Only those who are trying to slip it under the rug don't remember it.
How can you forget that 12,400 Americans died from it?
Thank you President Barry.
Well, most of us had bigger worries, like the complete economic collapse Bush had given us.
But there are major differences. The first is that we had vaccines and treatments for flu. Most of those who died either didn't seek treatment or didn't get vaccinations or were already in comprimised health.
The second was that Obama actually DID act decisively. The obsession is that he didn't declare a "national emergency" when it started.
What Trump Is Getting Wrong About Obama’s Response to the 2009 H1N1 Pandemic
But who can resist comparing Obama and Trump? Let’s take a look at where Obama succeeded and where he failed. In short: Even with all the medical differences in diagnosis and management, the claim that the 2009 response was inadequate and led to excess deaths is a gross exaggeration.
During and after the pandemic, many claimed that Obama was ginning up the threat, talking about it too much, scaring people too much, being the Nanny State nightmare libertarians had had warned us against. Likely, they said, the faux-crisis was really about developing more support for the Affordable Care Act, not yet voted upon in Congress but looming menacingly on the cold horizon. At the time, I wrote an evaluation of the government response in the
Daily Beast, mostly criticizing Washington overreach into a bad but routine crisis best handled by CDC experts, not politicians. In other words, I thought Obama was
too responsive. (Ah, the good old days … )
More recently, Justin Fox at Bloomberg Opinion wrote a thorough comparison of the
Obama and Trump responses. He looked in particular at one popular criticism made by Trump supporters about the timing of Obama’s declaration of “a national emergency.” The facts are that Obama declared a “
public health emergency” a few weeks after the first cases in the U.S. This focused public attention and resources on the outbreak. In October, six months later, he declared “a
national emergency.” Indeed, there are some subtle differences between the two federal responses, but for doctors and patients and human health, these bureaucratic distinctions are irrelevant.
