Mentally unfit sociopath and pathological liar Donald "Moron Vector" Trump and his cohort are furiously gaslighting us on their lack of preparedness for the COVID-19 outbreak, when in fact an exercise called "Crimson Contagion" in 2019 simulated a flu pandemic and demonstrated how unprepared the country was. He and his senior officials ignored the findings:
"Asked at his news briefing on Thursday about the government’s preparedness, Mr. Trump responded: 'Nobody knew there would be a pandemic or epidemic of this proportion. Nobody has ever seen anything like this before.'Our earlier post links to the disturbing news that Trump's gaslighting, aided by many in the broken Beltway media who are desperately trying to make a President out of him, is starting to succeed in the polls. It's essential that his lies and distractions be called out in real time, not after he's moved on to others.
The work done over the past five years, however, demonstrates that the government had considerable knowledge about the risks of a pandemic and accurately predicted the very types of problems Mr. Trump is now scrambling belatedly to address.
Crimson Contagion, the exercise conducted last year in Washington and 12 states including New York and Illinois, showed that federal agencies under Mr. Trump continued the Obama-era effort to think ahead about a pandemic.
But the planning and thinking happened many layers down in the bureaucracy. The knowledge and sense of urgency about the peril appear never to have gotten sufficient attention at the highest level of the executive branch or from Congress, leaving the nation with funding shortfalls, equipment shortages and disorganization within and among various branches and levels of government.
The October 2019 report in particular documents that officials at the Departments of Homeland Security and Health and Human Services, and even at the White House’s National Security Council, were aware of the potential for a respiratory virus outbreak originating in China to spread quickly to the United States and overwhelm the nation.
“Nobody ever thought of numbers like this,’’ Mr. Trump said on Wednesday, at a news conference.
In fact, they had." (our emphasis)
BONUS: Also --
“Donald Trump may not have been expecting this, but a lot of other people in the government were — they just couldn't get him to do anything about it,” this official said. “The system was blinking red.” https://t.co/LTmZmxNz79— Noah Shachtman (@NoahShachtman) March 21, 2020
