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It could have been worse if it had not been for Congress: > The damage would have been far worse had Congress not stood in the way of repeated defunding attemp

by est31 6y ago

It could have been worse if it had not been for Congress: > The damage would have been far worse had Congress not stood in the way of repeated defunding attempts by the Trump administration. In its first two years, the Trump budgets proposed to slash the CDC’s appropriation by 18.2% and then by 17.1% (accounting for inflation). Today, its FY 2021 budget still seeks a cut of over 10%. Even when Republicans controlled both houses, Congress roundly rejected these aggressive Executive-led cuts, to maintain the agency’s funding near the previous year’s level. https://envirodatagov.org/an-embattled-landscape-series-part-2a-coronavirus-and-the-three-year-trump-quest-to-slash-science-at-the-cdc/ https://envirodatagov.org/an-embattled-landscape-series-part...

imglorp 6y ago
What was the motivation for the cuts? Was it merely difficult to justify spending on a 100-year event that might never come? Or was there a conflict of interest?
- loopz 6y ago
  Not caring for anybody but themselves? Why would it be explained.
- redis_mlc 6y ago
  > 100-year event that might never come SARS-1 (2003) and MERS are recent coronaviruses, and Ebola re-occurs every other year. SARS-1 had a similar effect on Toronto hospitals as the current COVID-19 on NYC, with staff wiped out.
  - redis_mlc 6y ago
    Actually, if anybody knows why Ebola keeps re-occurring every 2-3 years (according to the CDC), I'd be curious to know why. You'd think a disease that fatal (over 50%) would wipe itself out. Or maybe, horrors, it's really that bad! In 2014, the US had a cluster of Ebola cases, and was totally unprepared, with one patient and 2 nurses getting infected: https://www.nbcnews.com/storyline/ebola-virus-outbreak/nurse-who-caught-ebola-settles-suit-against-dallas-hospital-n672081 https://www.nbcnews.com/storyline/ebola-virus-outbreak/nurse... "[nurse] went home in the scrubs she wore while treating Duncan [for Ebola]." That transmission was via an airline passenger from Liberia.
- delecti 6y ago
  Cynically? The best way to show the government is useless, and thus to justify cuts, is to make the government be useless.
  - sq_ 6y ago
    Case in point: the USPS. It's the Republican "starve the beast" strategy [0] (of course, not limited to the US, just commonly seen here). [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starve_the_beast https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starve_the_beast
- yardie 6y ago
  Tax cuts at any cost. Since they can't make small cuts to the large programs (military, SS, Medicare) they make thousands of large cuts to the not so well known programs, CDC, forestry, NEA. Then they go back to their constituents about how many millions and billions in programs they've cut.
  - _-david-_ 6y ago
    >Tax cuts at any cost. The revenue brought in from taxes increased after the tax cuts. https://www.cbo.gov/system/files/2019-11/55824-CBO-MBR-FY19.pdf https://www.cbo.gov/system/files/2019-11/55824-CBO-MBR-FY19....
    - EdwardDiego 6y ago
      Are you implying a direct causative link?
      - _-david-_ 6y ago
        >Are you implying a direct causative link No. The person I was responding to was making the claim that budget cuts were made to make tax cuts possible. I was trying to say that the tax cuts did not lower the revenue so budget cuts were not needed to justify the tax cuts.
        BlackNitrogen 6y ago
        The per year deficit greatly increased though during that time. we reduced taxes, the economy grew a little more but the deficit really increased. the net is we borrowed from the future to make those tax cut (cause we'll have to back back the extra deficit over time).
blfr 6y ago
Funding in 2019 isn't the problem. CDC had obviously wrong advice on their website against wearing masks since 2009. The modern day elites have been showing their incompetence time and again lately. This is not because they were a few dollars short.
- hylaride 6y ago
  Wrong how? COVID-19 didn't exist until late last year, so how could they have been wrong since 2009? Even if they were wrong, people can be wrong and change based on new information. That's not incompetence, that's learning. But if not the "elites" (eye roll) then who? The "non-elites" running things now aren't doing a bang up job.
  - blfr 6y ago
    Wrong in the obvious way that it doesn't impede transmission. The recommendation from 2009 was for H1N1 and they stuck to it for corona. If they couldn't figure it out in a decade, they should have been defunded. If not the elites, then some other elites, obviously. But the current ones have been failing us all over: a generation of scientific stagnation, poor diet and health advice, including absolutely ridiculous stuff about masks (CDC) and human-to-human transmission (WHO), and just grifting, like saddling young people with immense debt for education which seems to have no value beyond the sheepskin effect. Which is a fairly classic elite money extraction scheme but taken to really damaging, society-wide scale.
snarf21 6y ago
Even worse was his defunding of PREDICT (started in 2009 and funded by the U.S. Agency for International Development, and it worked with teams in 31 countries, including China. It was just one part of an emerging global network for infectious-disease surveillance.) This cost a trivial $20M per year and funded the woman listed below among others. Of note, in her team's research they have found dozens of bat-borne coronaviruses in the same family as SARS. This did not sneak up on us; we already have MERS, SARS and Ebola. We should have been (and continuing) spending billions as a species on this but everyone has their head in the sand. 1-[https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-chinas-bat-woman-hunted-down-viruses-from-sars-to-the-new-coronavirus1/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-chinas-bat-wo...]
- ars 6y ago
  That's a very misleading take. First of all PREDICT was shut down in October, so if it was going to help, then it certainly had a chance. But it was shut down because it failed, not to save money “But things got complicated in the last two years, and by January, Predict was essentially collapsed into hibernation.” Maybe I'm misreading the quote, but it sounds like there was some sort of problem with the program, and they just gave up and shut it down.

