Why Are People Blaming American Exposure To The Coronavirus On Trump?

In a post for Raw Story last week, Sarah Burris succinctly laid out the 5 reasons we have Señor Trumpanzee to thank if we get coronavirus:

1- Bringing infected people into the U.S. against the Center for Disease Control’s objections.
2- Trump refuses to listen to science over his buddy, Xi Jinping.
3- Trump lies about the facts of the coronavirus.
4- Trump and the GOP seriously cut public health funding.
5- Trump slashed resources form the Center for Disease Control.

Let's take a look at #4 and #5. "One of the greatest allies in a disease outbreak can be public health funding. However, the budget passed in 2018 killed over $1 billion from the Prevention and Public Health Fund (PPHF). 'When the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act was signed into law on December 22, 2018, it cut $750 million from the PPHF, diverting the money to cover costs of CHIP, the Children’s Health Insurance Program,' The Scientist reported. 'CDC relies on PPHF for 12 percent of its budget, with much of that money going toward state and community programs.'

The PPHF acts as the "core of public health programs" in the U.S., according to former director Tom Frieden. When Obamacare was passed in 2010, it financed the PPHF, but Republicans have worked to undermine the law.

"It was established in 2010 and financed by the Affordable Care Act (ACA)," The goal was to improve health outcomes and enhance the quality of care. The first initial investment form Obamacare was $500 million, and it grew to over $2 billion by 2015. It was supposed to be protected from Republicans eager to cut funding to anything affiliated with the Democrats’ healthcare law.

During the 2017-2018 government shutdown, sequestration took $69 million from the fund, “PPHF was left with $931 million annually to support public health, wellness, and prevention activities,” in the entire country.

“In the same fiscal year, the CDC received more than $891 million from PPHF to support vaccine coverage, respond to outbreaks of foodborne infections and waterborne diseases, develop programs to counter the leading causes of death and disability, such as cancer, heart disease, stroke, and diabetes, and eliminate childhood lead poisoning, among other initiatives,” the report said.

While the reduction in funding to the PPHF has been drastic, it doesn’t mean the CDC has gone without its own budget cuts.

“The Trump administration in 2018 further diverted millions of dollars from the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC),” said The Scientist.

“CDC’s mission is to keep Americans safe,” said Frieden. “But without funding, the CDC won’t be able to protect us.”

As the president presents his new budget for 2020, the cuts to public health and the CDC are even more drastic.

Thankfully, that budget isn’t likely to pass either chamber of Congress.

Ultimately, as the coronavirus begins to take over the world, it’s not surprising that Trump’s campaign is worried that the president’s bumbling response could cost him votes in November.

Trump’s budget to the World Health Organization that he’s proposed would leave everyone at risk. While he complains that other countries aren’t paying their fair share into NATO, when it comes to the WHO, Trump wants to gut the U.S. contribution. Diseases aren’t like wars; they don’t stay contained in borders; everyone is at risk. Trump’s budget proves that the president doesn’t understand this important fact.

A few days later, Business Insider noted that while Trump was playing down the danger to Americans and boasting about how he had saved everyone anyway, his comments "are at odds with reality" and that the same day he was trying to gaslight the public, "the CDC announced that it expected the virus to spread enough within the US to cause a "disruption to everyday life." And they reported that by spending "the past several years dismantling the very government programs responsible for combatting a global health crisis," Trump has placed us all in more danger than we would have been.

In 2018, for instance, the CDC cut 80% of its efforts to prevent global disease outbreaks because it was running out of money. Ultimately, the department went from working in 49 countries to just 10.

Here are some other actions the Trump administration undertook to dismantle government-spending programs related to fighting the spread of global diseases, according to Foreign Policy:

• Shutting down the entire global-health-security unit of the National Security Council.
• Eliminating the U.S. government's $30 million Complex Crises Fund.
• Reducing national health spending by $15 billion.
• Consistently attacking Mark Green, the director of the U.S. Agency for International Development.

This guy sounds completely, utterly insane, a stereotypical "the sky is falling" crackpot-- and it worries me that I get so much information from this website's other host, Chris Martenson. I hesitate to even post it but I found it useful in terms of knowing what kind of lunatics to avoid listening to.





Ah... and Chris is back, and just as we published. This will make a lot more sense-- and is actually worth listening to carefully; ignore the lunatic in the clip above: