Trumps tweeted "WE CANNOT LET THE CURE BE WORSE THAN THE PROBLEM ITSELF" and i cant believe I agree with him

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Meghan54

Lifer
Oct 18, 2009
11,504
5,027
136
Competent governments are struggling to dramatically change the outcome. You have a few pockets of success, primarily in countries that got a pandemic preview in recent year and had protocols in place, and even those are straining.

This is a global pandemic for which the global response is lacking direction.

I understand the desire to blame it all on Trump, but that desire lacks perspective.

Speaking of that...we ( and I mean the U.S. govt. and business) have had TWO pandemic exercises since Trump took office, in 2018 and 2019, and this doesn't count the 2013/7 exercise the outgoing Obama administration gave the incoming Trump administration on just this scenario.

And yet, despite this, Trump in each budget attempts to slash funding for the NIH, CDC, disbanded the group that was supposed to spearhead our response, etc. How's that for leadership?

Here, read. I know you won't but it's here:


Virus Pandemic Exercise Got One Thing Wrong: the U.S. Response

Last October, about 50 national security experts gathered in Washington to role-play a global response to a frightening scenario: a pandemic sparked by a mysterious new coronavirus ravages the world, hitting North Asia, Europe and the U.S. especially hard.

The exercise got a lot right about the pandemic now sweeping the globe. It concerned a virus that’s “highly transmissible via direct person-to-person contact,” overwhelms available resources and kills more than 3% of those infected, roughly equivalent to the current rate, with a workable vaccine trial many months away.

One thing it got badly wrong: Those involved -- a mix of professors, international-relations theorists, intelligence experts and others -- assumed the U.S. would lead the global response.

Even after almost three years living under President Donald Trump’s “America First” doctrine, few in the scenario predicted the U.S. would initially play down the threat, refuse for weeks to heed lessons learned by other nations struggling with the outbreak and treat institutions guiding the response -- like the World Health Organization -- with suspicion and scorn.

“What’s happening now is much worse in the sense that the U.S. response has been even more ineffective than we would have assumed,” said Sam Brannen, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies’ International Security Program, who helped lead the exercise. “The president undercutting his own officials and his messaging -- I’m stunned by the scale of it.”





Trump Administration Failed Dry Run ‘Crimson Contagion’ Pandemic Exercise
The 2019 simulation exposed underfunding, muddled leadership and equipment shortages that have plagued the U.S. coronavirus response.





We Were Warned

When the inevitable inquiry into the government's response to COVID-19 happens, it will conclude that signs of a coming crisis were everywhere.


We were warned in 2012, when the Rand Corporation surveyed the international threats arrayed against the United States and concluded that only pandemics posed an existential danger, in that they were “capable of destroying America’s way of life.”


We were warned in 2015, when Ezra Klein of Vox, after speaking with Bill Gates about his algorithmic model for how a new strain of flu could spread rapidly in today’s globalized world, wrote that “a pandemic disease is the most predictable catastrophe in the history of the human race, if only because it has happened to the human race so many, many times before.” If there was anything humanity could be certain that it needed to prepare for to prevent the deaths of a lot of people in little time, it was this.

We were warned in 2017, a week before inauguration day, when Lisa Monaco, Barack Obama’s outgoing homeland-security adviser, gathered with Donald Trump’s incoming national-security officials and conducted an exercisemodeled on the administration’s experiences with outbreaks of swine flu, Ebola, and Zika. The simulation explored how the U.S. government should respond to a flu pandemic that halts international travel, upends global supply chains, tanks the stock market, and burdens health-care systems—all with a vaccine many months from materializing. “The nightmare scenario for us, and frankly to any public-health expert that you would talk to, has always been a new strain of flu or a respiratory illness because of how much easier it is to spread” relative to other pandemic diseases that aren’t airborne, Monaco told me.

