
CDC to cut by 80 percent efforts to prevent global disease outbreak (2018) - uptown
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/to-your-health/wp/2018/02/01/cdc-to-cut-by-80-percent-efforts-to-prevent-global-disease-outbreak/
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RcouF1uZ4gsC
> Countries where the CDC is planning to scale back include some of the
> world’s hot spots for emerging infectious disease, such as China, Pakistan,
> Haiti, Rwanda and Congo.

Why was the United States subsidizing China which is the world’s second
largest economy and has a military budget of $228 Billion making it the second
largest military spender ( [https://www.worldatlas.com/articles/countries-
with-the-bigge...](https://www.worldatlas.com/articles/countries-with-the-
biggest-military-expenditure.html) )

~~~
tlb
To get a seat at the table for policy decisions. For example, we want them to
stop sick people flying to the US. Paying for part of an operation is a common
way to have some influence. Also, some deals require them to spend a fraction
of it on US suppliers.

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peter303
The survival of the current US administration is at risk. Especially from
anti-science policies like this health one and more abstract ones like climate
change.

I say "Good riddance!". We can only hope this happens in time to save more
lives.

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kitsuac
Why is the US apparently responsibile for this financially in the first place?
For the future, will other countries join financially to up our global
defenses against future outbreaks?

It sounds like the US took up a global cause on its own and when the clock ran
out they didn't renew because that emergency had subsided.

Is this what was being pinned as Trump's "fault" in recent press and social
media?

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hedora
He did a few things to eliminate the pandemic response team in 2018. This was
one of the things that happened:

[https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/trump-fire-pandemic-
team/](https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/trump-fire-pandemic-team/)

The US used to pay for this because the downsides of not doing it are higher
than the cost. Also, initiatives like these increase the US’s political and
economic power overseas.

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wideasleep1
"Trump’s budgets have proposed cuts to public health, only to be overruled by
Congress, where there’s strong bipartisan support for agencies such as the CDC
and NIH. Instead, financing has [bold]increased[/bold].

Indeed, the money that government disease detectives first tapped to fight the
latest outbreak was a congressional fund created for health emergencies.

Some public health experts say a bigger concern than White House budgets is
the steady erosion of a CDC grant program for state and local public health
emergency preparedness — the front lines in detecting and battling new
disease. But that decline was set in motion by a congressional budget measure
that predates Trump." [https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/trump-cut-cdc-
budget/](https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/trump-cut-cdc-budget/) The blame
game is beyond getting old...it's moldy.

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kitsuac
I'm at a loss how my good faith reply gets immediately downvoted away. The
game has broken our collective ability to make sense of anything. The wrong
scent gets pushed away without any authentic attempt to cohere.

