, Klain recruited the CDC's Frieden to join him in briefings to add medical credibility to the administration’s assertions.”

2009 may have been luck. They learned things, put together a plan, that plan was trashed by the new administration.

[bourgwaletariat]

Perhaps not. How many times must someone lie to you before you stop believing them? And worse, shilling for them?

[entee]

That’s a pretty disingenuous link. The Bush administration did have a plan for Flu and was thinking about the issue. In 2015 (your article recounts stories of H1N1 in 2009) the Obama administration established NSC level officials responsible for pandemic work, Trump disbanded it in 2018. Nobody knows whether those plans would have worked, but A plan is better than NO plan every time. Even so, president “inject detergent”, “liberate America”or whatever, may have screwed it all up. But no, it is not rewriting history to say there were plans that might have helped if implemented. We’ll never know due to institutional failure in part encouraged by the last administration.

https://jamanetwork.com/channels/health-forum/fullarticle/27...

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1283304/