by est31 6y ago

imglorp 6y ago

What was the motivation for the cuts? Was it merely difficult to justify spending on a 100-year event that might never come? Or was there a conflict of interest?

loopz 6y ago
Not caring for anybody but themselves? Why would it be explained.
redis_mlc 6y ago
> 100-year event that might never come SARS-1 (2003) and MERS are recent coronaviruses, and Ebola re-occurs every other year. SARS-1 had a similar effect on Toronto hospitals as the current COVID-19 on NYC, with staff wiped out.
- redis_mlc 6y ago
  Actually, if anybody knows why Ebola keeps re-occurring every 2-3 years (according to the CDC), I'd be curious to know why. You'd think a disease that fatal (over 50%) would wipe itself out. Or maybe, horrors, it's really that bad! In 2014, the US had a cluster of Ebola cases, and was totally unprepared, with one patient and 2 nurses getting infected: https://www.nbcnews.com/storyline/ebola-virus-outbreak/nurse-who-caught-ebola-settles-suit-against-dallas-hospital-n672081 https://www.nbcnews.com/storyline/ebola-virus-outbreak/nurse... "[nurse] went home in the scrubs she wore while treating Duncan [for Ebola]." That transmission was via an airline passenger from Liberia.
delecti 6y ago
Cynically? The best way to show the government is useless, and thus to justify cuts, is to make the government be useless.
- sq_ 6y ago
  Case in point: the USPS. It's the Republican "starve the beast" strategy [0] (of course, not limited to the US, just commonly seen here). [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starve_the_beast https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starve_the_beast
yardie 6y ago
Tax cuts at any cost. Since they can't make small cuts to the large programs (military, SS, Medicare) they make thousands of large cuts to the not so well known programs, CDC, forestry, NEA. Then they go back to their constituents about how many millions and billions in programs they've cut.
- _-david-_ 6y ago
  >Tax cuts at any cost. The revenue brought in from taxes increased after the tax cuts. https://www.cbo.gov/system/files/2019-11/55824-CBO-MBR-FY19.pdf https://www.cbo.gov/system/files/2019-11/55824-CBO-MBR-FY19....
  - EdwardDiego 6y ago
    Are you implying a direct causative link?
    - _-david-_ 6y ago
      >Are you implying a direct causative link No. The person I was responding to was making the claim that budget cuts were made to make tax cuts possible. I was trying to say that the tax cuts did not lower the revenue so budget cuts were not needed to justify the tax cuts.
      - BlackNitrogen 6y ago
        The per year deficit greatly increased though during that time. we reduced taxes, the economy grew a little more but the deficit really increased. the net is we borrowed from the future to make those tax cut (cause we'll have to back back the extra deficit over time).

blfr 6y ago

Funding in 2019 isn't the problem. CDC had obviously wrong advice on their website against wearing masks since 2009. The modern day elites have been showing their incompetence time and again lately. This is not because they were a few dollars short.

hylaride 6y ago
Wrong how? COVID-19 didn't exist until late last year, so how could they have been wrong since 2009? Even if they were wrong, people can be wrong and change based on new information. That's not incompetence, that's learning. But if not the "elites" (eye roll) then who? The "non-elites" running things now aren't doing a bang up job.
- blfr 6y ago
  Wrong in the obvious way that it doesn't impede transmission. The recommendation from 2009 was for H1N1 and they stuck to it for corona. If they couldn't figure it out in a decade, they should have been defunded. If not the elites, then some other elites, obviously. But the current ones have been failing us all over: a generation of scientific stagnation, poor diet and health advice, including absolutely ridiculous stuff about masks (CDC) and human-to-human transmission (WHO), and just grifting, like saddling young people with immense debt for education which seems to have no value beyond the sheepskin effect. Which is a fairly classic elite money extraction scheme but taken to really damaging, society-wide scale.

snarf21 6y ago

Even worse was his defunding of PREDICT (started in 2009 and funded by the U.S. Agency for International Development, and it worked with teams in 31 countries, including China. It was just one part of an emerging global network for infectious-disease surveillance.) This cost a trivial $20M per year and funded the woman listed below among others. Of note, in her team's research they have found dozens of bat-borne coronaviruses in the same family as SARS. This did not sneak up on us; we already have MERS, SARS and Ebola. We should have been (and continuing) spending billions as a species on this but everyone has their head in the sand. 1-[https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-chinas-bat-woman-hunted-down-viruses-from-sars-to-the-new-coronavirus1/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-chinas-bat-wo...]

ars 6y ago
That's a very misleading take. First of all PREDICT was shut down in October, so if it was going to help, then it certainly had a chance. But it was shut down because it failed, not to save money “But things got complicated in the last two years, and by January, Predict was essentially collapsed into hibernation.” Maybe I'm misreading the quote, but it sounds like there was some sort of problem with the program, and they just gave up and shut it down.