The White House v covid-19

WHEN THE Trump administration took office in January 2017 it inherited, among other things, plans to make cheaper ventilators and 20m reusable face masks, should the country need them. Nobody followed up. In 2018 John Bolton, the national-security adviser, “streamlined” the National Security Council and, in the process, closed its pandemic preparedness office. The following year, the administration decided to no longer embed an epidemiologist from the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) with China’s CDC.

The consequences of these decisions, like the consequences of President Donald Trump’s insistence up until four weeks ago that covid-19 was less serious than seasonal flu, can only be guessed at for now. It seems likely that covid-19 would always have hit America hard, as it has most other rich countries that did not feel the impact of SARS. It also seems possible that America will suffer more than other rich Western democracies. If so, some portion of this exceptional excess mortality will be attributable to the president’s public-health advice and to decisions he avoided until too late.

That accounting will come later, though. Right now, the White House is running a response focused on getting material to the states being hit first by the virus. Though the CDC has not held a public briefing for a month,...

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