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by TMWNN·6y ago·view on hn ↗
Ah yes, yet another person who looked at the Snopes piece's headline and nothing else. One would think reading it, and the Twitter thread it is based on, that to save money (or because the Trump administration hates science, or something) the entire "US Pandemic Response Team" agency was eliminated to save money and everyone in a large DC office building was fired.

Actually reading the contemporary NBC News https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/politics-news/tom-bossert-t... and Washington Post https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/to-your-health/wp/2018/0... articles it cites, they seem to have been a handful of people in one team in the National Security Council hierarchy, that the new National Security Advisor reassigned to related agencies, as part of a desire to have his own hierarchical structure. Ziemer resigned because he wanted to keep his team the way it was.

COVID19 was not a surprise; that is, it was known to exist in China some time before the first cases appeared in the US. It is not unreasonable for a government to assemble a team to respond to something like a pandemic as needed, as opposed to having people dedicated solely to the purpose and nothing else. And that's exactly what the US did, implementing the ban on non-American travelers who'd been to China in late January, among other things.

You may or may not agree with this. But please don't claim that this is somehow prima facie proof of the Trump administration's malfeasance/evilness.

PS - No, Trump did not "cut the CDC budget" either. https://apnews.com/d36d6c4de29f4d04beda3db00cb46104

1 comments
You put significant effort into writing a rational post, but delivered it with disdain and sarcasm right from the start.
One gets tired of having to respond over and over to people who read a Snopes headline (not even the entire article; as I said, it relies on a Twitter thread (!) to mark the claim "true", but at least Snopes does cite two contemporaneous news accounts that say otherwise) and mindlessly repeat it without actually looking into the claim.

And further, my sarcasm was based on reality. Are you denying that the connotation of claims like "Trump fired the Pandemic Response Team" and "Trump cut the CDC budget" are not akin to what I described in my first paragraph?