OBAMA PANDEMIC PLAYBOOK REJECTED BY TRUMP WHITE HOUSE--DASTARDLY

Andrea Mitchell interviewed Christina Mulligan former Director for Preparedness and response from the Department of Justice now Managing Director for National Security and International policy of the American Enterprise Institute. She said the Trump Administration opted NOT to use a pandemic playbook created by the National Security staff which was written to help officials confront a range of biological threats.

Mitchell asked how could this have helped an early pandemic response? Mulligan said the Trump administration was given a gift by the previous administration which would have allowed them not to start from ground zero. They would have been given a head start in figuring out what the decision points were and what actions needed to be taken to get ahead of this pandemic. It is hard to tell, Mulligan said, whether they just did not realize what they had or choose to ignore it because there was a bias against everything to do with the prior administration and they would not leverage any information or expertise from it. Mulligan said she worked with Admiral Ziemer from the Global Health Initiative and said he was like a quarterback with respect to a response to Ebola and global health issues like pandemics. 

 Mulligan said there was a groundswell within the career civil servant community in 2017 and 2018 to create a national level exercise conducted every two years to build muscle memory across departments and agencies on how to respond to various types of threats and incidents including pandemics. There was a lot of arguing that the US was under prepared for a pandemic but those ideas were overruled by the White House and the global exercise never took place. -- Dastardly