In a column for the Daily Beast, longtime political observer and Pulitzer Prize finalist Michael Daly said the coronavirus crisis that threatens to swamp government health workers specializing in epidemics has been made worse by President Donald Trump.
As Daly notes, Trump is to blame for leaving the country vulnerable to a pandemic because he has made it his mission to cut funding for health research ever since he became president -- putting American citizens at risk.
"Even as China was announcing that its deaths from the novel coronavirus had surpassed its toll from SARS, President Donald Trump released a proposed budget for 2021 that slashed funding for our chief defender against epidemics by 18 percent," Daly began. "Within the overall proposed cuts detailed on Feb. 10 for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention was a reduction in spending to guard against “emerging and zoonotic diseases” from $635,772,000 to $550,464,000. "
After pointing out, "The $85,308,000 proposed budget cut is less than the cost of 5 miles of border wall," he added, "For the cost of less than 7 miles of border wall, the proposed budget would leave all of us less protected against a potential epidemic. The Trump administration made its priorities even more explicit when Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar discounted a suggestion that border wall funds could be diverted to fight the spread of the coronavirus."
Continuing to make his case against Trump, Daly called out the president's appointed Vice President Mike Pence as the administration's point man when it comes to battling the spread of the deadly virus, writing, "Nobody who is aware of Pence’s role in enabling an HIV outbreak when he was governor of Indiana could have been rightly heartened by his new role. But one hopeful sign came when Pence enlisted the help of a physician scientist who has been leading the national fight against HIV. Dr. Deborah L. Birx will now direct the effort against novel coronavirus. She is held in nearly as high esteem as Rear Admiral Ziemer, but she is only now being put in place. Ziemer would have already been on the case had he not been pushed out. "
Hammering home his point, Daly suggested that Trump has also put himself at risk using the severe illness of President Woodrow Wilson as an example.
"Our Germophobe-in-Chief should consider that a president is as vulnerable as anybody else to a virus. President Woodrow Wilson was stricken while visiting France during the Spanish flu pandemic early in the last century. Wilson survived, but some historians believe he suffered lasting neurological damage that became apparent at the negotiating table, making for considerably less art to his dealing," he wrote before adding, "Wilson could have just as easily caught the flu at the White House. And the present viral threat could arrive there as easily as any other place with a cough or a shaken hand."
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