Why Quality Leadership Matters
“In 2005, according to ABC News, President George W.
Bush read an advance copy of John M. Barry’s book about the 1918 flu pandemic,
“The Great Influenza.” “This happens every hundred years,” he told other
officials. “We need a national strategy.”
Over the next three years, prodded by the president,
administration officials created a detailed pandemic-response strategy.
According to Fran Townsend, Bush’s homeland-security adviser, it included an
outline for a global early-warning system, money for vaccine technology and the
now-infamous national stockpile for protective equipment, ventilators and so
on.
President Barack Obama’s administration confronted
outbreaks of the Ebola, Zika and H1N1 viruses. Although these had limited
effect in the U.S., they highlighted the very real possibility of a pandemic
wreaking havoc here. By the end of Obama’s second term, his National Security
Council had developed a 69-page playbook for responding to such threats.
As Obama was leaving office, members of his
national-security team conducted a so-called table-top exercise on pandemics
for the incoming Trump officials. The reception their presentation received,
according to Politico, was “chilly.””
What if facts matter?
“President Trump was irate on Thursday — not because
unemployment claims topped 17 million, or because more than 16,000 Americans
have died from the coronavirus, or because we lack a national testing program,
or because African Americans and Hispanics are dying in disproportionate
numbers. What really fried him was the statement from the usually accommodating
Wall Street Journal editorial board that his briefings are “less about the
virus and more about the many feuds of Donald J. Trump.” (Did the Journal just
notice this?)”
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