Trump's top science adviser seeks help from public health experts on coronavirus response

[Yo_Mama_Been_Loggin]

President Trump’s top science adviser asked a group of national security and public health experts on Wednesday to stand at the ready to respond to urgent inquiries from the U.S. government and to contribute to the “scientific bulwark” that will protect Americans from the dangers of the spread of the coronavirus.

Kelvin Droegemeier, director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) since January 2019, said Trump is regularly attending meetings of Vice President Mike Pence’s coronavirus task force, which has convened in recent weeks for at least two hours every afternoon. “Trump visits the task force frequently,” Droegemeier told members of the rapidly assembled Standing Committee on Emerging Infectious Diseases and 21st Century Health Threats.

The meeting came hours after the World Health Organization officially labeled the coronavirus outbreak a pandemic based upon the “alarming levels of spread and severity, and by the alarming levels of inaction,” according to its director-general, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus.

The White House and the Department of Health and Human Services requested in late February that the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine — which responds to the nation’s top scientific inquiries and was first chartered by President Abraham Lincoln in 1863 — bring together a team of top experts to not only respond to the immediate crisis at hand but also develop ways to anticipate, mitigate and prevent future threats posed by infectious diseases.

https://news.yahoo.com/trumps-top-science-advisor-seeks-help-from-public-health-experts-on-coronavirus-response-211156698.html

About time. Guess the stable genius couldn't handle it by himself.

[GusBob]

1. Too late now, but for future reference look at Taiwan and Singapore

They got on it right away, like the minute they heard

And Taiwan is right next door to China

[redstatebluegirl]

2. Dr. Droegemeier is a good scientist.

His field is meteorology I think, but from what I know of him he would do a good job of getting the right answers from smart people. He is not an antiscience nut like the rest of them.

[lapfog_1]

3. but what about Jared???

[exboyfil]

4. It might have been useful to have a pandemic response team around

https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/trump-fire-pandemic-team/

Legum outlined a series of cost-cutting decisions made by the Trump administration in preceding years that had gutted the nation’s infectious disease defense infrastructure. The “pandemic response team” firing claim referred to news accounts from Spring 2018 reporting that White House officials tasked with directing a national response to a pandemic had been ousted.

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.