The Trump administration eliminated a $200 million program to help scientists around the world predict pandemics before they get started, according to a report in the Los Angeles Times. Is it too much to call this decision criminal negligence? What’s the old poem? “For want of a nail, a kingdom was lost?” To save $200 million, a global pandemic was unleashed that killed many thousands of people and wrecked the world’s economy. Was the program scrapped to save money or because it was started by the Obama administration, which Trump hates?
Two months before the novel coronavirus probably began spreading in Wuhan, China, the Trump administration ended a $200-million pandemic early-warning program aimed at training scientists in China and other countries to detect and respond to such a threat.
The project, launched by the U.S. Agency for International Development in 2009, identified 1,200 different viruses that had the potential to erupt into pandemics, including more than 160 novel coronaviruses. The initiative, called PREDICT, also trained and supported staff in 60 foreign laboratories — including the Wuhan lab that identified 2019-nCoV, the new coronavirus that causes COVID-19.
Field work ceased when the funding ran out in September, and organizations that worked on the PREDICT program laid off dozens of scientists and analysts, said Peter Daszak, president of EcoHealth Alliance, a key player in the program.
On Wednesday, USAID granted an emergency extension to the program, issuing $2.26 million over the next six months to send experts who will help foreign labs squelch the pandemic. But program leaders say the funding will do little to further the initiative’s original mission.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Re “Was the program scrapped to save money or because it was started by the Obama administration, which Trump hates?” I doubt very much if Mr. Trump has the IQ or attention span to get himself involved in such matters. I think it is the low quality of his minions that result in such poor decision making. So, his hatred for all things Obama (a dog whistling effort if there ever was one) probably didn’t involve Mr. Trump this time.
Steve,
My guess is that one of Trump’s minions axed the program both to cut the budget and to kill something started during the Obama administration. Trump probably didn’t know what a pandemic was, didn’t care. Consider the caliber of people he appointed, and imagine the caliber of people they appointed. They were told to cut, cut, cut, and they did.
I understand that Donald Trump is a liar, but how does he get all those people to stand with him while he lies at the press conferences?
Why don’t THEY have any integrity? The problem seems to be bigger than President Trump.
Trump has surrounded himself with sycophants. Part of their job is to stand silently while he lies.
and NOT six feet away, always right behind him
This is a lie:
“President Donald Trump falsely claimed Wednesday that airplane and train passengers are being given “very strong tests” for the coronavirus both before departure and after arrival.”
And all the people he hires who are standing with him when he lies like this are ALSO lying if they don’t correct him. He has made them all liars.
The public sector has been intensely de-funded and continuously looted in favor of the private sector for the past 45 years. Progressive movements and labor unions which had built and defended the essential public sector were too weak, divided, and distracted to defend the public goods without which no society can prosper. The dismantling of the pandemic program was just another part of the evisceration of public needs which has been on the offensive since the progressive 1960s declined. Mass movements and robust labor unions will be needed again to secure the public goods taken from us–public parks, public transit, public housing, public schools and colleges, public stewardship of the air, land and water, etc.
Yes, exactly.
Train to Nowhere
Trump is the end
Of Neolib trend
Caboose on a train
Whose purpose is gain
The engine is greed
It’s not what we need
And heading is bane
Of all that is sane
Very true. This is a philosophical decision made by the present administration in perfect line with the idea that the government cannot do anything right. Those who believe in the absence of government can now see what it all comes to, if they open their eyes.
Pennywise, POTUSFOO-ISH
If you can, donate to food banks. The food bank here had a line out the door yesterday and it’s longer this morning. I knew people here couldn’t go more than two weeks without pay.
Donate money, not food. They buy in bulk and are nonprofits so can use the fund donations more efficiently than the food donations.
For a more balanced perspective on this matter, read the linked article and also the embedded links. The author is an atheist conservative who has often strongly criticized Trump.
https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/04/armchair-quarterbacks-try-to-rewrite-history-on-coronavirus/
The article you link to is a pathetic attempt to absolve Trump of any responsibility for his failure to take action in the early stages of the pandemic and his insistence for weeks that it was nothing worse than an ordinary flu season. Ordinary citizens did not have access to the information available to the highest level of the federal government. He did. Why did he make so many public statements dismissing the disease as insignificant? All of us saw them. Those statements are on tape. His echo chamber at FOX humiliated themselves by belittling the threat. Why are we now so unprepared, lacking the protective equipment for healthcare workers, accepting humanitarian aid from other countries?
If Trump were smart (he isn’t), he would do the uncharacteristic thing and say to the people what most already know, “I made a mistake here. A grave mistake. I underestimated the severity of this. But I have learned, and we will take whatever action we can to lessen this.” But Trump will never do that. His motto, “Never apologize. Never back down. Double down.”
This has worked well for Don the Con for decades. I suspect that this time, however, the gig is up. History will say that it worked until it didn’t.
The National Review… the right wing/libertarian rag that was founded by the crypto-fascist William F. Buckley who openly praised Franco and Pinochet.
