An Open Letter to Donald Re: “Quickly Spreading Virus Raises Fears Across China,” Washington Post, 1/21/2020

January 22, 2020

President Donald J. Trump
The White House
1600 Pennsylvania Ave, NW
Washington D.C. 20500

Dear President Trump:

This is a short letter with a serious message about national security and safety.

It has now been established that the Coronavirus spreading in China can be communicated from human to human. That includes you and everyone else. Already the first case has been diagnosed in Washington State. The patient had just returned from the city of Wuhan where the afflictions originated. China is in a near panic trying to curtail the spread of this lethal virus during a period of massive movements of people in China on the occasion of the Spring Festival holiday.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in Atlanta is tasked with detecting, alerting, containing and preventing deadly pandemics worldwide. You know about the CDC because in your first budget you wanted to cut its $7.2 billion budget by $1.2 billion. Before, that is, cooler heads prevailed. Cooler heads failed to persuade you not to give an additional $80 billion to the military budget and its large wasteful contractors that year.

The CDC needs more resources, more scientists, more training programs, and more field personnel in key areas of the world to do its life-saving job.

So stop the golf games, drop your “fake news” fulminations and GET TO WORK. Bear in mind, all your techniques of intimidations, and your guided missiles and armed drones, don’t faze deadly viruses and bacteria at all. You are a well-known germophobe. Act like one! NOW!

Sincerely,
Ralph Nader

PO Box 19312
Washington, D.C. 20036