The government has contingency plans for everything. Everything. For the fall of the Berlin Wall, for a Soviet first strike, for the emergence of MUTOs. These plans might not be good. They might be bare-bones or outdated. But the point of the plans isn't to have a cheat-sheet ready the minute a crisis strikes. The point is to have people already exposed to the idea of the crisis so that, when it hits, they're not starting from zero. New presidents are briefed on many of these plans. And as an incoming president, Donald Trump's team was briefed on the possibility of a world-wide pandemic:POLITICO obtained documents from the meeting
https://www.politico.com/f/?id=00000...712fe-79680897
and spoke with more than a dozen attendees to help provide the most detailed reconstruction of the closed-door session yet. It was perhaps the most concrete and visible transition exercise that dealt with the possibility of pandemics, and top officials from both sides — whether they wanted to be there or not — were forced to confront a whole-of-government response to a crisis. The Trump team was told it could face specific challenges, such as shortages of ventilators, anti-viral drugs and other medical essentials, and that having a coordinated, unified national response was “paramount” . . .
Asked whether information about the pandemic exercise reached the president-elect, a former senior Trump administration official who attended the meeting couldn’t say for sure but noted that it wasn’t “the kind of thing that really interested the president very much.”
“He was never interested in things that might happen. He’s totally focused on the stock market, the economy and always bashing his predecessor and giving him no credit,” the person said. “The possibility things were things he didn’t spend much time on or show much interest in.
“Even though we would put time on the schedule for things like that, if they happened at all, they would be very, very brief,” the former official continued. “To get the president to be focused on something like this would be quite hard.”
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