*The former Deputy National Security Adviser in Barack Obama’s administration has fired back after President Donald Trump blamed his predecessor for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC) sluggish response to coronavirus testing.
“I think, importantly, what Obama did leave Trump is a global health infrastructure that we had set up informed by the lessons of the Ebola outbreak,” former White House deputy national security adviser Ben Rhodes said during an interview on MSNBC, per The Hill. “And what we did is set up, in the White House … an office that was responsible for managing pandemics, managing global health threats that was shut down two years ago by President Trump.”
On Friday, Trump took aim at the CDC under President Obama, saying on Twitter: “For decades the @CDCgov looked at, and studied, its testing system, but did nothing about it. It would always be inadequate and slow for a large scale pandemic, but a pandemic would never happen, they hoped. President Obama made changes that only complicated things further.”
“Their response to H1N1 Swine Flu was a full scale disaster, with thousands dying, and nothing meaningful done to fix the testing problem, until now,” Trump added. “The changes have been made and testing will soon happen on a very large scale basis. All Red Tape has been cut, ready to go!”
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During his MSNBC interview on Saturday, Rhodes slammed Trump’s comments, adding that “what he said about testing was completely false,” and noting, “And when you don’t have an office like that, you don’t have dedicated people inside the White House who are ensuring that information is acted upon,” he continued. “When you see an outbreak in a place like Wuhan, China, you want people in the White House who are thinking about what needs to be done right away so that you don’t get behind the curve, which is what happened in this White House.”
Rhodes then went on to point out differences between how Trump is handling the COVID-19 outbreak and how Obama handled the Ebola crisis during his presidency.
“You need a president who’s willing to hear bad news, willing to understand that they’re going to have to focus on something that they may have not intended to focus on. President trump clearly did not want to hear that bad news when he heard about the outbreak in coronavirus,” Rhodes said.
Rhodes said Obama “sidelined” officials who were not experts and said his administration “designed a very unique response where deployed thousands of U.S. troops to Africa to help set up medical infrastructure to contain the outbreak before it could get to the United States.”
Trump, however, “seems to turn his Twitter feed and try to do just enough to get him through the news cycle, while not preparing the nation for what is necessary here,” said Rhodes.
“And now, we kind of see a unique situation and a crisis where state and local officials are kind of taking the lead here because the White House won’t do it,” he added.
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