U.S. axed CDC expert job in China months before virus outbreak

[Yonnie3]

EXCLUSIVE-U.S. axed CDC expert job in China months before virus outbreak
by Reuters
Sunday, 22 March 2020 20:02 GMT

WASHINGTON, March 22 (Reuters) - Several months before the coronavirus pandemic began, the Trump administration eliminated a key American public health position in Beijing intended to help detect disease outbreaks in China, Reuters has learned.

The American disease expert, a medical epidemiologist embedded in China's disease control agency, left her post in July, according to four sources with knowledge of the issue. The first cases of the new coronavirus may have emerged as early as November, and as cases exploded, the Trump administration in February chastised China for censoring information about the outbreak and keeping U.S. experts from entering the country to help.

"It was heartbreaking to watch," said Bao-Ping Zhu, a Chinese American who served in that role, which was funded by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, between 2007 and 2011. "If someone had been there, public health officials and governments across the world could have moved much faster."

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More at https://news.trust.org/item/20200322192432-0xeib/

[DonaldsRump]

1. For f**k's sake... n/t

[exboyfil]

2. This was his job while in China

This was his job while in China

Resident Advisor
Company NameChinese Field Epidemiology Training Program
Dates EmployedSep 2007 – Nov 2011
Employment Duration4 yrs 3 mos
LocationBeijing, China
Supervised Chinese FETP officers in investigating disease outbreaks, evaluating surveillance systems, and conducting applied epidemiologic research. Reviewed and critiqued Chinese FETP officers’ work, and guided the officers in preparing their work for peer-reviewed publication and presentations at scientific conferences. Taught applied epidemiology, biostatistics, and public health to Chinese FETP officers in classroom settings and over the Internet. Provided advices to China CDC staff during their epidemiologic investigations and the subsequent scientific publications. Created, and served as the first Chief Editor for, the Dispatch of the Chinese FETP, a twice-monthly, MMWR-type journal for timely dissemination of findings from field epidemiologic investigations to public health leaders, policy-makers, and clinicians in China.

[magicarpet]

3. It was trDumpie who fucked this up not Obama.

We were warned in 2012, when the Rand Corporation surveyed the international threats arrayed against the United States and concluded that only pandemics posed an existential danger, in that they were “capable of destroying America’s way of life.”

We were warned in 2015, when Ezra Klein of Vox, after speaking with Bill Gates about his algorithmic model for how a new strain of flu could spread rapidly in today’s globalized world, wrote that “a pandemic disease is the most predictable catastrophe in the history of the human race, if only because it has happened to the human race so many, many times before.” If there was anything humanity could be certain that it needed to prepare for to prevent the deaths of a lot of people in little time, it was this.

We were warned in 2017, a week before inauguration day, when Lisa Monaco, Barack Obama’s outgoing homeland-security adviser, gathered with Donald Trump’s incoming national-security officials and conducted an exercise modeled on the administration’s experiences with outbreaks of swine flu, Ebola, and Zika. The simulation explored how the U.S. government should respond to a flu pandemic that halts international travel, upends global supply chains, tanks the stock market, and burdens health-care systems—all with a vaccine many months from materializing. “The nightmare scenario for us, and frankly to any public-health expert that you would talk to, has always been a new strain of flu or a respiratory illness because of how much easier it is to spread” relative to other pandemic diseases that aren’t airborne, Monaco told me.

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2020/03/pandemic-coronavirus-united-states-trump-cdc/608215/