Apparently we were sending PPE to China in February?

[PeterB]

... apologies if already posted, but... WaPo is reporting that apparently we were sending lots of PPE to China in February ... when this becomes more publicly known, wow, what a frackup.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/us...story.html

(sorry about paywall)

Here's Snopes' evaluation of it:

https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/us-tons-ppe-china/

[davester]

That's because it was a Chinese virus and Trump stopped it at the border.

[Lemon Drop]

Concerns about a dwindling supply of PPE are not new. Back on February 7, the World Health Organization sounded alarm bells about “the limited stock of PPE,” noting demand was 100 times higher than normal for this equipment.


Yeah but that WHO is a bunch of lying incompetent morons.


I support having us come to China's aid or aiding any other country, for humanitarian reasons, but obviously we needed a captain for our own ship. Only a healthy US can be there for the rest of the world, after all.

At that national security meeting on Jan 3 when they talked about the outbreak that might be coming...did this topic come up? Did anybody say, hey, let's take a look at our PPE supplies?

[PeterB]

Lemon Drop wrote:
Concerns about a dwindling supply of PPE are not new. Back on February 7, the World Health Organization sounded alarm bells about “the limited stock of PPE,” noting demand was 100 times higher than normal for this equipment.


Yeah but that WHO is a bunch of lying incompetent morons.


I support having us come to China's aid or aiding any other country, for humanitarian reasons, but obviously we needed a captain for our own ship. Only a healthy US can be there for the rest of the world, after all.

At that national security meeting on Jan 3 when they talked about the outbreak that might be coming...did this topic come up? Did anybody say, hey, let's take a look at our PPE supplies?

Who knows. The Orange-in-Chief was probably more preoccupied with his current poll numbers and getting re-elected.

"The Trump administration received its first formal notification of the outbreak of the coronavirus in China on Jan. 3. Within days, U.S. spy agencies were signaling the seriousness of the threat to Trump by including a warning about the coronavirus — the first of many — in the President’s Daily Brief.

And yet, it took 70 days from that initial notification for Trump to treat the coronavirus not as a distant threat or harmless flu strain well under control, but as a lethal force that had outflanked America’s defenses and was poised to kill tens of thousands of citizens. That more-than-two-month stretch now stands as critical time that was squandered."

https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-...sfunction/

[Lemon Drop]

And of course now China is helping us, particularly with ventilators and PPE.
Gov. Pritzker of IL secretly sent 2 planes to China to get gloves, masks and other supplies, he didn't want the feds to know because they might confiscate it.
https://www.chicagotribune.com/coronavir...story.html


NY is getting 1,000 ventilators from China.

I think that's part of the reason Trump is foaming at the mouth about ventilators and saying he's the best manufacturer of ventilators the world and universe have ever seen.

[Ted King]

Those PPE were shipped in early February. Trump's "phase one trade deal" with China had just been signed in the middle of January. Basically Trump had managed to cobble together a trade truce with China that was going to be "proof" that his tariffs against China - that Americans paid for through higher prices - led to a big win that he could yammer on about in the upcoming election. Part of the agreement was that China would buy a couple hundred billion dollars of American goods over the next couple of years. So... I suspect that in early February that Trump was of the mind that the Chinese were mostly in the "good guys" category and he wanted to show them that he would reward them for their good behavior.

In early February if the epidemiologists in the government thought that the Chinese had some real prospects of containing the virus, then it made sense to help them do that by sending supplies. But I'm betting they didn't think then that the Chinese would contain it. If so, they should have been recommending that the U.S. keep the supplies and ramp up production of more as quickly as possible.

I guess what I'm saying is that there is a fair circumstantial case to be made that giving those supplies to China then was at least as much a political decision based on the context of economic relations with China as it was a medical-humanitarian decision. (I have a hard time believing Trump would do anything primarily for humanitarian reasons.)

[Acer]

.

[PeterB]

Ted King wrote:
Those PPE were shipped in early February. Trump's "phase one trade deal" with China had just been signed in the middle of January. Basically Trump had managed to cobble together a trade truce with China that was going to be "proof" that his tariffs against China - that Americans paid for through higher prices - led to a big win that he could yammer on about in the upcoming election. Part of the agreement was that China would buy a couple hundred billion dollars of American goods over the next couple of years. So... I suspect that in early February that Trump was of the mind that the Chinese were mostly in the "good guys" category and he wanted to show them that he would reward them for their good behavior.

In early February if the epidemiologists in the government thought that the Chinese had some real prospects of containing the virus, then it made sense to help them do that by sending supplies. But I'm betting they didn't think then that the Chinese would contain it. If so, they should have been recommending that the U.S. keep the supplies and ramp up production of more as quickly as possible.

I guess what I'm saying is that there is a fair circumstantial case to be made that giving those supplies to China then was at least as much a political decision based on the context of economic relations with China as it was a medical-humanitarian decision. (I have a hard time believing Trump would do anything primarily for humanitarian reasons.)

Let's be honest; given his background and history, which is more likely:

1) He said, "those poor Chinese. Let's do what we can to help them."

or

2) "How can I make a ton of bucks, and simultaneously make sure that I get reelected?"

[rjmacs]

PeterB wrote:
Let's be honest; given his background and history, which is more likely:

1) He said, "those poor Chinese. Let's do what we can to help them."

or

2) "How can I make a ton of bucks, and simultaneously make sure that I get reelected?"

and don't forget, now:

3) The deceitful Chinese Communist Party TRICKED ME into sending them our precious PPE..... Such perilous guile.