We were warned in 2018, on the 100th anniversary of the flu pandemic of 1918, which killed 50 to 100 million people around the world. Luciana Borio, then the director for medical and biodefense preparedness at the National Security Council, told a symposium that “the threat of pandemic flu is our number-one health security concern.” Serving under a president who’d come to office on the pledge to wall off the United States, she noted that such a threat could not “be stopped at the border.” The very next day, news broke that National Security Adviser John Bolton had shuttered the NSC’s unit for preparing and responding to pandemics, of which Borio was a part. The White House official in charge of spearheading such a response to infectious threats departed as well and was not replaced.

We were warned in 2018 and 2019, when the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security gathered public-health experts, business leaders, and U.S. government officials for simulations of the devastating humanitarian, political, social, and economic consequences of fictional novel coronaviruses that left tens of millions dead around the world. Participants exited the events thinking, “‘Oh my god, we really need to get working on this,’” Eric Toner, who helped run the exercises, told me. Two months after the second simulation, a novel coronavirus (albeit with what appears to be a substantially lower lethality rate than the fictional viruses in the scenarios at Johns Hopkins) emerged in China.

We were warned in 2019 of the grave hazards of a new influenza pandemic by the U.S. intelligence community in its annual “worldwide threat assessment.” They had also cautioned us in 2018. And in 2017. And in 2016. And in 2015. And in 2014. And in 2013, when intelligence officials pleaded, “This is not a hypothetical threat. History is replete with examples of pathogens sweeping populations that lack immunity, causing political and economic upheaval.” (The 2020 worldwide threat assessment, which reportedly yet again flagged America’s vulnerability to a flu pandemic, has been postponed without explanation.)

The above taken from this Atlantic article:


Not blaming Trump for the infection, blaming Trump for spending essentially the first six weeks of the outbreak belittling, obfuscating, lying, downplaying, denying the virus was serious/was a media hoax/Democrat hoax instead of getting shit together. His inaction, no....his lying and inability to take science seriously is going to kill many who don't have to....all for the dollar.








 
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Muse

Lifer
Jul 11, 2001
37,402
8,038
136
Speaking of competence it now appears that the US infection rate is going up at the worst rate in the entire world:


So the richest and most powerful country on Earth, one that benefits by significant natural isolation allowing us to more effectively track and control potential contagion, is dead last.
Trump is a dumb fuck for not shutting down the US like India is doing. The asshole is going to sacrifice the populace for his fantasy of a strong economy going into the election. He sees everything through that cat's eye. We're faced with the prospect of a complete debacle, particularly if Trump isn't voted out in November. Absent that, I feel, there's little hope.

Make no mistake, Trump is campaigning. He's a politician, pure and simple.
 
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fskimospy

Elite Member
Mar 10, 2006
83,717
47,404
136
Trump is a dumb fuck for not shutting down the US like India is doing. The asshole is going to sacrifice the populace for his fantasy of a strong economy going into the election. He sees everything through that cat's eye. We're faced with the prospect of a complete debacle, particularly if Trump isn't voted out in November. Absent that, I feel, there's little hope.

Make no mistake, Trump is campaigning. He's a politician, pure and simple.

Yup. Does anyone seriously doubt that if Trump were given the option that he would win re-election but millions of Americans would die he wouldn't take it?
 
Dec 10, 2005
23,987
6,788
136
Yup. Does anyone seriously doubt that if Trump were given the option that he would win re-election but millions of Americans would die he wouldn't take it?
And it wouldn't probably wouldn't be impeachable if he thought his re-election was for the good of the country per Republican logic.
 

JEDIYoda

Lifer
Jul 13, 2005
33,981
3,318
126
Competent governments are struggling to dramatically change the outcome. You have a few pockets of success, primarily in countries that got a pandemic preview in recent year and had protocols in place, and even those are straining.

This is a global pandemic for which the global response is lacking direction.

I understand the desire to blame it all on Trump, but that desire lacks perspective.
We all know that Trump didn`t directly insert the virus into our country! But what we all do know is that this son a of a bitch has tried repeatedly to dismantle the very agencies that are responsible for dealing with a pandemic!
Then this idiot of a President places the economy over the virus resp[onse!
Then this moron of a mother feaker has the audacity to try to use this to position himself for relection by saying this too shall pass and it will bt like having the common cold!
Even you must admit that Trump totally dropped the ball on this one and it will IMO come back to bite him.........
 

you2

Diamond Member
Apr 2, 2002
5,678
917
126
Well now trump is resorting to his old standby - it was someone else fault.
 

fskimospy

Elite Member
Mar 10, 2006
83,717
47,404
136
Killing millions through your stupidity is not specifically a high crime or misdemeanor.

