"Snip: The impact has been calamitous. I know the effect on health programs vividly, having run U.S.A.I.D.’s Bureau for Global Health during the last Administration. For example, the U.S. has limited sight on infectious-disease outbreaks in many parts of the world, such as Russia and China. So U.S.A.I.D. has funded experts in neighboring countries, such as Kazakhstan, sitting between those particular two, to upgrade monitoring and share information on bird flu and other deadly diseases. That work has halted."

Remember, one of the things Trump and his sycophants did when first taking office in 2016 was to cut funding for a program that had U.S. scientists working in Chinese labs on infectious diseases. In their pea sized brains, they thought we were paying to help China to do scientific research. What they couldn't grasp is that what we were really paying for was to give the U.S. insight into Chinese research and to have eyes on what is going on in that portion of the world. The U.S. was benefitting from their work. Trump and his sycophants could not see that though, they just saw it as U.S. taxpayer money going to help the Chinese.

How much better would have the U.S. (and the world's) response to COVID had been if the U.S. actually had infectious disease scientists working in Chinese labs when the outbreak started?