The United States was ranked the best-prepared nation to deal with a pandemic late last year by the Nuclear Threat Initiative (NTI) and the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security (JHCHS), Fox News reported on Sunday.
The study appears to contradict claims by Democrats that the Trump administration had the country ill prepared for the coronavirus outbreak.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s “response has been excellent, as it has been in the past,” said John Auerbach, president of the nonpartisan Trust for America’s Health, which works with the government to improve the nation’s response to health crises.
Auerbach added that the CDC’s top scientific ranks have remained stable during the past three years, despite charges by some Democrats that the nation’s public health leadership has been decimated.
Democrats have also said that Trump cut the CDC budget, though those reductions were only proposals overruled by Congress, where strong bipartisan support for the CDC actually increased financing for it and other health organizations.
Some public health experts contend that a larger concern is the steady erosion of a CDC grant program for public health emergency preparedness at the state and local level. However, Fox News reported that this decline in the front lines for detecting and battling new disease was set in motion by a congressional budget measure that came before Trump entered the White House.
Brian Freeman ✉
Brian Freeman, a Newsmax writer based in Israel, has more than three decades writing and editing about culture and politics for newspapers, online and television.
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