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A comment on Pentagon Knew of Possible Coronavirus Threat for Years. Parent comment

Re:Pentagon Knew of Possible Coronavirus Threat for Years by twomoretime on Monday April 06, 2020 @12:21PM (#22794999)
You're delusional if you don't recognize that this was a mass failure throughout the width and breadth of US corporate and government administration. Practically no one at federal, state, or local levels took any initiative to prepare. Same across the medical industry. Same for manufacturing - not a single company thought to ramp up mask or ventilator production when we've been hearing about this since January.

It's popular to hate on the president but needlessly political to place the blame solely on his shoulders. And at the risk of posting flaimbait, note that Trump made a very early move to close the border to Chinese travel, and was met with condemnation of sinophobia from high ranking Democrats (like Schumer) and media.

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Re:Pentagon Knew of Possible Coronavirus Threat for Years by Daishiman on Monday April 06, 2020 @12:27PM (#22795076)
"The buck stops here", said someone.

It is the president the one who sets the tone and priority for these issues, and having been wisely advised, he obviously sat around, downplayed the issue, and yes, his response was absolute sinophobia given that a couple dozen additional measures would have have to be shown to display competency in this.

He is easily the most incompetent person that could lead this crisis.

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Re:Pentagon Knew of Possible Coronavirus Threat for Years by btilly on Monday April 06, 2020 @12:45PM (#22795256)
"The buck stops here", said someone.

That someone was Harry S. Truman, who succeeded Roosevelt during WW II. And was succeeded in turn by Eisenhower.

I randomly picked up https://www.amazon.com/Where-Buck-Stops-Personal-Writings/dp... in a used bookstore. I'm glad I did. It is Truman's take on every president up through Eisenhower. Truman was known for his blunt language, but even he asked that it not be published until after he and his wife died.

I don't agree with him on many things. But his take on leadership is very enlightening.

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Re:Pentagon Knew of Possible Coronavirus Threat for Years by twomoretime on Monday April 06, 2020 @02:08PM (#22796195)
>his response was absolute sinophobia given that a couple dozen additional measures would have have to be shown to display competency in this.

You are blinded by your hatred. Half the country has become totally unable to evaluate anything the president does objectively.

What proportion of world governments are xenophobic now for closing down borders?

>It is the president the one who sets the tone and priority for these issues, and having been wisely advised, he obviously sat around, downplayed the issue

And so did just about every other world government. Including your "model" "democratic socialist" European nations - hell, Sweden is still betting on herd immunity.

Rational thinking ceases when anyone brings up Trump. I'd also caution anyone evaluating this crisis response to recognize the unprecedented smear by the media. How many "US commandeers masks" articles have been corrected over the last few days now? Look it up, I bet you didn't hear about the quiet corrections. This happens all the damn time.

Trump is a shitty president but much of the hate he gets is pure partisan hysteria. Look at how quickly the tide turned against Chloroquine simply because he tweeted about it. Pure idiocy.

There's an old saying that people deserve their rulers.

Edit: and by the way, on the subject of rising claims of sinophobia: the CCP is not your friend. The world is paying now for their lies. All the little trickles of COVID symptomology that we are still just getting today should have been officially announced by China months ago while they were trying to cover up and downplay the virus to a much deeper degree than our president. There is a propaganda war waging right now across the internet with China attempting to set a narrative and by ignorantly screaming "sinophobia!" You are playing right into their narrative.

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Re:Pentagon Knew of Possible Coronavirus Threat for Years by James_Henry on Monday April 06, 2020 @12:31PM (#22795112)
This isn't true. You may only be hearing about the failures because that makes a better news story. 3M, for instance, increased production of masks in January because they knew demand would go up. There are surely countless others.
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Re:Pentagon Knew of Possible Coronavirus Threat for Years by elliekelly on Monday April 06, 2020 @01:08PM (#22795503)
Several regulators added pandemic preparedness to business continuity planning requirements following H1N1. In recent years most of those requirements have been significantly relaxed if not removed entirely. To give you a quick idea of how drastically things have changed in a very short time you can look at the Business Continuity Planning Handbook the FFIEC[1] publishes as a compliance guide.

The prior version[2] used the word "pandemic" 139 times while the current version[3] mentions it only 18 times.

Considering financial institution compliance is hardly known for speedy updates that is an absolutely monumental shift in guidance in less than four years.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Financial_Institutions...

[2] https://ithandbook.ffiec.gov/media/391101/ffiec-itbooklet-bu...

[3] https://ithandbook.ffiec.gov/media/296178/ffiec_itbooklet_bu...

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Re:Pentagon Knew of Possible Coronavirus Threat for Years by Nuzzerino on Monday April 06, 2020 @12:27PM (#22795081)
Lots of partisan voting in this thread but I thought this was well said. I'm more concerned about the systemic failures in this case.
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