WaPo reports on the sudden weakening of the American capability to respond to global pandemics:
The top White House official responsible for leading the U.S. response in the event of a deadly pandemic has left the administration, and the global health security team he oversaw has been disbanded under a reorganization by national security adviser John Bolton.
The abrupt departure of Rear Adm. Timothy Ziemer from the National Security Council means no senior administration official is now focused solely on global health security. Ziemer’s departure, along with the breakup of his team, comes at a time when many experts say the country is already underprepared for the increasing risks of a pandemic or bioterrorism attack.
Ziemer’s last day was Tuesday, the same day a new Ebola outbreak was declared in Congo. He is not being replaced.
Pandemic preparedness and global health security are issues that require government-wide responses, experts say, as well as the leadership of a high-ranking official within the White House who is assigned only this role.
It’s simple to suggest that the Trump Administration is using a false libertarian view of the matter: that other countries should take care of their own problems. It’s false because political and even geographical boundaries are permeable: disease does not respect the former and can surmount the latter. As WaPo points out:
The day before news of Ziemer’s exit became public, one of the officials on his team, Luciana Borio, director of medical and biodefense preparedness at the NSC, spoke at a symposium at Emory University to mark the 100th anniversary of the 1918 influenza pandemic. That event killed an estimated 50 million to 100 million people worldwide.
Worldwide. That means the virus traveled from wherever it originated to just about everywhere, and this in a time when travel was not as cheap and easy as it is today. So, just as pathogens do not respect national borders, nor can our public health system.
All that said, reasonable people can disagree on the precise structure of how we prepare for eventualities such as this one. Perhaps we don’t need a high ranking official who concentrates on this one issue and sits on the National Security Council. Perhaps that’s a waste of money. I’m no expert on matters like this.
But when experts comment that the Trump Administration is screwing up by not having a high official working on this one problem, and given how terribly we all suffered last time, I’m more than a little nervous. Once again, this feels like third-rate amateurism at its worst. All the walls at the southern American border won’t stop another potential pandemic – it won’t even slow it down.
