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Originally posted by wtg:
Why bother to control the message? The administration hasn't done that for the last three years. Mr Tweet just says whatever he wants, and everyone scrambles to deal with the fallout.

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Officials at the Department of Health and Human Services sent more than a dozen workers to receive the first Americans evacuated from Wuhan, China, the epicenter of the coronavirus outbreak, without proper training for infection control or appropriate protective gear, according to a whistleblower complaint.

The workers did not show symptoms of infection and were not tested for the virus, according to lawyers for the whistleblower, a senior HHS official based in Washington who oversees workers at the Administration for Children and Families, a unit within HHS.

The whistleblower is seeking federal protection, alleging she was unfairly and improperly reassigned after raising concerns about the safety of these workers to HHS officials, including those within the office of Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar. She was told Feb. 19 that if she does not accept the new position in 15 days, which is March 5, she would be terminated.

The whistleblower has decades of experience in the field, received two HHS department awards from Azar last year and has received the highest performance evaluations, her lawyers said.

The complaint was filed Wednesday with the Office of the Special Counsel, an independent federal watchdog agency. The whistleblower’s lawyers provided a copy of a redacted 24-page complaint to The Washington Post. A spokesman for the Office of the Special Counsel said he could not comment on complaints filed with the office.

The complaint alleges HHS staff were “improperly deployed” and were “not properly trained or equipped to operate in a public health emergency situation.” The complaint also alleges the workers were potentially exposed to coronavirus because appropriate steps were not taken to protect them and staffers were not trained in wearing personal protective equipment, even though they had face-to-face contact with returning passengers. The workers were in contact with passengers in an airplane hangar where evacuees were received and on two other occasions: when they helped distribute keys for room assignments and hand out colored ribbons for identification purposes.

In some instances, the teams were working alongside personnel from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in “full gown, gloves and hazmat attire,” the complaint said.

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The risk of spread and impact of the coronavirus is now very high at a "global level", World Health Organization chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus told reporters in Geneva on Friday.

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In a 2001, when Pence was running for Congress, he wrote a post on his campaign website warning against "the worst kind of Washington-speak" about regulating tobacco.

"Time for a quick reality check. Despite the hysteria from the political class and the media, smoking doesn't kill," he wrote in the article dug up by BuzzFeed News.

He continued, without citing sources: "In fact, 2 out of every 3 smokers does not die from a smoking related illness and 9 out of ten smokers do not contract lung cancer." [The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says "people who smoke cigarettes are 15 to 30 times more likely to get lung cancer or die from lung cancer than people who do not smoke."]

Pence conceded that "smoking is not good for you," and urged people to quit. But he suggested that "back handed big government disguised in do-gooder health care rhetoric" would be "more harmful to the nation" than second-hand smoke. He also equated the dangers of smoking to fatty foods, caffeine and sports utility vehicles.

Years later, in Congress, Pence voted against legislation giving the Food and Drug Administration power to regulate the tobacco industry and adding new warning labels to tobacco products and ads. The bill passed, and President Obama signed it into law.

The CDC says smoking "is the leading cause of preventable death," with cigarette smoke responsible for more than 480,00 deaths per year in the United States (including more than 41,000 deaths from secondhand smoke exposure). It says tobacco use causes more than 7 million deaths per year worldwide.