Public health and national security experts shake their heads when President Donald Trump says the coronavirus "came out of nowhere" and “blindsided the world.”
They've been warning about the next pandemic for years and criticized the Trump administration's decision in 2018 to dismantle a National Security Council directorate at the White House charged with preparing for when, not if, another pandemic would hit the nation.
“It would be nice if the office was still there,” Dr. Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases at the National Institute of Health, told Congress this week. “I wouldn't necessarily characterize it as a mistake (to eliminate the unit). I would say we worked very well with that office.”
The NSC directorate for global health and security and bio-defense survived the transition from President Barack Obama to Trump in 2017.
Trump's elimination of the office suggested, along with his proposed budget cuts for the CDC, that he did not see the threat of pandemics in the same way that many experts in the field did.
“One year later I was mystified when the White House dissolved the office, leaving the country less prepared for pandemics like COVID-19,” Beth Cameron, the first director of the unit, wrote in an op-ed Friday in The Washington Post.
She said the directorate was set up to be the “smoke alarm" and get ahead of emergencies and sound a warning at the earliest sign of fire — "all with the goal of avoiding a six-alarm fire."
It's impossible to assess the impact of the 2018 decision to disband the unit, she said. Cameron noted that biological experts remain at the White House, but she says it's clear that eliminating the office contributed to what she called a “sluggish domestic response.” She said that shortly before Trump took office, the unit was watching a rising number of cases in China of a deadly strain of the flu and a yellow fever outbreak in Angola.
“It's unclear whether the decision to disband the directorate, which was made in May 2018, after John Bolton became national security adviser, was a tactical move to downgrade the issue or whether it was part of the White House's interest in simplifying and shrinking the National Security Council staff," Cameron says.
The NSC during the Obama administration grew to about 250 professionals, according to Trump's current national security adviser, Robert O'Brien. The staff has been cut to about 110 or 115 staffers, he said.
When Trump was asked on Friday whether closing the NSC global health unit slowed the U.S. response, the president called it a “nasty” question because his administration had acted quickly and saved lives.
“I don't know anything about it,” Trump said.
Earlier, when asked about it, he said: “This is something that you can never really think is going to happen."
