Over the last 2 years trump has pretty much dismantled the US CDC staff in China. There was nearly 50 US CDC people in China. Now there's only 14.
Just in time for that virus to turn into a pandemic.
It could have been stopped in China but the needed people to do it were fired by trump.
The Trump administration cut staff by more than two-thirds at a key U.S. public health agency operating inside China, as part of a larger rollback of U.S.-funded health and science experts on the ground there leading up to the coronavirus outbreak, Reuters has learned.
www.reuters.com
FTA:
The CDC did not respond to detailed questions submitted by Reuters about the cuts.
It has insisted its staffing levels did not hinder the U.S. response to the coronavirus.
“There are many factors that go into decisions around staffing,” the CDC said in a statement.
Some health experts were skeptical that more CDC employees operating inside China would have made a difference in stemming the outbreak. Beijing has been widely criticized for silencing its own public health officials who warned of a deadly new respiratory disease emanating from the Chinese city of Wuhan and surrounding Hubei province.
“The problem was China, not that we didn’t have CDC people in China,” said Scott McNabb, a former CDC epidemiologist who is now a research professor with Emory University. He pointed to
China’s censorship as the main culprit in the spread of the pandemic, which has infected at least 435,470 people worldwide, killed 19,598 and upended the global economy.
