This is a must watch segment.
A devastating indictment of Donald Trump.
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Professor Ashish Jha, head of the Harvard Global Health Institute, said, "My expectation – and I have to say, in retrospect, was quite wrong – was that there was massive planning happening in the U.S. government. I assumed there was a lot of ramping up of testing and getting our country ready for what was coming."
"But?" asked correspondent Martha Teichner.
"Well, it's really become clear now, that there was not," Jha replied.
The fact that the CDC's test kits didn't work meant that coronavirus was out there, spreading, and no one knew where.
What came next was six weeks of schizophrenia: Dueling versions of reality, the president dismissing the threat ("A lot of people think that goes away in April, with the heat"; "We have it very much under control"), versus the press ("We now have the first case with no immediate links to worldwide travel or a related illness").
But the nation was preoccupied, not with coronavirus, but with impeachment and the primaries.
"It was only at the end of February, early March, that it started dawning on us that, My God, we wasted six weeks of early warning time," Jha said.