No I mean if he thought that by making a deliberate choice that he would knowingly cause the deaths of millions but ensure his re-election he would do it.
 

brycejones

Lifer
Oct 18, 2005
25,991
23,788
136
No I mean if he thought that by making a deliberate choice that he would knowingly cause the deaths of millions but ensure his re-election he would do it.
I completely agree, I also think the GOP would consider it non-impeachable conduct for the reasons I mentioned which are complete horseshit but in line with their previous arguments.
 
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JEDIYoda

Lifer
Jul 13, 2005
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https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-usa-trump/trump-says-u-s-to-make-a-decision-on-coronavirus-outbreak-at-end-of-current-15-day-plan-idUSKBN21A0C6

Earlier on Sunday, Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said the lockdown affecting large segments of the American public was likely to last 10 to 12 weeks, or until early June.


Trump again expressed impatience with the effect of public health measures on the economy with that tweet.
I'm a Dem and i cant believe that im saying this but I agree with his tweet. :eek:
with more and more states telling people to stay home, unemployment could reach a high of 30%.

heck the current guidelines of no more than 10people max has already taken a toll on the econ.
estimates of New unemployment claims could be 2M when figures are released this Thurs. The previous record was 700k in 1982.
(https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-03-20/u-s-weekly-jobless-claims-could-exceed-2-million-goldman-says)

We need to find a balance.

i say go back to allowing groups of 50 to come together.
this will allow restaurants to have dine in (instead of the current take out only) and allow small businesses/retailers open again.
No we don`t need to find a balance!
If the cure is worse that the problem that is all right!! It will have been cured!
But if we let the problem fester with no cure then we lose everything!!
You would almost have to be a jack ass to tweet what Dumpity Trumpity tweeted!!
You would almost have to be a jack ass to believe that tweet!!
 

K1052

Elite Member
Aug 21, 2003
45,893
32,683
136
Oh he wants the economy roaring by Easter huh? The only roaring you’re going to hear is trucks carting away the bodies.
 
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JEDIYoda

Lifer
Jul 13, 2005
33,981
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It is a sad stae of affairs that we are supposedly the greatest country in the world yet we are so fucked!!!
 

Starbuck1975

Lifer
Jan 6, 2005
14,698
1,909
126
Speaking of that...we ( and I mean the U.S. govt. and business) have had TWO pandemic exercises since Trump took office, in 2018 and 2019, and this doesn't count the 2013/7 exercise the outgoing Obama administration gave the incoming Trump administration on just this scenario.

And yet, despite this, Trump in each budget attempts to slash funding for the NIH, CDC, disbanded the group that was supposed to spearhead our response, etc. How's that for leadership?

Here, read. I know you won't but it's here:


Virus Pandemic Exercise Got One Thing Wrong: the U.S. Response

Last October, about 50 national security experts gathered in Washington to role-play a global response to a frightening scenario: a pandemic sparked by a mysterious new coronavirus ravages the world, hitting North Asia, Europe and the U.S. especially hard.

The exercise got a lot right about the pandemic now sweeping the globe. It concerned a virus that’s “highly transmissible via direct person-to-person contact,” overwhelms available resources and kills more than 3% of those infected, roughly equivalent to the current rate, with a workable vaccine trial many months away.

One thing it got badly wrong: Those involved -- a mix of professors, international-relations theorists, intelligence experts and others -- assumed the U.S. would lead the global response.

Even after almost three years living under President Donald Trump’s “America First” doctrine, few in the scenario predicted the U.S. would initially play down the threat, refuse for weeks to heed lessons learned by other nations struggling with the outbreak and treat institutions guiding the response -- like the World Health Organization -- with suspicion and scorn.

