Two interesting things happened in the real world yesterday as fucking idiots with assault weapons gathered in Lansing, shutting down the capitol to speculate about the imaginary crimes committed by Governor Gretchen Whitmer and fantasize about her assassination. Rick Bright, a former high-ranking vaccine official at the Department of Health and Human Services, testified before Congress that, several months into the pandemic, we still “don’t have a master plan for this response,” and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell conceded that he was wrong when he said earlier this week that President Obama did not leave Donald Trump a detailed plan as to how an administration should respond to a pandemic. “They did leave behind a plan,” the Senator from Kentucky conceded, walking back his claim on Monday that “(T)he Obama administration did not leave to this administration any kind of game plan for something like this.”
One would think, after over three years in office, the Trump administration could have drafted their own plan, but apparently, to hear the Republicans tell it, it was Obama’s job to hold Trump’s hand through the entirety of his administration. [For what it’s worth, I never heard Roosevelt complain that Hoover left him without a battle plan for WWII.] But, in this case, that’s pretty much exactly what happened. As we’ve discussed before, In early 2017, members of the Obama administration public health team met with 30 Trump officials, to walk them through a number of pandemic scenarios and discuss the federal government’s pandemic flu playbook, which had been in existence, and evolving, since 2005.
Here’s Bright, testifying before the House today.
BRIGHT: The American health care system is being taxed to the limit. Our economy is spiraling downward and our population is being paralyzed by fear, stemming from a lack of a coordinated response and a dearth of accurate, clear information about the path forward." pic.twitter.com/rXKFLiKnm2
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) May 14, 2020
If you’ll recall, Bright says that he was forced from his office for — in the words of the New York Times — standing up to pressure that he “direct money toward hydroxychloroquine, one of several ‘potentially dangerous drugs promoted by those with political connections’ and repeatedly described by the president as a potential ‘game changer’ in the fight against the virus. [Again, if you though thought the Ukraine hearings were insane, just wait until members of the House start digging into how Trump was self-dealing during the pandemic.] Now here’s that video of McConnell.
“I was wrong. They did leave behind a plan. I clearly made a mistake in that regard” — Mitch McConnell walks back his comment about Obama not leaving a pandemic plan for Trump pic.twitter.com/2r8DqSdUyy
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) May 14, 2020
And, this, my friends, is why every other word out of Donald Trump’s mouth these past several days has been about the imagined non-scandal of “Obamagate”. He was left with a detailed pandemic response plan, he chose not to follow it, and the United States now leads the world with over 86,000 dead.
