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  • 2020-05-13 (xsd:date)
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  • Did the Obama Administration Fail to Prepare a Pandemic 'Game Plan'? (en)
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  • On May 9, 2020, Yahoo! News reported that it had obtained a tape of former U.S. President Barack Obama talking privately with ex-members of his administration. On the tape, Obama reportedly characterized the Trump administration’s handling of the COVID-19 coronavirus disease pandemic as an absolute chaotic disaster. In response, U.S. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell declared during an interview with Lara Trump (President Donald Trump's daughter-in-law) that President Obama should have kept his mouth shut and criticized the Obama administration for supposedly failing to prepare a pandemic game plan. That interview was broadcast live by the president's re-election campaign: However, McConnell's criticism on the latter point was untrue. As former Obama White House Ebola Response Coordinator Ronald Klain stated in a tweet, We literally left them a 69-page Pandemic Playbook ... that they ignored: Back in March 2020, Politico had written about the 69-page pandemic playbook (titled Playbook for Early Response to High-Consequence Emerging Infectious Disease Threats and Biological Incidents), which was completed by the Obama administration in 2016: According to Politico, the Trump administration had been briefed on the document in 2017, but it was not approved by the National Security Council (NSC) as Trump administration strategy, and one NSC official referred to it as quite dated: Nonetheless, contrary to McConnell's claim, the Obama White House did indeed leave behind a pandemic playbook — as Ben Rhodes, Obama's former deputy national security adviser, also noted on Twitter: (en)
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