“What’s happening now is much worse in the sense that the U.S. response has been even more ineffective than we would have assumed,” said Sam Brannen, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies’ International Security Program, who helped lead the exercise. “The president undercutting his own officials and his messaging -- I’m stunned by the scale of it.”





Trump Administration Failed Dry Run ‘Crimson Contagion’ Pandemic Exercise
The 2019 simulation exposed underfunding, muddled leadership and equipment shortages that have plagued the U.S. coronavirus response.





We Were Warned

When the inevitable inquiry into the government's response to COVID-19 happens, it will conclude that signs of a coming crisis were everywhere.


We were warned in 2012, when the Rand Corporation surveyed the international threats arrayed against the United States and concluded that only pandemics posed an existential danger, in that they were “capable of destroying America’s way of life.”


We were warned in 2015, when Ezra Klein of Vox, after speaking with Bill Gates about his algorithmic model for how a new strain of flu could spread rapidly in today’s globalized world, wrote that “a pandemic disease is the most predictable catastrophe in the history of the human race, if only because it has happened to the human race so many, many times before.” If there was anything humanity could be certain that it needed to prepare for to prevent the deaths of a lot of people in little time, it was this.

We were warned in 2017, a week before inauguration day, when Lisa Monaco, Barack Obama’s outgoing homeland-security adviser, gathered with Donald Trump’s incoming national-security officials and conducted an exercisemodeled on the administration’s experiences with outbreaks of swine flu, Ebola, and Zika. The simulation explored how the U.S. government should respond to a flu pandemic that halts international travel, upends global supply chains, tanks the stock market, and burdens health-care systems—all with a vaccine many months from materializing. “The nightmare scenario for us, and frankly to any public-health expert that you would talk to, has always been a new strain of flu or a respiratory illness because of how much easier it is to spread” relative to other pandemic diseases that aren’t airborne, Monaco told me.

We were warned in 2018, on the 100th anniversary of the flu pandemic of 1918, which killed 50 to 100 million people around the world. Luciana Borio, then the director for medical and biodefense preparedness at the National Security Council, told a symposium that “the threat of pandemic flu is our number-one health security concern.” Serving under a president who’d come to office on the pledge to wall off the United States, she noted that such a threat could not “be stopped at the border.” The very next day, news broke that National Security Adviser John Bolton had shuttered the NSC’s unit for preparing and responding to pandemics, of which Borio was a part. The White House official in charge of spearheading such a response to infectious threats departed as well and was not replaced.

We were warned in 2018 and 2019, when the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security gathered public-health experts, business leaders, and U.S. government officials for simulations of the devastating humanitarian, political, social, and economic consequences of fictional novel coronaviruses that left tens of millions dead around the world. Participants exited the events thinking, “‘Oh my god, we really need to get working on this,’” Eric Toner, who helped run the exercises, told me. Two months after the second simulation, a novel coronavirus (albeit with what appears to be a substantially lower lethality rate than the fictional viruses in the scenarios at Johns Hopkins) emerged in China.

We were warned in 2019 of the grave hazards of a new influenza pandemic by the U.S. intelligence community in its annual “worldwide threat assessment.” They had also cautioned us in 2018. And in 2017. And in 2016. And in 2015. And in 2014. And in 2013, when intelligence officials pleaded, “This is not a hypothetical threat. History is replete with examples of pathogens sweeping populations that lack immunity, causing political and economic upheaval.” (The 2020 worldwide threat assessment, which reportedly yet again flagged America’s vulnerability to a flu pandemic, has been postponed without explanation.)

The above taken from this Atlantic article:


Not blaming Trump for the infection, blaming Trump for spending essentially the first six weeks of the outbreak belittling, obfuscating, lying, downplaying, denying the virus was serious/was a media hoax/Democrat hoax instead of getting shit together. His inaction, no....his lying and inability to take science seriously is going to kill many who don't have to....all for the dollar.
I read both articles. Trump won the election on an America first, isolationist platform. Why is the world shocked that Trump would lead exactly as he said he would.

The first exercise you cited assumed the US as a global leader, but also global transparency. We can thank China for its lack of transparency, which allowed it to break out.