From Dissent, 9-28-16:
“He is not an oppressive dictator,” the 1957 letter continued. “He is only as oppressive as it is necessary to be to maintain total power, and that, it happens, is not very oppressive, for the people, by and large, are content.” After Franco’s death, in 1975, Buckley would double down on this argument in an aside from an article on Pinochet, writing that Franco “believed in just as much repression as was necessary.
”https://www.dissentmagazine.org/online_articles/spanish-speaking-william-f-buckley
This absurd piece of rewriting of history by the National Review begins be accusing others of rewriting history. This is a play right out of the playbook that Trumpty Dumpty inherited from Roy Cohn. Lie. Accuse those who call you on it of being liars. What’s happening now was entirely predictable, except by profoundly ignorant people like IQ45–the same guy who told the fellow whom he referred to as “The Prince of Whales” that climate change was “just weather.”
Day broke again on April 2, and the sun appeared to rise, as it always does, due to the Earth’s rotation. “Nobody could have predicted this,” said Donald Trump, speaking from the Rose Garden. “It was like, who knew?”
The National Review should rename itself “The Ministry of Truth,” for it does the same job that Winston has in Orwell’s 1984. Rectifying history. A little something that Stalin picked up from the long history of autocratic usurpers, brought to the status of a fine art, and passed along to the likes of The Don, Cheeto “Littlefingers” Trumpbalone.
The usual Trump playbook of denying that he said what he said or did what he did and having people like Kellyann CON-way or Sarah Hucksterbee repeat the denial over and over on Fox News isn’t likely to work here, except among folks in Trump’s base base, who will believe anything. His denials and his fiddling while the virus burned through the country, in the face of warnings from scientists all over the world, are far, far too clear, to obvious. And that’s what history will say about this. However, my worry, right now, is that we are headed for extreme conditions of the kind that have, historically, allowed would-be autocrats to realize their dreams–one or two million deaths and economic apocalypse. Trump has always strutted about, playing the tough guy, except in the presence of actual dictators, where he suddenly becomes a sycophant and lap dog. To what extent will this situation give him the opportunity to become just like the folks he so admires–Putin, Dear Leader Kim, Duterte, Bolsanaro, Modi, etc?
Now it’s coming out that our government was negotiating and big businesses were selling critical medical supplies and ventilators to China in January when they should have been thinking about the virus spread here in the US. It also doesn’t help that Jared Kushner made an appearance to claim that the supplies that the Fed Gov’t has stockpiled are NOT for the States….but for those in the Fed Gov’t…..what the heck! our tax dollars paid for this stuff!! Me thinks these people running the country need a little kick in the butt Karma. Sorry, but cretins like this will never learn a lesson until it smacks them in their face.
The GOP, the anti-science, anti-working class party that caters to the crazy religious fundamentalist bible thumpers and the phony televangelist charlatans (nothing against sincerely religious folks). An incompetent president who surrounds himself with equally incompetent and unqualified toadies who are determined to destroy the agencies that they oversee….. what could possibly go wrong during a global pestilence. Keeping fingers crossed that we don’t have a major earthquake or meteor hit.
History is full of incidents where entire civilizations disappear when inadequate attention is paid to what is happening to the VITAL means of life support and consequently are reduced to a point where people in large numbers cannot survive. Trump is fomenting the latest in that history.
The 6th extinction has been examined by people FAR smarter than myself.
it is extremely difficult for most people to understand something which they have not personally experienced. It is understandable but the problem now is that too many people have lost faith in the people who DO understand.
A host of prominent scientists and economist have jointly signed a letter berating Fox “news” for promoting falsehoods which have and are having an horrific negative effect on our well being.
They needed the money to build the Kushner pavilion in the West Wing.
And to put Trumpty Dumpty on Mt. Rushmore
This will make quite the history one day–a piece of the history of how the Moronavirus spread and the delay in acting killed millions of Americans.
Here, a list of Trump’s statements about what he called, variously, the “Corona flu,” the “Caronavirus,” “just like the Common Cold,” the “Democrats’ new hoax,” and the “Chinavirus.”
https://bobshepherdonline.wordpress.com/2020/03/18/tracking-the-progress-of-the-moronavirus/
IQ45: The worst possible president at one of the worst possible times
I want to follow suit with all the butt kissers on stage with Trump. Read this article and say with me, “THANK YOU MR. PRESIDENT FOR YOUR EXCELLENT LEADERSHIP”
—————————————–From: “Diane Ravitch’s blog”
To: pbarton1@charter.net Cc: Sent: Friday April 3 2020 8:03:11AM Subject: [New post] L.A. Times: Trump Administration Killed Program to Predict Pandemics Before They Start
WordPress.com
dianeravitch posted: “The Trump administration eliminated a $200 million program to help scientists around the world predict pandemics before they get started, according to a report in the Los Angeles Times. Is it too much to call this decision criminal negligence? What’s the “
This one fact by itself should be repeated every day from thousands of blogs, via Facebook, Twitter and all the other major social network sites, since all the pulpits are now sitting in empty churches.