Obama Shares Joe Biden's Year-Old Pandemic Prophecy
Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden tweeted one year ago that the United States was not prepared for a pandemic.
Former President Barack Obama and dozens of others shared the tweet from October 25, 2019, on its one-year anniversary. The tweet highlighted the former vice president’s foresight months before the coronavirus pandemic first brought the world to a standstill, eventually killing more than 225,000 people in the US.
“We are not prepared for a pandemic,” Biden tweeted. “Trump has rolled back progress President Obama and I made to strengthen global health security. We need leadership that builds public trust, focuses on real threats, and mobilises the world to stop outbreaks before they reach our shores.”
The tweet included a link to a Washington Post story about the Global Health Security index — a report by the Nuclear Threat Initiative and Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security — which found that 195 countries, including the US, were not fully prepared to respond should an outbreak occur.
Eight months into the pandemic, as new cases are breaking records, we need an administration that’s not going to wave the white flag. A year ago today, @JoeBiden was talking about the leadership we need to get prepared for a pandemic, and he’s got a plan to get it under control. https://t.co/A49pTJEQc9
— Barack Obama (@BarackObama) October 25, 2020
The prescient tweet has recirculated a number of times throughout the Covid-19 pandemic, which has infected more than 42.8 million people worldwide and killed more than 1.1 million so far.
Donald Trump has often blamed his predecessors for his own administration’s lack of preparedness to deal with the pandemic.
He has repeatedly criticised Obama for not leaving him a fully stocked national stockpile of medical supplies. In fact, Congress did not approve the Obama administration’s full budget request to restore the stockpile depleted during the 2009-10 H1N1 swine flu pandemic. Trump had three years in...
