04-09-2020, 09:50 PM
Janit wrote:
[quote=DP]
That is a myth that no one saw this coming.
I'm talking about the virus itself.
If you know that a gang of thugs is hanging out in the neighborhood, waiting to attack, you don't need to know which particular thug it will be in order to be prepared.
Predicted by Bill Gates, 2015:
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/fact...890900001/
Our ruling: True
In his 2015 TED talk, Gates does not specifically call out the coronavirus but does predict the impact of a potential epidemic and lays out a path for preparing for it. Based on our research, we determine the claim that Bill Gates nominally predicted the coronavirus pandemic – and the world's ability to respond to it – to be TRUE.
So, yeah.
Predicted.
And just for the bonus points...
https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/trump-...emic-team/
Did Trump Administration Fire the US Pandemic Response Team?
True
Amid warnings from public health officials that a 2020 outbreak of a new coronavirus could soon become a pandemic involving the U.S., alarmed readers asked Snopes to verify a rumor that U.S. President Donald Trump had “fired the entire pandemic response team two years ago and then didn’t replace them.”
The claim came from a series of tweets posted by Judd Legum, who runs Popular Information, a newsletter he describes as being about “politics and power.” Legum’s commentary was representative of sharp criticism from Democratic legislators (and some Republicans) that the Trump administration had ill-prepared the country for a pandemic even as one was looming on the horizon...
Rear Adm. Timothy Ziemer abruptly departed from his post leading the global health security team on the National Security Council in May 2018 amid a reorganization of the council by then-National Security Advisor John Bolton, and Ziemer’s team was disbanded. Tom Bossert, whom the Washington Post reported “had called for a comprehensive biodefense strategy against pandemics and biological attacks,” had been fired one month prior.
It’s thus true that the Trump administration axed the executive branch team responsible for coordinating a response to a pandemic and did not replace it, eliminating Ziemer’s position and reassigning others, although Bolton was the executive at the top of the National Security Council chain of command at the time.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/opinion/i...r-BB1192Xy
I ran the White House pandemic office. Trump closed it.
Editor’s note: The opinions in this article are the author’s, as published by our content partner, and do not necessarily represent the views of MSN or Microsoft.
Beth Cameron is vice president for global biological policy and programs at the Nuclear Threat Initiative. She previously served as the senior director for global health security and biodefense on the White House National Security Council.
When President Trump took office in 2017, the White House’s National Security Council Directorate for Global Health Security and Biodefense survived the transition intact. Its mission was the same as when I was asked to lead the office, established after the Ebola epidemic of 2014: to do everything possible within the vast powers and resources of the U.S. government to prepare for the next disease outbreak and prevent it from becoming an epidemic or pandemic.
One year later, I was mystified when the White House dissolved the office, leaving the country less prepared for pandemics like covid-19...