President Trump has been dangerously silent on this year’s deadly flu epidemic

Trump sends a lot of tweets. You’d think one could be about the flu.

By Emily Stewart  Feb 12, 2018, 3:50pm EST

This year’s flu season is severe. All but a handful of states are experiencing widespread flu outbreaks. As of last week, the flu and pneumonia are causing one in 10 deaths in America. Yet the White House has been largely silent about it.

President Donald Trump fired off more than a dozen tweets over the weekend, quoting Fox News segments, attacking the “Fake News Media,” and worrying about “due process” for accused abusers and sexual harassers. No mention of the 2018 flu season.

Of course, President Trump can’t cure the flu. Nor can be he faulted that this year the flu has been deadly, as it has in years past. But he could tell people to get a flu shot and wash their hands — as past presidents have done.

When the bird flu threatened a global spread in 2005, President George W. Bush mapped out a plan to combat the pandemic and keep it from reaching the United States. And when faced with the swine flu in 2009, President Barack Obama drew from Bush’s playbook in his administration’s response. Both presidents also spoke about their efforts publicly — Bush delivered a speech at the National Institutes of Health to put minds at ease and discuss measures for prevention, and Obama went as far as to enlist Elmo as part of its anti-flu campaign.

This year, up to 4,000 Americans are dying from the flu and pneumonia per week. But Trump hasn’t been telling people to sneeze into their elbows or speaking about a plan to fight the virus.

“We haven’t seen that from the White House, which considering the number of American lives at stake, it’s really somewhat astonishing,” said Wendy Parmet, a professor of health policy at Northeastern University. “They have been remarkably invisible on this.”

Trump’s predecessors stepped up to the plate on public health risks
When H1N1, commonly known as the swine flu, became an international pandemic in 2009, the Obama administration launched a campaign to help Americans figure out what to do, ease their minds, and hopefully slow the illness’s spread. The US declared a public health emergency in April of that year; the president delivered a broadcast address and asked Congress for funding.

In September of the same year, Obama delivered a statement in the Rose Garden with advice on how to prevent the spread of the swine flu: wash your hands, sneeze into your sleeve, etc. “I don’t want anybody to be alarmed, but I do want everybody to be prepared,” he said. Three Obama administration departments launched a public service campaign about the flu featuring Sesame Street’s Elmo.

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https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2018/2/12/17004788/trump-flu-season-cdc-shot