The president had given instructions to staff that 14 Americans aboard the Diamond Princess cruise ship who were infected with Wuhan coronavirus were to remain in Japan until such time as they were infection-free.
Meanwhile, the president and his virus task force were told last week that Americans quarantined aboard the vessel but were not yet sick would be brought home on two chartered planes. However, as The Washington Post reports, that decision was ultimately overruled by someone without the president’s knowledge or permission.
The paper reported:
Trump was briefed on the decision and agreed that healthy passengers should not be on the plane with sick ones, three senior administration officials said. But the State Department and a top U.S. health official ultimately decided to bring back the 14 Americans who tested positive for the virus on the planes and place them in isolation — without informing the president first.
The president first learned about the decision after it was made and the infected people were aboard the flight, according to the report, leading him to become extremely angry — and rightfully so — that he was not consulted first.
The decision, according to the Post, “could damage his administration’s handling of the response.” And quite frankly, anyone who has been following the undermining and sabotage of the president and his administration has to be thinking that this decision to overrule Trump was made on purpose.
“Some members of the task force were not told in advance that the infected people would be placed on the plane and learned that only after the plane was on its way back to the United States,” the power added.
The president is ultimately responsible, not a State Department official
Naturally, the State Department defended its own personnel.
“It’s important to remember this was an emerging and unusual circumstance,” claimed Principal Deputy Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary of the Bureau of Consular Affairs, Ian Brownlee.
“We had 328 people on buses, a plan to execute and we received lab results on people who were otherwise asymptomatic, un-ill people on a bus on the way to the airport," he added. "The people on the ground did exactly the right thing...in bringing them home.”
Really? So, the president and his task force weren’t sufficiently briefed on the situation, then…by the State Department? Is that it?
Or, more likely, was it just someone making a decision against the will of the president because a) they don’t like him; and b) don’t think he knows what he’s doing?
Either way, whoever was responsible has now put not just the president’s strategy of containing the virus at risk but the entire country as well. It could be that whomever decided to defy Trump just committed an act of biological terrorism against the country.
Also, as Zero Hedge’s Tyler Durden points out, coronavirus tests are not sufficiently reliable. They often show false negatives, while so-called asymptomatic “super-spreaders” are walking around the countryside infecting people.
And that’s no different from standard flu tests, which are also not even close to 100 percent accurate.
If Wuhan coronavirus begins to spread among the American people, the last person to blame will be President Trump.
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