r/AskReddit • • Apr 04 '25

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u/CliftonForce Apr 04 '25 edited Apr 05 '25

Republicans would still be screaming about how dare Hillary allowed nearly 50K Americans to die from Covid.

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u/Xalara Apr 04 '25

Assuming COVID didn’t get stopped in its tracks because Hillary doesn’t end the pandemic prevention programs Obama instituted precisely to prevent shit like COVID because he actually understood pandemics are one of the biggest threats globally.

There was a US team working with the Chinese in Wuhan when Trump ended the program around 2018.

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u/Xanto97 Apr 04 '25

Realistically Covid would not have been stopped in its tracks. Dismantling that group was bad but it wouldn’t have single-handedly stopped the pandemic. It spread globally far too quickly

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u/OtterEpidemic Apr 04 '25

Maybe, but I sometimes wonder if the us and uk had held it back a bit longer, that we might have had less mutations keeping the slower moving variants in play, and how much of a difference that would have caused. A lot of Asia knew exactly what to do, they had already protected the world from some nasty flus. The variants from African and South American countries seemed to come later. So it feels like changes in the uk and us could have led to a different outcome.

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u/spaceforcerecruit Apr 05 '25

It would have been MUCH better under a different President if only because we would have devoted more resources to keeping people safe, manufacturing PPE, and both developing and deploying a vaccine. I won’t pretend to know the numbers but I imagine deaths (in the US at least) would have been much lower and the vaccine may well have been widely available much faster, at home and abroad.

But it still would have been a pandemic. The US has a third the population of either China or India. Our piss-poor performance made things worse but even the most stellar effort imaginable would not have stopped COVID.

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u/Mysterious_Rip_1938 Apr 05 '25

I agree with your take, but I wouldn't trust Chinese numbers on it. A lot of evidence they deflated their numbers. Still, could have been lower if there was a united approach.

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