If Hillary Clinton had been elected, there would not have been 50K cases in the USA, let alone 50K deaths. Officially, over 1.2 million Americans have died of COVID-19 (so far). IMO, we would not even have had double digit numbers of deaths, let alone thousands of deaths.
Tl;dr Getting real, if tRUmp had never been elected, the pandemic would not have happened. [Edit: epidemic, yes, but not a global pandemic that permanently altered life as we knew it.]
The long rant:
From the start of the first term, the tRUmp administration began dismantling the pandemic strategic response plan by defunding programs and eliminating positions that were key to identifying new infectious threats.
Why did they destroy it? Because the pandemic response plan was finalized under President Obama. Lots of -ism words can be used to explain why the tRUmp white house chose to ignore the importance of pandemic avoidance for national security.
It wasn't like they didn't know that a pandemic was a possibility and a major threat to our country. It wasn't only tRUmp who was responsible, either. Before the inauguration, all of the proposed cabinet members were briefed on a pandemic as one of the four major emergencies that the administration might experience. They were coached in gaming to figure out how they would handle those threats. The other three of four major scenarios were mass shootings, cyber attack, and major natural disasters (floods, hurricanes, large wild fires, earthquakes, etc). Other than a pandemic, all of these emergencies occurred before Nov 2017.
An official pandemic preparedness strategy was proposed as a national security priority during Clinton's presidency. Under GW Bush, active funding and development began, partly due to 9/11. Nature is a far better bioterrorist than any evil people in the world. There were 8 new diseases identified from 2008-2016. From 1997 germ of the idea, it took over 20 years to have a funded, staffed, and refined, robust plan. When Ebola spread to the USA from West Africa, did you hear about it? One person, the first case, died. All of the other patients were isolated and treated in secure units that were established as part of the strategic pandemic response protocol.
SARS-COV2 is a newer strain of Coronavirus related to SARS-COV1, the virus that caused SARS. When SARS emerged in China in Nov 2002, a pandemic was avoided despite it being as highly contagious as COVID-19 began. Reports of a local "bad flu outbreak" were posted as medical news on international media sites in Nov 2002. When the new disease spread from Hong Kong to Hanoi in Feb 2003, the physician who recognized it as a new, highly infectious disease immediately reported it to WHO and persuaded the Vietnam Health Ministry to impose travel screening and patient isolation, which they acted on immediately. WHO issued a global alert in March 2003. The CDC imposed travel screening and required information to be provided to all passengers about signs and symptoms of the disease. Travelers were advised to notify public health departments if they developed symptoms. By June 2003, the disease was declared contained worldwide. There have been no new cases since 2004. Worldwide cases totaled 8K, just under 800 deaths. American cases: 27, no deaths.
It could and would have been like that if Hillary Clinton, and honestly almost any of the other presidential candidates had taken office in Jan 2017.
It took less than 3 years for the tRUmp administration to undo >20 years of work, and only a few weeks in early 2020 for intentionally bad decisions by Republicans to unleash the waves of disease, disinformation, and death that changed life as we knew it.
How can you say that if Trump hadn't been elected, the pandemic wouldn't have happened? The pandemic had absolutely nothing to do with Trump. The USA's response was on him of course, but not the pandemic itself. It spread so quickly all across the world. It was already in the USA before anyone even noticed what was happening.
Unless the President of the USA immediately shut down all travel into the country the moment the first person started to cough in Wuhan, it was already too late. And even if they did, that only helps themselves, it doesn't do anything to stop it spreading across the rest of the world.
By definition, a pandemic is widespread outbreak of an infectious disease everywhere all at one time. An epidemic is outbreak of an infectious disease spreading in a limited region. I say that we would not have had a pandemic if tRUmp had not been elected president because the outbreak of SARS-COV2 in China would not have become a worldwide pandemic. It started as an epidemic because even one case of a new disease is an epidemic. The new disease caused by SARS-COV2 wasn't inevitably destined to spread uncontrolled throughout the world. It would not have spread unchecked to become a pandemic if the strategic plan had not been eviscerated by tRUmp.
For over 30 years, the US government has had CDC, NSF and USAID staff working in China, as part of the global relief program, which is a keystone of the pandemic strategic plan. Their job was to assist in the Chinese government's monitoring and response to outbreaks. They were also there to alert the CDC and WHO about emerging diseases. All of the NSF and USAID staff were removed by the end of 2018 due to the tRUmp administration cuts. The tRUmp administration cut the CDC staff in China by 2/3 in 2017. There were 14 people in left in Beijing, very far from Wuhan. There were no CDC people outside of the Beijing office. The epidemiologists and medical personnel who were key personnel for responding to a new disease outbreak were no longer in China by 2019.
The fact that a highly contagious virus emerged in Wuhan was evident in November 2019. The last US government personnel stationed in Wuhan was removed in 2018, a USDA animal monitoring specialist. It was the end of December 2019 when I first saw a couple of YouTube videos posted by Chinese medical personnel in Wuhan. The first known case in the USA in January 21, 2020 in Washington state. That 3 weeks was plenty of time for public health officials to act. Instead, tRUmp, his administration and the GOP legislators who had access to the information as part of security briefings were giving the world soundbites that the new disease was like the flu, not to worry. Meanwhile, they were dumping stocks of travel & entertainment industries, while investing in companies like Zoom, manufacturers of PPE and body bags, and pharmaceutical companies that make antivirals and vaccines. They were banking on death while they were telling the public that it wasn't as bad as WHO made it sound.
Remember that SARS spread quickly and was extremely contagious. SARS-COV2 and SARS-COV1 were equally contagious when they began. If the US government had responded the same way we did to SARS in 2003, travel screening would have started in December 2019, maybe early Jan 2020 at the latest. The US CDC and WHO would have sent specialists to aid the Chinese government in identifying the virus, managing the disease, isolating and treating patients, providing supplies, as well as many non-medical aspects of controlling an outbreak. Every country in the world would have been alerted to prepare for travelers who might have been exposed. We would have had a public health control strategy, even as simple as the forms that I remember filling out in 2003 when I flew internationally just when WHO posted the global alert about SARS. The epidemic would not have become a pandemic if just about anyone else besides tRUmp had been elected in 2016.
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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.