So you think the travel bans from China and Europe were completely useless? We couldv'e had millions of people moving into and out of the country. We couldn't had extras entering the country to flee the pandemic, bringing the disease with them as asymptomatic carriers. And I'll repeat: that was the ONLY legal tool in the President's shed. He did it too late for my tastes, and he still got slammed for it anyway (at least when banning travel from China; nobody seemed to mind much when he banned travel from Europe).
Late and ineffectual, by most reports. What I wrote was extremely clear; if you felt a travel ban was worthwhile, you needed to implement it very early and across the board. Allowing a large exception for American nationals when you had no monitoring program pretty much defeated the purpose.
Hence why it's more effective to implement local controls at the airports than to limit travel from a specific country or region. Also passes the legality test, which you keep referring to.
This isn't the first time you've said that the restrictions effectively only blocked Chinese nationals, which simply isn't true. Read it yourself:
On January 31, 2020, I issued Proclamation 9984 (Suspension of Entry as Immigrants and Nonimmigrants of Persons Who Pose a Risk of Transmitting 2019 Novel
www.whitehouse.gov
Stop saying the travel restrictions only applied to Chinese nationals. They applied to ALL foreign nationals who had recently traveled in the region. The travel ban that only considers nationality is China's own, where they stopped allowing all non-Chinese ("foreigners"). Get it straight.
You're right, it applied to all foreign nationals. Meanwhile, hundreds of thousands of people flew into the U.S. between Jan. 1 and mid-March.
Stop saying the travel restrictions "accomplished nothing" when scientists and doctors agree that it demonstrably delayed the spread. In no uncertain terms Dr. Fauci said this in front of the entire world. It's astoundingly ignorant to go on claiming that it "did nothing."
Overall I think Dr. Fauci has done a good job as a public face, but he's one guy and hardly the sole authority. He's also the guy who was interviewed by Fox News in late January and said the novel coronavirus was not a major problem? So hardly the best expert you want to be referring to IMO. You claim there's a consensus among "scientists and doctors" with no source. Most of the general news articles I've read stated otherwise. Here's a short and a long article on the subject:
https://apnews.com/0dc271ad7f7917374a5a0cfb49273783
https://www.factcheck.org/2020/03/the-facts-on-trumps-travel-restrictions/
Feel free to provide rebuttal credible sources, I'm glad to read them.
What bearing does a 2006 NIH conclusion regarding the efficacy of travel restrictions for a completely different virus have? Even if they were talking about the same virus, it doesn't conclude what you assume it concludes. It concludes that one thing is better than another thing when they aren't mutually-exclusive.
Just what do you think happened to Americans at the international airports that began early screening months ago? If they had symptoms they were tested and asked to self-quarantine. If they tested positive then they were asked to isolate. Same as anyone testing positive today except there also would have been a stronger effort made to do contact tracing in the early days. You're the one putting way too much faith in the ability of screeners to stop a virus that clearly has asymptompatic spreaders. Heck, even the flu has asymptomatic super-spreaders, which is why that NIH study is so short-sighted.
How did travel restrictions help when the virus was already here? By restricting travel where the outbreaks were known/large, you slow the influx of new outbreaks in your own country. Obviously. It's a lot easier to deal with the ones that are already here when you don't start new outbreaks all over by being stupid. "Herp derp: The virus is already here so why stop travel?" is about as stupid as "The virus is already here so why bother social distancing?"
You and your brother stand up the same straw man argument. Nobody said do nothing. You're missing the forest for the trees. We can debate on and on about the WHO, and whether CCP lied (they did). What's clear is that our federal government wasted weeks of time doing almost nothing, and that was the far greater contributor to the spread of Covid-19 in the U.S. To be fair, many other governments made similar errors, to varying degrees.
As for the designated U.S. international airports, if I'm not mistaken, we did little like the major East Asian international airports (who had screeners in full PPE, for example). IF you even spot symptoms, asking somebody to voluntarily self-isolate is very different from quarantining them on-site, esp. when you have zero enforcement controls.
SARS-CoV-2 was already spreading in WA state in January (and probably CA as well). And in NYC metro in February. You're touting these limited travel restrictions that by most accounts accomplished very little.
...sooooo "apolitical."
This entire conversation is happening because:
...they are clearly NOT the apolitical international health authority they claim to be
...they are not the apolitical international health authority everyone assumed/believed they were
...they are not the apolitical international health authority the media led us to believe
As you can see, the sentiment in the NYT article is what we are disagreeing with. It's what WHO is supposed to be, not what it is proving to be. I wouldn't link to a statement where the WHO claims to be apolitical in order to counter the argument that they are political despite their claims. That's what's in dispute here. The NYT article is in the same boat.
You claim to be accepting the word of 'health experts" regarding 'travel bans" except you aren't taking the word of public health experts who have asserted that the travel restrictions were effective at slowing the spread.
This isn't a call-out, but are you Taiwanese-American? It's fair game to criticize the WHO, which you guys have consistently been doing for weeks. Obviously I won't be changing your mind on this. What Trump is doing is entirely different, he's scapegoating them to deflect from his own failures. The NYT article was a news report, not an Op-Ed. It includes third-party quotes that support the assertion that Trump is scapegoating to shift blame, plain and simple. Your accusation is baseless, I referred to no direct claim from the WHO. NYT != WHO
On the political topic, the WHO is a UN agency so again it works for its member nations. The Republic of China lost the Chinese Civil War, so ultimately they were booted out of the UN. Now that doesn't preclude the WHO from accepting assistance from Taiwan but you're being silly if you think China should willingly make any concession to the One China Policy. For the record, I'm ethnic Chinese but I have zero roots to Greater China so I have no horse in this race. I have no affinity to the CCP, but I understand and respect the One China Policy. WHO senior officials aren't going to publicly say anything that would appear to question the One China Policy any more than they would say anything to criticize the Trump administration. That's what I mean by apolitical. Was the WHO too deferential to China and not strident enough in its public warnings? Yeah, very likely.
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