Surely you jest? When Trump fired Rear Adm. Timothy Ziemer from the National Security Council and completely reorganized under John Bolton it meant no senior administration official is now focused solely on global health security. This completely gutted our pandemic and bioterrorism attack response capability. This left us completely unprepared and defenseless against coronavirus!
There is absolutely no excuse for this. You can pretend that it was just inexperience, but when you fire the experienced people and surround yourself with yes men who have no experience, then it is not a valid excuse! It is in fact inexcusable incompetence that will likely cost us many lives worldwide! This is NOT politics. This is simply idiocy. Not ideology! It is rational objective critique of actions and inaction made by an incompetent clown. Not because of the ridiculous troll things the twit tweets about. We all know that is just to get publicity. I am instead referring to real life actions affecting national security and the health and lives many Americans.
There is a time when we need to admit the buck really does stop there, and stop with the excuses. There is no excuse.
The broad outlines of how to drive a virus like SARS-COV-2 into (effective) extinction have been known for quite a while. And the global experience with SARS validated all the key points and then some.
Nothing new*: test, trace, isolate. Communicate openly, honestly, and transparently. Cooperate.
For COVID-19 there are several "proofs", which include what happens when you fail to actually implement any of the key aspects; for example Taiwan, South Korea, Singapore, Macau, Hong Kong, Australia (Ruby Princess anyone?).
Bodies like the WHO play an important role, but it's governments (or administrations, if you prefer) which must lead most of the heavy lifting. And the heavy lifting involves a lot of doing things that are consistent with very clear results from the sciences of epidemiology and virology.
At the global level, I think there are only three entities with the resources to lead implementation: the US, China, and the European Union (EU). Unfortunately, the structure of the EU makes it almost impossible for it to play any significant leadership role; indeed, its "freedom of movement" core value seems tailor-made for the spread of things like COVID-19. Likewise, the default "unless we say otherwise, everything is a state secret" core value of the PRC hobbles its ability to lead.
Maybe, when the economic impact of failing to act according to well-understood principles has sunk in, serious international efforts will be made to ensure there will never again be a global pandemic like COVID-19.
*
As January has become April, many articles in the mainstream press have made it abundantly clear that not only were the key tools and techniques well-understood, in a great many governments, well before late 2019, but that war-gaming, scenario planning, and even some quite detailed preparation had been done. In at least one major country, much of this came to naught when the pandemic struck.