As for the second exercise, the government often runs simulations with the intent of exposing where systems and capabilities break down, but rarely makes the right forward thinking investments to mitigate the exposed risks.

The Army ran wargames in a post Cold War world, and one of the outcomes was that our soldiers did not have the right equipment to deploy for Somalia and Balkans like scenarios. The government didn’t make the necessary investments in response to those findings, but chose instead to downsize and end programs, which is why our soldiers had nothing but thinly armored HMMWV’s to protect them for urban operations in Afghanistan and Iraq.
 

Muse

Lifer
Jul 11, 2001
37,402
8,038
136
It is a sad stae of affairs that we are supposedly the greatest country in the world yet we are so fucked!!!
We have capabilities but we are highly disfunctional. Priorities we should have right now above all others:

1. Social distancing, immediately... not day(s) after required like we're seeing all too often (my area had it first, but not a day too soon)
2. ASAP - Making test kits of high reliability and quick results available in massive quantities all over the country
 

JEDIYoda

Lifer
Jul 13, 2005
33,981
3,318
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As for the second exercise, the government often runs simulations with the intent of exposing where systems and capabilities break down, but rarely makes the right forward thinking investments to mitigate the exposed risks.

The Army ran wargames in a post Cold War world, and one of the outcomes was that our soldiers did not have the right equipment to deploy for Somalia and Balkans like scenarios. The government didn’t make the necessary investments in response to those findings, but chose instead to downsize and end programs, which is why our soldiers had nothing but thinly armored HMMWV’s to protect them for urban operations in Afghanistan and Iraq.
So that begs the question which you did not answer -- Why was the government so unprepared? oh, I get it -- Dumpity Trumpity was Commander in Chief this time around....and slashing the governments critical agencies budgets,,,umm OK!!
Oh wait, stop the presses.....you are bringing up that China shit again........hahahaaaaaaa
 
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Muse

Lifer
Jul 11, 2001
37,402
8,038
136
Being a NYS resident, yes. Proud to have an actual leader as our governor.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think he (Cuomo) was a day or two late instituting effective social distancing. I was paying attention to his televised remarks and that was my thought during those few days.
 
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JEDIYoda

Lifer
Jul 13, 2005
33,981
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Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think he (Cuomo) was a day or two late instituting effective social distancing. I was paying attention to his televised remarks and that was my thought during those few days.
You are correct! But he has since stepped up to the plate big time!!
 

[DHT]Osiris

Lifer
Dec 15, 2015
14,004
12,070
146
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think he (Cuomo) was a day or two late instituting effective social distancing. I was paying attention to his televised remarks and that was my thought during those few days.
Pretty much everyone was, I don't think anyone wanted to be the first one to jump in the pool. Having said that, he's totally gone above and beyond at this point which I appreciate.
 
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hal2kilo

Lifer
Feb 24, 2009
23,331
10,236
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I read both articles. Trump won the election on an America first, isolationist platform. Why is the world shocked that Trump would lead exactly as he said he would.

The first exercise you cited assumed the US as a global leader, but also global transparency. We can thank China for its lack of transparency, which allowed it to break out.

As for the second exercise, the government often runs simulations with the intent of exposing where systems and capabilities break down, but rarely makes the right forward thinking investments to mitigate the exposed risks.

The Army ran wargames in a post Cold War world, and one of the outcomes was that our soldiers did not have the right equipment to deploy for Somalia and Balkans like scenarios. The government didn’t make the necessary investments in response to those findings, but chose instead to downsize and end programs, which is why our soldiers had nothing but thinly armored HMMWV’s to protect them for urban operations in Afghanistan and Iraq.
F off with the China shit. We had intelligence if not official China data. Carry some more water.
 

Atari2600

Golden Member
Nov 22, 2016
1,409
1,655
136
Keep fighting a global pandemic with TDS

Keep fighting a battle of intelligence with just 3 brain cells.

There was plenty of published & peer reviewed information out of China in January. Just too many arrogant westerners (and I include my own government and their "experts" in that), chose to ignore it.