President Barack Obama laughs with aides
aboard Air Force One en route to Singapore, Nov. 14, 2009. (Official White
House Photo by Pete Souza)
"Let's call it Trumpvirus," urged a New
York Times opinion writer conspiratorially. Nancy
Pelosi groused that President Trump waited too long to attack the
coronavirus (COVID-19) and then impetuously declared he couldn't have leftover
and unspent Ebola virus money to fight it, while Senator
Chuck Schumer looked down his nose and over his glasses to intone that
it was the end of the world and the president hadn't spent enough money
to stop the scourge. Joe Biden and Michael Bloomberg have both
been called out for politicizing the virus.
By their lights, Trump's doing it all wrong. They won't
be able to tell you why, but (stomps foot) they just know. They're
praying for a pandemic filled with infected people and decimation of
the stock market just to fix Trump's wagon in his re-election campaign, now
that the whole Russian-secret-agent and peeing-hooker story went belly-up.
They just know that he's such a dummy
that it wouldn't ever occur to him to stop air travel from an infected nation,
increase screenings, involuntarily quarantine those infected with the virus
when they were repatriated and seek a vaccine now.
Oh, wait, he has done all of those things and was called
a racist for doing it.
We've had several creepy viruses emerge over the past two
decades. There's been MRSA, SARS, and H1N1 (swine flu), to name a few. But it's
been the H1N1 flu that has been most compared to this outbreak.
Surely, St. Barack of Obama would have dealt with this
horrible pandemic better than Orange Man Bad, right? No-Drama-Obama had this
whole thing under control, of course!
Well, let's compare and contrast.
The American Journal of Clinical Pathology reports that
this coronavirus (COVID-19) was first seen in late December:
On December 30, 2019, scientists in China "a cluster
of patients with pneumonia of unknown etiology was observed in Wuhan, China,
and reported to the World Health Organization (WHO) China bureau in Beijing. A
week later, January 7, 2020, a new coronavirus (SARS-CoV-2) was isolated from
these patients."
As we suspect, the Chinese government tried to keep the
virus outbreak secret – for what reason we don't know. What we do know,
however, is that by January
31, 2020, President Trump had declared a public
health emergency and began restricting U.S. access to non-citizens
from China. Flights filled with U.S. citizens who were in Wuhan were brought to
America and those people were quarantined on U.S. military bases for two weeks.
Though he lamented being called a "racist" for
doing so, Trump says if he hadn't hardened the U.S. borders at that point, the
virus would have had gained a bigger foothold in the country.
Now, let's go to the Wayback Machine. In April of 2009,
the H1N1 became a pandemic.
But it wasn't until six months later,
October, that then-President Obama declared a public health emergency on what was already a
pandemic. By that time, the disease had infected millions of
Americans and more than 1,000 people had died in the U.S.
CNN reported at the time:
Since the H1N1 flu pandemic began in April, millions
of people in the United States have been infected, at least 20,000 have been
hospitalized and more than 1,000 have died, said Dr. Thomas Frieden,
director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. [emphasis
added]
Furthermore, the CDC's Frieden fretted at the time that
efforts to create a vaccine had stumbled:
"We are nowhere near where we thought we would
be," Frieden said, acknowledging that manufacturing delays have
contributed to less vaccine being available than expected. "As public
health professionals, vaccination is our strongest tool. Not having enough is
frustrating to all of us."
Frieden said that while the way vaccine is
manufactured is "tried and true," it's not well-suited for ramping up
production during a pandemic because it takes at least six months. The vaccine
is produced by growing weakened virus in eggs.
But wait, there's more.
According to Virology Journal, the 2009 H1N1 came into the U.S.
from Mexico:
The swine-origin influenza A (H1N1) virus that appeared
in 2009 and was first found in human beings in Mexico, is a reassortant with at
least three parents. Six of the genes are closest in sequence to those of H1N2
'triple-reassortant' influenza viruses isolated from pigs in North America
around 1999-2000.
Now, about that "racist" wall ...
Every time the Left tries to make Trump look bad on this
issue they're found to be frauds.
In fact, by 2015, Obama was back trying
to counter a new H1N1 outbreak in the country.
Democrats have weaponized the virus stories to get Trump.
Of course they have.
But for the sake of argument, can we all stipulate that
it would be really nice if we could just get humans to stop sleeping with pigs,
kissing birds, and eating live bats so we wouldn't have to deal with this?
Here's Obama telling everyone in 2009 to wash their hands
after the H1N1 virus had already become a pandemic: