Inside Moise Kean’s lockdown house party with lapdancers as ‘appalled’ Everton prepare £100,000 fine - The Sun

TAKE a look inside Moise Kean’s lap-dancing lockdown party – with Everton set to fine the Covidiot £100,000 for his idiotic stunt.

The Toffees are ready to hit the Italian, 20, with a maximum two-week fine after the striker flouted lockdown laws.

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Moise Kean can be seen grinning in Snapchat footage of his lap-dancer party

At one point, the caption ‘quarantine clean’ is splashed across the footage

Kean appeared to be having the time of his life but is now set to be fined £100,000

And manager Carlo Ancelotti also plans to give the Italy Under-21 striker a severe dressing-down for having a party at his apartment in Cheshire last weekend.

In Snapchat footage, Kean can be seen grinning ear-to-ear as he enjoyed himself with his pals – and lap-dancers.

In one clip, the caption “quarantine clean” is splashed across the mindless video.

Flop Kean – who has struggled to make an impact at Goodison Park since arriving from Juventus last summer – uploaded footage of the gathering, featuring several women thought to be models, to the social media platform Snapchat.

Everton – who have been working hard to help fans in the community cope with the difficulties that have come from being in self-isolation – were furious after learning of Kean’s antics and have decided to hit him with the biggest fine possible.

The Goodison club lashed out at Kean in a statement which said: “Everton Football Club was appalled to learn of an incident in which a first-team player ignored government guidance and club policy in relation to the coronavirus crisis.

“The club has strongly expressed its disappointment to the player and made it clear that such actions are completely unacceptable.

“Everton has regularly stressed the importance of following all the government guidelines — including rules and advice for inside and outside of the home — through a series of official communications to all staff members, including players.

“The amazing people in the NHS deserve the utmost respect for their hard work and sacrifice. The best way to show them respect is by doing everything we can to protect them.”

Kean is understood to have made a full apology to the club and vowed such a mistake will never happen again.

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His actions follow similar crass behaviour by Manchester City’s Kyle Walker and Jack Grealish of Aston Villa.

England ace Walker held a sex party with two escorts at his flat during the coronavirus lockdown.

The 29-year-old and his friend invited the two women to his apartment just hours after he told his 1.5 million Twitter followers to strictly observe the lockdown measures in place.

He is believed to have been fined two weeks’ wages – around £240,000 – by City.

Prior to that Villa skipper Grealish was hit with a £150,000 rap for breaking the lockdown laws to go to a friend’s house for a Saturday night party.

Grealish, who had also urged fans to stay home, crashed his car following the 4am party, but escaped police action with proceeds from the fine of two weeks’ wages donated to The University Hospitals Charity in Birmingham.

Arsenal and Tottenham have also been widely criticised for not taking the lockdown seriously.

The Gunners’ David Luiz, Granit Xhaka, Nicolas Pepe and Alexandre Lacazette were spotted flouting rules to remain at home.

A photograph of Nicolas Pepe shared on WhatsApp showed him playing football with a group of people, while Luiz and Xhaka had a kickabout between themselves.

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Moise Kean will be slapped with a fine of more than £100k by Everton for throwing a coronavirus lockdown party at his Cheshire apartment

Their actions came despite stars from north London rivals Tottenham previously being slammed for breaching guidelines.

Boss Jose Mourinho, Tanguy Ndombele, Davinson Sanchez and Ryan Sessegnon were rapped at the start of this month after being pictured training on Hadley Common in north London.

Serge Aurier uploaded a video on Instagram of him and Moussa Sissoko training together.

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Inside Moise Kean’s lockdown house party with lapdancers as ‘appalled’ Everton prepare £100,000 fine - The Sun

Health Inside Edition"s Deborah Norville Get Tested for Coronavirus - Inside Edition

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Published on Apr 22, 2020

They are the words no one wants to hear: positive for coronavirus. And it was not the result Inside Edition anchor Deborah Norville expected when she recently took a COVID-19 antibody test. Norville said she took the antibody test, which consists of drawing a small amount of blood, at the same time as her daughter who she thought may have contracted the virus after attending Mardi Gras in New Orleans, now a COVID-19 hotspot. But her test results weren’t as conclusive as she first thought.

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Health Inside Edition"s Deborah Norville Get Tested for Coronavirus - Inside Edition

Inside the digital cage of Zoom diplomacy

The World Bank is among the many global organizations that have been forced to meet digitally due to the coronavirus crisis. | Win McNamee/Getty Images

Spare a thought for the world’s diplomatic elite: they’re prowling around Zoom like caged animals, deprived of their most potent tool — personal contact — right as the world is looking to them to coordinate the response to a crippling pandemic.

Ambassadors normally mix in a world of corridor chats and embassy cocktail parties, building trust and confidence over meals and trading favors over amendments to resolutions and legislation. But that rarified world is over, replaced by an endless series of video conferences that take longer and produce less.

This week alone, the G7, G20, International Monetary Fund and World Bank have all convened teleconferences in place of in-person gatherings.

At the United Nations Security Council, the apex of global diplomacy, one sitting ambassador says the problems are already piling up. “It took three weeks to get a Security Council meeting on coronavirus. If it hadn’t been online it could have happened much, much earlier,” Estonian Ambassador Sven Jürgenson he told POLITICO.

When it comes to high-stakes diplomacy, “WhatsApp chats can’t replace the corridor diplomacy for getting consensus,” Jürgenson said.

As the Security Council moved its work online last month, Russia initially opposed — and therefore prevented — the group from taking official decisions. The eventual workaround is “a crazy system of sending signed letters by email to vote instead of raising our hands online,” Jürgenson said. POLITICO reached out to Russia’s mission to the U.N. for comment.

Ashok Mirpuri, Singapore’s veteran ambassador in Washington, agrees that “operating online is not real diplomacy.”

“The reason you send diplomats out to foreign capitals is to engage personally and share confidences and confidential assessments,“ Mirpuri said. Building and acting on trust is “about the cues and nuances,” that aren’t available online, he said. “You can reach a much wider audience (when on video), but you can’t get to that next stage of diplomacy.”

After eight years on the Washington diplomatic circuit, Mirpuri says he can cope with pandemic interruptions, but worries for newcomer counterparts: “A new person can’t broaden their contacts.”

One of those newcomer ambassadors in Washington is Austria’s Martin Weiss, who arrived in November 2019. Weiss said that in a time of travel restrictions, video tools have helped him figure out “how our Austrians are doing in California, and who’s currently on a cruise ship and where.” But the benefits stop when the discussions get complex.

“You have a very different group-dynamic on a video platform. There isn’t the same pressure to compromise you would experience if you were in the same room. It’s easier to hide behind your own screen,” Weiss said.

For diplomats from some of the world’s far-flung and poorer countries, virtual conferences have been a lifeline in climate negotiations for more than a decade. But Zoom diplomacy can be just another dividing line between the haves and have-nots: Countries that can’t If your country lacks the funds for elaborate system of embassies or diplomatic travel are likely to have sub-par broadband and 5G connections, too.

During a recent virtual meeting of the Warsaw International Mechanism – a U.N. climate initiative — a Sudanese representative was unable to participate because of low bandwidth.

The security of video conferencing systems is another headache for countries, rich and poor. Zoom has faced a backlash over its privacy standards, prompting warnings against its use from organizations as diverse as the German foreign ministry, U.S. Senate and Taiwanese government.

For some governments, the security issues have been of their own making. Early on in the coronavirus crisis, UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson posted a screenshot of “the first ever digital Cabinet” on Twitter, revealing the Zoom meeting ID was 539-544-323.

Taiwan, no stranger to diplomatic isolation, simply banned Zoom last week. Government spokesperson Chen Chi-mai said the decision was a matter of “defending the nation’s critical communications infrastructure.”

Julia Reda, a former member of the European Parliament who now works for GFF, a German digital freedom NGO, recommends leaders use Nextcloud or Jitsi, “if you want the content of the conversation to be confidential.” The European Union’s Data Protection Supervisor team uses WebEx and Jabber.

When it comes to technical headaches, the European Union may have the biggest diplomatic challenge of all: shifting thousands of meetings in 24 languages online in a given week.

Deprived of monthly summer camp-style trips for plenary meetings in Strasbourg, France, the European Parliament’s 705 members are using Interactio, a system for multilingual meetings. Up to 1000 people may participate in up to four parallel meetings said Jaume Duch, the Parliament’s spokesperson.

For EU leaders summits “Each national government department connects into the Council’s hub using their own videoconferencing systems,” said a spokesperson for the European Council, the body that convenes the summits.

Those summits have been heavily disrupted. To reach a deal on Greece’s most recent bailout in 2015, European Council president Donald Tusk spent 16 hours switching between large group discussions and parallel bilateral and mini-group discussions, refusing to let the leaders leave until a deal was struck. This diplomatic version of torture worked — but only after in-person talks that lasted until 8 a.m.

For German Chancellor Angela Merkel, there’s no comparison between the digital and the personal. It is “possible to work on controversial texts,” Merkel said after her first EU video summit March 26, referring to official summit documents. But she said she prefers “walking around the table to discuss whether a compromise proposal would perhaps go through.”

The uptick in virtual diplomacy offers governments some opportunities amidst all the challenges. Moira Whelan, the U.S. State Department’s Deputy Assistant Secretary for Digital Strategy under President Obama, said the real benefits of Zoom diplomacy lie in its ability to engage the public. “In the midst of a crisis, government has the tendency to simply tell people what to do and use digital tools to help them do that.” Instead, she recommends “governments investing more time and energy on virtual town halls and question and answer sessions.”

Citizens have come to expect their leaders to be “digitally available” during this crisis, Whelan says, something that’s likely to persist even after social distancing ends.

— Vincent Manancourt contributed reporting to this article

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Inside the digital cage of Zoom diplomacy

Inside the global race to prevent another depression

The buildings of Germany’s banking district in Frankfurt on Sunday. Due to Covid-19, the economy worldwide expects heavy losses. | Michael Probst/AP Photo

Economic firefighters around the world have a problem they’ve never seen before: a lightning-fast economic collapse strapped to a virulent global pandemic and wild, whipsawing financial markets threatening to amplify the damage.

From Washington to Brussels to Frankfurt to Berlin and beyond, officials in advanced economies are rolling out the biggest fiscal and monetary policy bazookas they’ve ever imagined. Some of the players, notably Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell and Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, have forged a close fire-fighting partnership echoing their predecessors’ during the 2008 financial crisis. Officials who confronted the brink of economic calamity during a European debt crisis that began a decade ago — such as German Chancellor Angela Merkel and the new European Central Bank president, Christine Lagarde — are revising their playbooks and trying to avoid renewing the divides of that conflict.

Economists, traders and average citizens are all too aware that those efforts can’t stop the coronavirus, which is causing a once-in-a century human and economic catastrophe that’s still playing out with no clear end in sight. They’re starting to brace for a longer and deeper downturn than any of them imagined just a month ago when the mass shutdowns began across the global economy. And they’ve yet to grapple with the consequences of the economic damage rippling from the largest and strongest economies to the smaller and weaker ones with fewer resources.

The world’s finance ministers and central bankers will gather virtually this week for the International Monetary Fund’s semi-annual meeting of 189 member nations — a pandemic-era replacement for the usual in-person gathering in Washington. At the top of the agenda will be charting a course for fighting a global economic collapse unlike any other in the IMF’s 75-year history.

“The depth of the recession, just in terms of jobs lost and fallen output, will not compare to anything we’ve seen in the last 150 years. The only question is duration,” said Kenneth Rogoff, a Harvard professor and former IMF chief economist who has studied every recent downturn. “The economic tools we are using are important, but it’s a natural catastrophe or war — we are in the middle of it and just getting out of it is kind of the main thing right now.”

The massive infusions of cash from central banks and governments around the world will help. But new approaches will ultimately be required, Rogoff argued, including possible global debt moratoriums for emerging-market economies such as India likely to be slammed by the virus. He also said central banks such as the Fed may be forced into unprecedented steps to revive growth — such as lowering interest rates below zero, a move the central bank has long resisted in part because of mixed evidence of its effectiveness.

The big institutional players in this global economic drama are battle-tested veterans at spraying foam on the runway in the form of giant spending programs and an alphabet soup of lending facilities and central bank interventions. The U.S. Fed and Treasury just last week announced efforts designed to dole out more than $2 trillion in loans to businesses and municipalities, on top of trillions of dollars already promised through other lending and stimulus efforts.

But this is a beast unlike any of them have seen.

Other major downturns in recent decades grew out of market bubbles or economic policy mistakes, from runaway inflation in the 1970s and early 1980s, to the savings and loan crisis and Asian market meltdowns in the 1990s to the dot-com crash in 2000 and the 2008 financial crisis.

This time really is different.

And while central players including Powell, Mnuchin, Lagarde and Merkel are mostly using tools that worked in the past, few seem to be wrestling more broadly with how fundamentally the world is changing and what economies may look like once the coronavirus pandemic is finally brought under control, a date that remains largely unknowable and beyond the ability of economic policymakers to control or even influence.

The Great Depression transformed economic behavior for at least a decade. Many who lived through it never returned to their previous ways. The coronavirus crisis could do the same, suggesting the old playbook may help put out some short-term fires, but an entirely new approach may have to emerge from policymakers around the world.

“The Fed and Congress have done an outstanding job so far,” said Liaquat Ahamed, a former World Bank official and author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning “Lords of Finance: The Bankers Who Broke the World,” a history of the Great Depression. He cited trillions of dollars worth of emergency lending from the Fed and a congressional rescue package worth 10 percent of the economy.

“Whether that’s enough, I suppose, depends on how long you have to do it for. But when this is all over I think we will have to ask the question of, what it is about the U.S. economy that makes it so unstable when it gets hit?” Ahamed said. “Europeans have mechanisms in place to deal with this that are a lot better than we have. All these lines outside unemployment centers show we don’t have the institutional mechanisms to deal with these kinds of shocks.”

Here’s a look at what some of the biggest policymakers are doing now in the world’s two leading advanced economies — the United States and Europe — and what they may have to contemplate in the months and years ahead.

Trump’s trusted Treasury secretary joins arms with the Fed chair

Mnuchin, though generally calm and subdued in public appearances, has been a frenetic actor behind the scenes, consistently on the phone and in meetings with the Fed chair, congressional leaders and White House officials as the economic point man for President Donald Trump — one of the few top officials to maintain the president’s confidence throughout his term. Mnuchin personally shuttled between congressional offices last month negotiating between a Democratic House speaker and Republican Senate majority leader for a $2.2 trillion program to save major industries, rescue small businesses, issue checks to most Americans and bolster unemployment benefits.

He’s racing against grim signs of damage across the economy, including 17 million new jobless claims in the U.S. in just three weeks with millions more on the way. It’s a scale of devastation beyond what the U.S. saw across the entire course of an 18-month recession tied to the 2008-2009 financial crisis.

Over the last two weeks, Treasury and the Fed have held calls every day at 5 p.m., led by Mnuchin and Powell and including other senior staff. But Mnuchin and Powell talk multiple times a day on their cell phones, often well into the night — “sometimes five times, sometimes 30 times,” according to the Treasury chief.

The calls reached fever pitch last Wednesday, as Treasury and the Fed prepared to jointly announce the massive $2.3 trillion intervention by the central bank, timed to hit the news wires just ahead of another disastrous report on unemployment claims on Thursday morning, which wound up showing 6.6 million Americans filed for benefits.

The plan included multiple facilities with complicated names to plow money into the cratering economy. Staff at Treasury and the Fed worked until well after midnight Wednesday night putting the necessary documents together to make the moves legal, which under section 13(3) of the Federal Reserve Act required the signature of the Treasury secretary.

After a brief respite, work on the papers began again at 5 a.m. Thursday, with Powell and Mnuchin resuming their phone conversations as the clock ticked toward the 8:30 a.m. release of the devastating jobless figures.

The final documents bearing Mnuchin’s signature authorizing the giant intervention did not arrive at the Fed until 7:55 a.m., five minutes before the central bank planned to send out an embargoed press release to give reporters time to prepare stories that would hit right at 8:30 a.m.

The frantic effort largely upstaged the market impact of the job losses. CNBC immediately switched from covering the unemployment news to offering details of the Fed’s intervention. Investors also ignored the jobless claims figures on Thursday and celebrated the Fed’s moves, sending stocks up hundreds of points.

On the financial markets side at least, the Powell-Mnuchin power pairing appears to be working. After bottoming out on March 23, stocks have mounted a remarkable comeback — celebrated by Trump on Friday — though the Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index remains around 18 percent below highs hit in February.

It was a moment reminiscent of the partnerships between then-Fed Chair Ben Bernanke and Treasury Secretaries Hank Paulson and Tim Geithner during the 2008-2009 financial crisis. Bernanke, first with Paulson then with Geithner, often timed announcements to beat the opening of Asian markets on Sundays — their attempt to calm tanking markets and get ahead of grim news.

A dealer with Democrats in a bitterly partisan era

Mnuchin is serving as the administration’s economic deal-maker by building functional relationships with Democrats, the result of a lesson learned from Trump’s biggest economic legislation before now: the 2017 tax cuts.

People close to the Treasury secretary say that during that effort, when Mnuchin took a back seat to top officials such as then-National Economic Council Director Gary Cohn, he learned during the highly partisan debate that building relationships with Democrats on Capitol Hill really mattered. Also key was being viewed as speaking directly for Trump, to the limited extent that anyone but Trump himself can do that.

“After tax reform he’s been very careful to solicit Democratic members’ concerns, as well as Republicans of course,” one person close to Mnuchin said. “Quite frankly, over the three years he’s been there, he’s figured out Washington better, certainly better than when he first got there. He’s learned to play the game.”

Mostly, Mnuchin grabbed the lead slot on the rescue package by getting tighter with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer. “I think they’ve come to view him as not that political a guy, not a backslapper,” this official said. “He kind of just says what he means and I think Democrats sort of figured that out.”

A second official close to Mnuchin said that in Hill meetings, as discussions skidded into partisan rows, the secretary often served as the person to keep them focused on the core items — moves that ultimately satisfied Democrats and enlarged the rescue package. “He was the most uniquely positioned person to do this for Trump given he has the president’s confidence and knows with as much certainty as anyone how the president will react to things.”

During the frenetic, often late night talks over the rescue package, people close to the matter say Mnuchin relied most heavily on White House Legislative Affairs Director Eric Ueland; Deputy Treasury Secretary Justin Muzinich, who has deep experience on Wall Street; and Treasury General Counsel Brian Callanan. Despite the large staff at his department, Mnuchin has long preferred to lean on a small group of trusted advisers.

Mnuchin on Friday morning helped broker what appeared to be an agreement with Schumer to open bipartisan talks on the next chunk of coronavirus relief from Congress. But partisan lines over the money hardened again over the weekend, and it remained unclear whether Mnuchin could actually play any kind of peacemaker role.

While Schumer has complained that Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell didn’t reach out to him and McConnell’s allies say Schumer isn’t negotiating in good faith, there have been few Democratic complaints about Mnuchin. At the same time, the Treasury secretary doesn’t exactly speak for the ideologically diverse Senate Republican Conference, leaving some negotiations akin to a game of telephone. It can appear to succeed one moment, then fall apart the next.

Mnuchin has also emerged as one of the key players in a variety of largely amorphous groups inside the White House working on plans to reopen the economy as soon as possible, a top Trump priority in regular tension with the advice of the president’s top health advisers. On Thursday, Mnuchin said he thought the economy could reopen in May.

The Fed, backed by taxpayers, creates bazooka after bazooka

Working remotely like almost everyone else at the nation’s central bank, Powell is on the phone for most of the day from his home office — as much as 12 hours straight — while his television is tuned to CNBC, or occasionally Bloomberg TV. On the other end of the phone line is a laundry list of policymakers: his staff, fellow Fed board members, the heads of the regional Fed branches, members of Congress, foreign central bankers, as well as Mnuchin and his deputy, Muzinich.

Powell’s in-person press conferences have been replaced by teleconferences. What were once highly anticipated public events are now webcasts. And the audience he’s trying to reach is broader than the usual world of policymakers and traders.

His stated goal is to work both within and outside the Fed to help the U.S. economy make it to the other side of the crisis — and ensure the central bank’s stunning array of actions keep their potency against endless skepticism about the strength of the Fed’s ammunition.

“The Federal Reserve is working hard to support you now, and our policies will be very important when the recovery does come, to make that recovery as strong as possible,” the Fed leader said in a rare TV interview on NBC’s “Today Show.”

Together, the Fed and Treasury have announced nine emergency lending programs so far, part of an effort to ensure households and companies have the ability to borrow money and that financial markets don’t fall apart.

The emergency programs are the backbone of the government’s economic response. Most of the $500 billion set aside by Congress for businesses, states and cities is allotted for Treasury to facilitate loans from the Fed by covering any losses on those loans. The central bank also announced an effort to bolster the $350 billion in the congressional relief package for government-backed loans to small businesses.

Fed staff shoulder the bulk of the work on designing the programs, with direction from Powell; Randal Quarles, the central bank’s vice chairman in charge of bank oversight; and Lael Brainard, the last remaining Democrat on the Fed board who chairs its committee on financial stability.

Many of the programs rolled out by the central bank are reruns from the 2008 financial crisis. But Treasury’s engagement has taken on greater importance as the Fed strays further outside its typical role — of simply keeping money flowing through the economy — and moves into directing credit to specific sectors. The Fed has prioritized help to borrowers that Congress specifically said should receive aid — namely, nonfinancial businesses and municipalities.

The central bank’s actions are finding a response officials did not get in the 2008 financial crisis: praise from lawmakers for forceful, preemptive moves.

“The Fed has taken massive and necessary action,” said North Carolina Rep. Patrick McHenry, the top Republican on the House Financial Services Committee, in an interview.

Congress handing the Treasury Department taxpayer dollars to facilitate the Fed’s efforts cleared the path early. “We now have the fiscal house in front of the central bank,” McHenry said. “I think that is healthy and right. We don’t want the central bank playing politics.”

The central bank has worked for weeks on a “Main Street” lending program aimed at medium-sized businesses, although it will likely be weeks before that offering rolls out. The Fed also has yet to open the doors of its corporate credit programs, under which it will purchase debt issued by large companies. But just the announcement of those programs has helped corporate bond markets start running a bit more smoothly.

Still, the Fed faces a tough balancing act in using its lending to help companies that merely need cash to get them through the next few months while not propping up firms that are in trouble because of bad decisions made leading up to the crisis, such as loading up on too much debt.

Meanwhile, it’s been an ongoing struggle for the Fed to ensure proper functioning in the market for U.S. government debt, which influences all other interest rates and is a key investment globally.

The institution is also working furiously to keep the U.S. dollar — used around the world to trade, invest and borrow — available in other countries, as investors around the world seek refuge in the U.S. currency. The Fed made it easier for some foreign central banks to exchange their currencies for dollars, a move designed to prevent the value of the dollar from rising too high as other countries experience dollar shortages, which could have unwanted spillover effects in the U.S.

But it won’t be able to entirely shield the domestic economy from longer-term wounds abroad, including in major emerging economies that might not have the resources to contain the virus before a vaccine is widely available.

“The Fed is serving as an international lender of last resort,” said Ramin Toloui, a professor at Stanford University and former Treasury official across three administrations. “But it’s beyond the capability of the Fed to address what might be a solvency problem that could be emerging as a result of the real economic harm that’s being done by the spread of this epidemic around the world.”

In Europe, Germany breaks its taboos and unleashes its weapons

Merkel’s long political career took an unexpected turn in early March.

Up until then, the German leader had been riding out her tenure as chancellor ahead of her planned retirement in 2021. Her top priority had been to broker a solution to the brewing refugee crisis on the Turkish-Greek border and quietly steer the process of finding a successor.

But news on March 8 that Italy’s prime minister had placed the northern half of the country — including the country’s industrial heartland — under quarantine forced Merkel to change focus.

With the number of dead and infected in Italy rising exponentially, Merkel knew that the hopes in Berlin that Europe could dodge a major economic crisis had been dashed.

During a 7-hour meeting with coalition partners in her cavernous Berlin office that evening, Merkel won approval for billions in stimulus and other measures to cushion the impact of the incoming storm.

It turned out to be just a first step. Within days, as the potentially catastrophic impact of the coronavirus became clearer, Merkel’s cabinet had agreed, in the words of Finance Minister Olaf Scholz, to “put all of our weapons on the table.” That meant generous tax relief for companies both small and large and credit guarantees worth nearly €500 billion.

“This is the most extensive and effective guarantee we have ever made in a crisis,” said German Economy Minister Peter Altmaier.

Just weeks before, Altmaier, one of Merkel’s most trusted advisers, had downplayed the economic threat posed by the coronavirus. But now, with the entire German economy facing a shutdown, the stakes were clear. The Germans were falling back on the playbook they followed in 2008 in the wake of the Lehman Brothers bankruptcy, when Merkel’s government stepped in to prop up the country’s banks with hundreds of billions of euros in guarantees.

This time, guarantees alone weren’t going to be enough.

With large swaths of German industry on hold, the government needed quick cash for the legions of self-employed and to inject funds into hospitals and the small- and medium-sized businesses that form the backbone of the German economy.

Even in an emergency, securing those funds would be complicated. Doing so would mean breaking the biggest taboo in German politics — running a deficit. One of the keys to Merkel’s enduring popularity is that Germany has recorded a surplus since 2015, what Germans call a “black zero.” But with economists predicting the crisis could cost the German economy anywhere from €250 billion to €730 billion, it was clear to Merkel and her advisers that the black zero was history.

Under Germany’s constitutional “debt brake” — a rule adopted in 2011 to tame deficit spending — governments need parliamentary approval to exceed budget limits. Merkel planned to ask for €156 billion for 2020, an increase of nearly 50 percent over the current budget. In addition, the government planned to seek approval for further loans and credit guarantees, bringing the total value of the rescue package to nearly €1 trillion. Relative to the size of Germany’s $4 trillion economy, the package would be among the most aggressive of any country’s, including the U.S. rescue package that was a tenth of its economy.

Germany’s parliament, the Bundestag, fought tooth and nail for months over smaller sums for Greece and other eurozone countries during the region’s debt crisis. Now it was being asked to approve the largest financial rescue in the country’s history in a matter of days.

Just as the chancellor’s team was putting the final touches on the plan, it hit an obstacle when Merkel was exposed to the virus. A doctor Merkel had visited on March 20 for an immunization shot had tested positive for the virus, and she was placed under quarantine.

That meant it would be up to Scholz, the finance minister and vice chancellor, to take the deal over the line.

“What we need now is solidarity,” he told legislators on March 25, as Merkel watched from home.

They agreed, approving the package by a comfortable margin.

Europe debates debt (again) as the ECB revisits “whatever it takes”

Putting together a European package has proved more complicated.

With Italy and Spain, the eurozone’s third- and fourth-largest economies, effectively shut down as they try to bring the spread of the virus under control, leaders in both countries have been looking to Frankfurt and Berlin for help.

Neither country has the fiscal space to undertake the aggressive stimulus Germany is pursuing.

Just how exposed those countries — which bankers like to call the “Club Med” — really are became clear on the afternoon of March 12 during Lagarde’s regular press conference. Lagarde, the former IMF chief who took over the ECB in November, was annoyed that national governments weren’t acting more forcefully to confront the pandemic with aggressive fiscal measures. She worried members of the 19-member euro currency bloc would once again put the onus on the central bank to act through asset purchases, a course many economists argue is little more than a short-term fix.

“We are not here to close spreads,” Lagarde told reporters, signaling the ECB was not prepared to intervene in the market to keep a lid on southern Europe’s borrowing costs. Lagarde also said she didn’t intend to represent “whatever it takes, No. 2.”

In the space of a few seconds, Lagarde appeared to have reversed her predecessor Mario Draghi’s famous pledge during Europe’s debt crisis in 2012 to do “whatever it takes” to save the euro.

Italian bonds posted their steepest drop in a decade following Lagarde’s remarks, prompting frantic calls from Rome. Spooked by the market reaction, Lagarde, a trained lawyer whose suitability for the ECB role some questioned, went on CNBC to repair the damage.

She insisted she was “fully committed to avoid any fragmentation in a difficult moment for the euro area.”

But the damage was done. The next day, she apologized to her colleagues on the ECB’s governing council who had gathered for a conference call.

With the crisis worsening by the hour, it had become clear that, like it or not, the ECB needed to go big.

In the days that followed, Lagarde’s team at the ECB’s Frankfurt headquarters — an imposing structure resembling a giant glass shard — assembled a sweeping €750 billion package to stabilize the markets through asset purchases. While the bank had pursued a similar strategy in the past, this time Lagarde was proposing going even further by lifting the controls on how much debt the central bank could hold of each individual member. Those constraints were put in place during the euro crisis to shield the bank from accusations it was effectively printing money without limit to keep its members afloat, a point of particular concern to Germany and other northern members of the currency bloc.

Less than a week after insisting she didn’t want to mimic Draghi, Lagarde was trying to convince the ECB’s governing council to go even further.

During a conference call on March 18, Lagarde told the head of the eurozone’s national central banks that the pandemic had created “severe strains in the financial markets.”

While some members of the ECB’s governing council expressed reservations about lifting the controls on bond buying, they relented.

Lagarde ensured the central bankers that governments were now signaling more willingness to play their part with spending initiatives.

Still, the problem in southern Europe wasn’t willingness to act on the fiscal but the ability to. In Rome, Italian Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte worried the shutdown he had mandated would leave the country starved for cash, a shortfall it could only fill with the help of its wealthy northern neighbors.

During a videoconference summit of European leaders on March 26, Conte repeated a call for the introduction of “corona bonds” backed by all countries in the eurozone. Proceeds from the sale of such debt could be used to help the likes of Italy and Spain. The advantage is that with Germany’s backing, the interest rate on the bonds would be much lower than other countries could secure on their own.

“We need to react with innovative financial tools,” Conte told his counterparts.

The idea of mutualizing eurozone debt came up during the Greek crisis as well. For Germany and the Netherlands and other northern European countries, it’s no less controversial today than it was then. They worry the introduction of corona bonds would open the door to further mutualization down the road, saddling their countries with the burden of Southern Europe’s debt.

Even as she’s writing blank checks at home in Germany, Merkel has so far responded to her European counterparts with a strict “nein,” infuriating southern Europe’s leaders.

“Do you not understand the emergency we are going through?” an exasperated Spanish Premier Pedro Sánchez asked Merkel during the videoconference.

The German leader insisted she did. Even so, corona bonds remained off the table.

That’s mainly because she knows her own party would never accept a deal requiring Germany to take on other countries’ debt.

The European summit nearly collapsed over the issue with Conte and Sánchez warning of dire consequences if there wasn’t an agreement.

The leaders punted the issue to their finance ministers. Last week, after an angry debate during an all-night session, they finally agreed on a €540 billion package of credits and loan guarantees to help flagging members.

The only question is whether it will be enough.

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Inside the global race to prevent another depression

Inside story of Arsenal"s pay-cut plan as Gunners face "very grave situation" - Mirror Online

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Arsenal players have been warned the club faces a “very grave situation” because of the coronavirus lockdown.

That was the warning spelt out to the first team squad in the pay proposal seen by Mirror Sport should the season not be completed or if Arsenal do not get the “expected payments from broadcasters.”

And that begs the question: if a club the size of Arsenal fears a financial meltdown, then what hope for the rest of football?

The reality is that Arsenal’s annual wage bill of £230m is huge, one of the biggest in the Premier League.

Now it leaves them facing a black hole with the club concerned that deferrals alone will only move the problem further down the line.

After reporting losses of £27.1m last year, they are asking the players to take a pay cut rather than a deferral which only highlights the magnitude of the problem facing one of Europe’s top clubs.

Josh Kroenke the Arsenal Director with Stan Kroenke the Arsenal Owner
(Image: Arsenal FC via Getty Images)

Arsenal have a huge wage bill – believed to be in the 60 per cent range of their turnover – which has long been a problem since they dropped out of the Champions League.

Another year out of Europe’s elite competition will leave them facing even greater problems because they gambled big on reaching the Champions League last summer – and are in serious danger of coming up short again.

They spent a club record £72million last summer on Nicolas Pepe, but while the repayments to Lille are spread over the length of his contract, it was still money they did not really have.

Mesut Ozil is on £350,000-a-week, top scorer Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang will only have one year left on his contract this summer, and they are also paying a heavy price of an early exit from the Europa League after crashing out to Olympiacos.

Club owner Stan Kroenke actually guaranteed the club’s expenditure last summer, effectively underwriting the debt because of the complex funding of their Emirates Stadium.

Nicolas Pepe arrived for huge money last summer, with payments to Lille spread against his contract
(Image: Getty Images)

1. A 12.5 per cent pay cut for 12 months from April 2020 to March 2021 (players paid in final week of each month so to start this month)


2. The full amount is then refunded if Arsenal qualify for the Champions League


3. If Arsenal do not qualify for the Champions League, no money is returned back


4. If Arsenal fail to qualify for the Champions League, but qualify for the Europa League the cut becomes 7.5 per cent


5. If the season does not finish and/or Arsenal does not get full money from broadcasters then they will ask the players to find a “further solution”

Arsenal had always been cautious when it came to spending for fear of a disastrous season – but could never have imagined it would be this bad.

There is a genuine fear that they may yet have to pay back huge sums of TV cash with the Premier League desperate to complete the season with more than £750m with of broadcasting money at stake.

For a club like Arsenal, the fear of another season out of the Champions League, a big drop in TV cash plus the gate receipts worth in excess of £2m-a-game would be gone if the season is, as expected, played out behind closed doors.

Off-field issues will worry boss Mikel Arteta as he plots his next moves for the club
(Image: Getty Images)

Arsenal was always known as The Bank of England club for its wealth but also its conservative attitude towards spending and yet the reality is anything but.

They have gambled, they have shown ambition and now they are desperately trying to claw the money back which seems unfair as they handed out the contracts in the first place.

It is rather ironic that Gabon FA president Pierre Alain Mounguengui this weekend questioned Arsenal’s ambition and insisted the nation’s star striker Aubameyang should leave the Emirates for a club in the Champions League.

There has been plenty of speculation around Aubameyang’s future
(Image: PA)

“I don’t want to say that Arsenal aren’t ambitious, but Arsenal don’t have ambitions as high as some other clubs as far as Europe is concerned,” said Mounguengui.

“Aubameyang is a world-class player. But for him, or anyone else in Europe who hasn’t won a major honour, football is a collective sport.

“Right now, he’s at Arsenal, and he’s won nothing here, so it’s a collective failing.”

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Right now, Arsenal are a club failing on their targets – but it is not through a lack of ambition.

If anything, their ambition has got the better of them and has prompted them to go beyond their means.

But now they are trying to push it back on the players, get the players to help them save around £25m.

The reality is that Arsenal will already save significant funds in bonuses if the players do not qualify for the Champions League.

Should the players, who have already pledged generously to charity, have to cough up twice?

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Inside story of Arsenal"s pay-cut plan as Gunners face "very grave situation" - Mirror Online

Inside America’s Two-Decade Failure to Prepare for Coronavirus

The streets of Manhattan stand nearly empty due to the coronavirus epidemic. | Spencer Platt/Getty Images

The nation’s health secretary was warned about a possible pandemic — and, he admits now, he didn’t take that first warning seriously enough. But he studied with experts at the Centers of Disease Control. He read papers on virology. He took his concerns to the president. And months later, the administration unveiled a plan to tackle the virus emerging out of Asia, investing in therapies and warning Americans to stock up on canned goods.

It’s a moment that feels ripped from the headlines about the current coronavirus crisis. But the year was 2005, not 2020.

And for his troubles, that health secretary — Bush appointee Mike Leavitt — was mocked as an alarmist by political rivals and late-night comics, even as that year’s threat of avian flu petered out around the globe.

“Secretary of Health and Human Services Michael Leavitt recommended that Americans store canned tuna and powdered milk under their beds for when bird flu hits,” host Jay Leno said on the Tonight Show in 2006, a recurring bit where he ridiculed Leavitt’s warnings. “What? … Powdered milk and tuna? How many would rather have the bird flu?”

Speaking to POLITICO this month, Leavitt described a trap that health and national security officials know too well: Prepare too early and you’re called Chicken Little. Act too late — and millions may die.

“In advance of a pandemic, anything you say sounds alarmist,” Leavitt explained. “After a pandemic starts, everything you’ve done is inadequate.”

The Trump administration has taken the brunt of the blame for America’s lack of preparedness for the Covid-19 pandemic, which has caught the world’s wealthiest nation embarrassingly off-guard and plunged it into an economic and health catastrophe. But the cycle of inattention has roots far deeper than that, according to interviews with top policymakers from three administrations covering 20 years.

After each major health crisis of the last two decades, American health and political leaders have launched preparedness programs and issued blunt warnings to their successors — only to watch as those programs were defunded, staff was allowed to depart and Washington forgot the stark lessons it had just learned.

That cycle then accelerated during the tumultuous Trump administration, said the health officials interviewed for this story, nearly all of whom cited Trump’s willingness to disregard evidence and stick with his gut as the coronavirus threat menaced the nation.

In interviews and reviews of years of remarks, Leavitt and more than a dozen other current and former officials who led or shaped preparedness efforts across the Bush, Obama and Trump administrations described a two-decade evolution in how government leaders learned to fight killer viruses — and how America forgot those hard-won lessons as the Covid-19 outbreak loomed.

Government agencies slowly abandoned their pandemic-planning efforts, with the Homeland Security department in 2017 shelving its decade-plus efforts to devise models of how outbreaks affect the economy. Rather than train government staff to respond to a pandemic, as some high-level officials urged, FEMA in 2018 instead coordinated a massive mock exercise across nearly 100 federal departments focused on a hypothetical Washington, D.C., hurricane — even though federal officials had responded to three real-life hurricanes the year before and called the simulation unnecessary.

“We felt we were not prepared for a pandemic and needed to build muscle memory in the way that only a national exercise could do,” said Katrina Mulligan, who was the Justice Department’s top preparedness official at the time, reflecting the kind of would-have, could-have thinking among many ex-policymakers interviewed for this story. A former FEMA official told POLITICO that it was too late in the planning process to shift to a pandemic exercise.

Meanwhile, White House budget officials repeatedly rebuffed requests to fund the nation’s emergency stockpile, turning down the health department’s $1.5 billion-plus proposal in early 2019 and asking Congress for $705 million instead.

And even as the coronavirus threat arrived this January, the National Security Council set aside a step-by-step playbook carefully crafted by the Obama administration and career officials – based on their own sometimes rocky experiences dealing with H1N1 and Ebola — for an ad hoc process that’s left the White House running consistently days or weeks behind on its response.

New reports are emerging near-daily about officials whose warnings fell on deaf ears.

Now, the Trump administration is facing the biggest public health threat in a century — relying on some of the same career officials and experts who advised Bush and Obama on pandemics to shape their coronavirus strategy today. Top infectious-disease scientist Anthony Fauci has been an Oval Office staple since the Reagan administration, although his delicate clashes with Trump over drugs and policy have tested the 79-year-old’s political survival. Meanwhile, Trump’s health secretary Alex Azar and top health preparedness official, Robert Kadlec, have gone from understudies during Bush-era health crises to main characters in this response.

Even some officials’ behaviors feel like a rerun. The Trump White House has rolled out social distancing strategies that mirror plans devised by the Bush White House’s national security team. At least several Trump appointees are reading “The Great Influenza,” John Barry’s book on the 1918 global flu pandemic, much like their predecessors in the Bush administration, who were assigned the book as required reading 15 years ago.

But current and former officials say there are tactics and tool kits, lost in the bureaucracy, that could better help with the current coronavirus fight. Several individuals pointed to one disease-surveillance tool, developed by the health department for the 2009 H1N1 flu pandemic, that could be used to answer the ethnic and racial questions about coronavirus that have boggled state officials — but is instead sitting quietly inside the Medicare agency rather than be shared publicly, overlooked by current leaders.

The officials also described the complexity of trying to stave off future threats and tamp down existing ones, such as the Obama-era effort to set up a long-term, global health security strategy with foreign partners in 2014 while simultaneously fighting the spreading Ebola outbreak ravaging West Africa.

“There was a trade-off every day,” said Beth Cameron, a former career official who led the National Security Council’s pandemic preparedness office during the end of the Obama administration and the beginning of the Trump administration. “How much time was I going to spend focused on the potential of pandemic versus talking to CDC about the actual one?”

2001: How 9/11 Changed the Game

Modern preparedness efforts were birthed under the Bush administration, which inherited some pandemic planning from the Clinton administration but had done relatively little on the issue during its first eight months in office — even abolishing the White House office on global health and security.

“Until 9/11, it was very hard to get anyone interested” in public-health preparedness, said one former official who worked on those early efforts.

Then the world changed. The terror attacks on Sept. 11, 2001, forced Bush’s deputies to grapple with questions they’d previously overlooked: Could terrorists cripple the country through a bio-attack? What would those hazards look like? And who was even in charge of responding? In fact, then-HHS Secretary Tommy Thompson was scheduled to receive one of his first pandemic preparedness briefings on the morning of Sept. 11, before the terror attacks scrambled his schedule and delayed the briefing for months, according to two of Thompson’s former top deputies.

By Sept. 12, top HHS officials had traveled to a still-smoldering New York City, trying to understand how to contain the next threat. By that weekend, they were recruiting a new brain trust to combat the biohazards they worried were looming.

“On Sunday afternoon, September 16, I received a call from Secretary Thompson’s office asking me to attend a 7:00 p.m. meeting that night,” D.A. Henderson, a Johns Hopkins scientist known for his efforts to eradicate smallpox, wrote in his 2009 memoir. “Officials feared there might be a second terrorist attack, and some considered smallpox virus or anthrax to be the most likely weapons.”

Henderson, who passed away in 2016, wrote that he had never met Thompson before that evening. Their first meeting lasted until nearly midnight. By October, Henderson would join the health department to lead its new office of public health and emergency preparedness, helping staff it up and develop the first national biosecurity plans. Henderson’s team included future pivotal figures in U.S. preparedness efforts, like physician Luciana Borio, who went on to lead the National Security Council’s pandemic-preparedness efforts 15 years later.

The efforts at the health department were reflections of larger-scale moves by the White House, which swiftly created roles like a presidential homeland security adviser and carved out the new Homeland Security department — and even brought back officials like Ken Bernard, who had been President Bill Clinton’s special assistant for security and health, to fill the same role for Bush.

Those moves were championed by Vice President Dick Cheney, who also fixated on a separate plan: nationally vaccinating Americans against smallpox, a deadly virus that Cheney feared terrorists would use to strike at the United States.

That goal pitted the vice president against career scientists like Fauci and Henderson, who worried that the complications from a national mandatory vaccine would lead to significant deaths and sickness, particularly among children.

Henderson in his memoir described making a plea to Bush aboard Air Force One during a trip to Pittsburgh in 2002, where he spent an hour urging the president not to embark on a nationwide smallpox vaccination campaign.

A planned national vaccination announcement was later called off, Henderson wrote, with one individual crediting Henderson’s frank talk with Bush.

“Did [Bush] overrule the vice president?” Henderson mused years later in his memoir. “It is all but certain he did.”

Henderson’s warnings to Bush were corroborated by two officials who worked closely with Henderson. Bush and Cheney did not respond to requests for comment.

Bush eventually settled on a compromise to vaccinate some first responders and soldiers against smallpox — a plan that would end up petering out over time. In retrospect, health officials say that Bush made the right choice to avoid a national campaign, despite myriad incentives to go further as advisers encouraged him to avert the next 9/11.

“Where we ended up was the right decision,” said one former senior official who spent months on the project. “There was more political pressure than scientific pressure to do the vaccinations.”

But in the moment, some of Bush’s critics weren’t so forgiving, an episode that encapsulates the difficulties facing presidents on preparedness.

“Smallpox is Bush’s worst failure,” policy analyst Jonathan Rauch wrote in The Atlantic in 2003, exhorting the president to ramp up vaccination efforts.

“Imagine, President Bush, how you would look to history if, a year after you left office, America were devastated by a smallpox attack—one for which you left the country underprepared, despite ample knowledge of the nation’s vulnerability. Does that get your attention?” Rauch wrote.

2005: A Pandemic Flu Plan – With a Big Omission

The vaccination plan also tested a young Republican legal star, Alex Azar, who was HHS general counsel at the time and charged with helping carry out the president’s plan. At one point in 2003, the plan stalled after unions demanded vaccine-injury compensation; the future HHS secretary had about 24 hours to write what became a vaccine-injury compensation program, which enabled vaccinations for first responders to continue, said two people familiar with the episode.

Staff who worked closely with Azar said that the experience taught the future HHS secretary that preparedness required a mix of long-term planning and short-term urgency — a lesson he seemed to absorb. Azar touted a binder that he called a “‘book of many tabs’ — all the things we’d need to do in case of any emergency,” said one former senior HHS official who worked with him.

By 2005, Azar was tapped as the top deputy to Leavitt, who was settling in as Bush’s second health secretary — and initially didn’t share his team’s urgency on pandemics.

Leavitt said that his mind was changed when aide Stewart Simonson, the nation’s recently installed health preparedness chief, threw two books on his desk. One was a copy of Barry’s “The Great Influenza,” the story of the 1918 flu outbreak that killed 50 million people around the globe. The second: A copy of Congress’ 9/11 commission report, revealing the government’s many failures to prepare for the 2001 terror attacks.

“And Stew said to me. . . if you don’t read the first book and get the next flu right, there’s going to be another one of those second books — and it’s going to be about you,” Leavitt said, recounting the story last week. “So that got my interest. Self-preservation.”

Azar also prevailed on Leavitt and other HHS leaders, one Bush-era official said, issuing a dire warning that the world would look poorly on the same country that spent years to develop the atomic bomb — but failed to spend time on developing a response to pandemic influenza. Azar worked closely with the health secretary on the subsequent pandemic flu plan and became one of its top champions, as the two men organized regional events and traveled to every state and territory to drum up support.

“Alex was my partner in all of this,” Leavitt said.

The final 381-page pandemic flu plan that Leavitt, Azar and other health officials announced in November 2005 includes tactics, models and other details that eerily resemble today’s coronavirus crisis. One scenario, cut from the final report, even described how a respiratory disease would swiftly move from sickening dozens in an Asian village to killing as many as 1.9 million Americans — a “grimly compelling” vision, the New York Times reported at the time, and a framework that would have foreshadowed future discussions about the Covid-19 outbreak. Staff who worked on the plan say they can’t remember why the Asian flu scenario was removed from the final plan.

Asked about Azar’s years of work on preparedness efforts, an HHS spokesperson declined to comment on behalf of Azar.

Robert Kadlec, meanwhile, was a former Air Force physician and Bush White House aide who had moved on to Capitol Hill, where he served as the director of the Senate’s bioterrorism and public health subcommittee. In that role, he ended up shaping the 2006 Pandemic and All Hazards Preparedness Act — a package that gained importance after the Bush administration’s botched response to Hurricane Katrina in 2005.

One outside expert who advised on the package: Nicole Lurie, a Clinton administration veteran and physician who called for more funding on disease surveillance and staffing. “I believe that a significant investment in leadership development is essential,” she urged the Senate in 2006.

In a twist of fate, the legislative package would create a new job — the dedicated HHS assistant secretary for emergency preparedness — that Lurie would hold three years later under Obama and Kadlec would hold more than a decade later under Trump.

The job was modeled on the need to have a single decision-maker in a health crisis, Kadlec said in a 2018 interview, years after he helped write the position into law. “It just was a coincidence that [a dozen] years later, I was asked to become the ASPR,” he added.

2009: Swine Flu Challenges a New President

By Bush’s second term, partly because of his administration’s efforts, there was growing consensus that pandemics had emerged as arguably the biggest threat to global security. One champion of the idea: a young senator from Illinois, just five months into his new job, but already convinced that a worldwide virus posed substantial risk.

“We must face the reality that these exotic killer diseases are not isolated health problems half a world away, but direct and immediate threats to security and prosperity here at home,” then-Sen. Barack Obama wrote in the New York Times in June 2005, alongside Republican colleague Dick Lugar.

But as president four years later, Obama promptly ignored a lesson from the past: He initially abolished the White House’s dedicated office on global health security, the same move that Bush did before him and Trump would do years later, and a decision that preparedness experts like Bernard have called a mistake.

Obama would soon face the reality of pandemics, as a devastating swine flu — H1N1 — swept across the globe. More than 12,000 Americans died from the virus between 2009 and 2010. The episode has gotten considerable attention during the current coronavirus outbreak, with Trump and other Republicans seeking to cast Obama’s handling of H1N1 as a failure by comparison. For instance, Obama took months to declare a national emergency, and flu vaccination rates lagged even as the death count grew in 2009.

“Their response to H1N1 Swine Flu was a full scale disaster, with thousands dying, and nothing meaningful done to fix the testing problem, until now,” Trump tweeted last month, arguing that his own administration had addressed problems that haunted Obama’s response a decade ago.

But Trump’s claims have been generally panned by fact-checkers; for instance, Obama did declare a public health emergency before a single American had died. At the time, experts even concurred that H1N1 was generally well-handled. An HHS retrospective in 2012 portrayed the response as “successful,” albeit one marked by delays that would foreshadow the current difficulties in procuring testing and treatment for the coronavirus outbreak today.

Meanwhile, an Obama-era improvement plan crafted post-H1N1 offered suggestions that were batted back by the Republican-led Congress — for instance, investing in the nation’s hospital preparedness program, which has undergone years of winnowing by congressional appropriators, and ensuring a sufficient supply of ventilators and masks in the stockpile, another problem that’s haunted the response to Covid-19.

“HHS aggressively contracted for the development of a next-generation, low-cost ventilator as well as the high-speed production of masks,” said Lurie, who ran the health department’s emergency preparedness efforts at the time, before handing the projects off to the Trump administration. While Obama officials’ vision has yet to be fully realized, some of their projects are still underway, current and former officials say.

But even the H1N1 crisis didn’t prevent the Obama administration from backing away from the no-holds-barred approach to national security that had characterized the Bush administration, paring back funding for preparedness amid the Great Recession. The health department and Homeland Security department cut preparedness funding by nearly $900 million between fiscal years 2010 and 2011.

“The preparedness budget cuts may make it particularly difficult for the nation – and the country’s public health agencies and workforce, in particular – to achieve the goals” set by the White House and CDC for national health security, Columbia University’s National Center for Disaster Preparedness experts warned in 2011. “The New York metropolitan area, in particular, is at greater risk for large-scale catastrophic events, and cannot afford to be less than maximally prepared.”

2014: Ebola, A Warning and a Political Football

The H1N1 crisis was bookended by the 2014-2015 Ebola outbreak, which hung over the 2014 midterm elections and shaped how Obama approached his waning years in office. Officials working in the Obama administration described being surprised as the outbreak unpredictably surged in West Africa, sickening thousands of people and killing about 40 percent of those who were infected. Historically, the deadly virus had burned itself out before jumping borders and becoming an epidemic.

“Our handling of Ebola wasn’t perfect initially,” said Jeremy Konyndyk, who led USAID’s Office of US Foreign Disaster Assistance during Obama’s second term, allowing that the unprecedented spread of the virus in early 2014 caught U.S. officials by surprise. “But once we understood its risks, when the evidence of the risk profile changed and cases started spreading again in West Africa in June and then began exploding in July… within weeks of that happening, we were deploying.”

The virus also arrived in Dallas, Texas, in September 2014 — as one man died and two of his nurses contracted the disease — prompting Obama to tap administration veteran Ron Klain to coordinate the nation’s Ebola efforts. The move was Obama’s tacit acknowledgment that U.S. hospitals and health workers had been caught unprepared by the spreading disease, and that a full-time coordinator was needed to handle emerging health crises and cut through bureaucratic logjams.

The Ebola outbreak has assumed more political significance in retrospect. Trump — then a private citizen — used the outbreak to launch dozens of attacks on the Obama administration, elevating his profile with public-health claims that he’d disregard as president several years later.

“The U.S. cannot allow EBOLA infected people back,” Trump tweeted on Aug. 1, 2014, as the Obama administration sent an air ambulance to rescue two Ebola-stricken missionaries from West Africa. “People that go to far away places to help out are great-but must suffer the consequences!”

A White House digital analysis later determined that Trump’s tweets represented a turning point in U.S. public perception of Ebola. “It was that tweet that created a level of anxiety in the country,” Amy Pope, a senior Obama administration official who worked on the outbreak, told author Reid Wilson. “That was a crystallizing moment.”

Meanwhile, Klain has gone on to become a top campaign adviser to Joe Biden, the presumptive Democratic nominee for president and Klain’s longtime mentor, and is expected to take a senior White House role if Biden wins.

Klain’s leadership during the Ebola crisis helped to galvanize the Obama administration, which set up a permanent pandemic preparedness team inside the National Security Council, crafted its pandemic playbook and took other steps intended to avert a disjointed response from happening again.

“I would get asked, what keeps you up at night?” said Lisa Monaco, who served as Obama’s homeland security adviser between 2013 and 2017. “An emerging infectious disease like a new strain of flu was the thing I worried most about.”

The outgoing team in 2017 also prepared a transition exercise on pandemics for the Trump administration’s incoming leaders, seeking to impart the lessons learned from Ebola and other crises. In the hypothetical scenario, the Trump team walked through a respiratory illness framed as the worst pandemic since the 1918 flu, and told how to prepare for challenges like ventilator shortages and insufficient personal protective equipment.

The Obama officials also warned their successors: Be ready to act fast. “In a pandemic scenario, days — and even hours — can matter,” the incoming Trump leaders were told, in a handout given to attendees.

2017: A New Team’s Mixed Record

But the Obama-era warnings were largely ignored, forgotten or abandoned. Two-thirds of the Trump appointees who attended the 2017 pandemic transition exercise would end up leaving the administration before the coronavirus outbreak arrived this year. The pandemic playbook — which specifically warned of the high lethality of a coronavirus — was set aside.

“The thing I wish people understood more,” Klain said, “we not only fought Ebola in 2014-2015, we built out an agenda and put resources into pandemic preparedness that have been allowed to ebb since then.”

Still, Trump’s pandemic preparedness efforts had begun with more promise, largely thanks to Bush veterans who picked up the threads from previous administrations.

In the White House, Tom Bossert, a Bush administration veteran, was tapped as Trump’s first homeland security adviser where he was enthusiastic about the pandemic playbook prepared by his predecessors, advocated for readiness and began devising what became the 2018 National Biodefense Strategy.

Installed as the health department’s preparedness chief in 2017, Kadlec set up a program to train national disaster medical responders on how to fight infectious disease and transport highly infectious patients. On the speaking circuit, he stumped for more money, repeatedly noting that the U.S. spends twice as much on a single aircraft carrier than the $7 billion that goes toward biodefense every year.

“We don’t have a sustained level of funding — a line item for pandemic influenza, for example — that would give us great confidence” in long-term planning, Kadlec warned at a Senate hearing in January 2018. “We’re operating with about half an aircraft carrier of resources to do this mission, this national security mission, to protect 320 million people.”

Azar, who took over as Trump’s second health secretary that month, repeatedly warned that pandemic flu was set to be a “global health disaster” and steered new investments into vaccine research.

“The thing that people often ask is: ‘What keeps you most up at night in the biodefense world?’” Azar said at an April 2019 biodefense summit. “Pandemic flu, of course. Everyone in this room probably shares that concern.”

Some of the Trump team’s moves unnerved their predecessors and career officials, who noted that efforts and investments begun years ago ran aground under the new administration. For instance, an Obama-era plan to develop low-cost ventilators fizzled out in the United States, even as the company — drawing on HHS funding — ended up selling versions overseas.

Former officials also bristled that Trump appointees — perhaps emulating the president — rejected their predecessors’ advice and walled out career experts. Kadlec fought to move control of the nation’s emergency stockpile from under CDC’s control to HHS, a bureaucratic battle that he won at the end of 2018 but divided the department.

“This administration has constantly been at war with itself,” said one longtime health department official. “The fighting and feuds are just extraordinary, even for Washington.”

2020: A Playbook Discarded

When the pandemic finally came, the team that had prepared their careers for it were working for a president unwilling and unready to act.

Azar in January first briefed Trump on the virus’ concerning spread, but found that the president and his political aides didn’t share his urgency and even interpreted his views as alarmist, according to the secretary’s colleagues. Kadlec by February was privately raising concerns in an email thread, noting that there were flaws in the U.S. response, even as the administration publicly touted its success.

Bossert was already long gone. The pandemic-preparedness advocate had been dismissed in the spring of 2018 and the new national security adviser, John Bolton, dissolved the White House’s pandemic office and shifted the staffers into a broader National Security Council team. That meant Bossert was left trying to warn his former colleagues about coronavirus via Twitter and on TV, urging the administration to move faster to stop an outbreak that he predicted could kill hundreds of thousands of Americans.

Meanwhile, Trump was slow to act and even slower to understand the potential risk of a pandemic, let alone use the term in public. One of the first times was on February 27, at a White House meeting for African-American supporters.

“I know politics,” Trump told attendees. “But when it comes time to talk about pandemics or whatever you may want to call it, you got to get away from politics. And the Schumers — Cryin’ Chuck and all of these people… you can’t go out and just say ‘terrible, it’s terrible.’ We’re doing incredibly.”

“It’s going to disappear,” Trump said of the coronavirus. “One day — it’s like a miracle — it will disappear.”

Instead, the number of confirmed U.S. coronavirus cases has ballooned from several dozen that day to more than 470,000 today.

Weeks or even months to prepare were lost as Trump and some of his top aides dithered across January, February and even March of this year, hoping that the virus would miss the United States or even disappear as the weather warmed.

Had the Trump administration followed the Obama-era pandemic playbook, which some staff briefly consulted and then discarded, the White House would have begun procuring protective equipment for U.S. health workers nearly three months ago, rather than the frenzied bidding that began in recent weeks. Had the president listened to his top health advisers, the nation could have more rapidly instituted the social-distancing measures that have so far worked to slow the virus’ spread.

But “you have complacency when you have the same people — and they warn about the same things and it never happens,” said a former senior Trump official, explaining why the president and his top advisers weren’t more attuned to the warnings of Kadlec, Azar and others.

About the only thing that current and former preparedness officials think Trump did well and swiftly on coronavirus: The president was right to limit travel from China at the end of January, as his administration tried to slow the emerging disease and grapple with its spread.

But even the fallout from that decision was mishandled, as the CDC’s lab tests faltered and the administration failed to urgently ramp up additional testing. That meant the virus silently spread throughout the United States in February, even as Trump insisted that Covid-19 cases would soon drop to zero and his aides mocked questions about whether the administration had successfully contained the outbreak.

Global health experts increasingly view the U.S. response as among the worst in the developed world.

Several officials characterized the situation as a perfect storm entering 2020: an administration that had defunded preparedness efforts; a leadership team that’s infamously tumultuous, like the FDA cycling through four different leaders between April and December 2019; a Congress that had failed to fully “advise and consent,” letting Trump persist with vacancies in key roles; and a president whose approach to governing includes claims that he knows better than his scientists.

“If a president chooses to ignore advice, it doesn’t really matter how you’re organized,” one longtime preparedness adviser said, echoing concerns that the coronavirus failure was worsened because of Trump’s broader approach to expertise.

Gregg Gonsalves, a Yale epidemiologist who’s tracked outbreaks for decades, argued that it’s wrong to single out just a few decisions that weakened the U.S. response to Covid-19, saying instead that years of failure to act on the lessons of the past by strengthening public health — combined with Trump’s uniquely disruptive approach — teed up this year’s fragmented response.

“It’s been a slow war of attrition on public health and social spending in the U.S.,” Gonsalves said. “We may talk about how they fired the global health person, or they didn’t do this [project] or have that report — but the groundwork was laid long ago.”

The Future: Where We Go Next

Even beyond the White House, officials have struggled to pass their preparedness tests. A prime example: The coronavirus outbreak that’s ravaged New York for the past month. More than 7,000 people in the state are already dead and serious supply shortages, hospital bed crunches and other health crises will persist for weeks. While Gov. Andrew Cuomo and New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio are now loudly warning on coronavirus’ risks, both officials also spent days in mid-March raising questions about whether measures like ordering residents to shelter-at-home were even necessary.

If New York had moved a week or two faster to lock down public events and encourage residents to “social distance” by staying at home, the state’s death toll could’ve been cut by up to 80 percent, said Tom Frieden, who led the CDC under President Barack Obama. But “if New York had acted two days later, the death toll would have been double what it is and will be,” Frieden added.

House Democrats have already announced plans to investigate the Trump administration’s response to coronavirus, but experts like Cameron, who led the White House’s pandemic preparedness team for Obama and briefly for Trump, say it’s essential to use this moment to look forward too.

“Thinking about the next thing gets that much harder right now,” she acknowledged, but said that the coronavirus outbreak has revealed the need for more work on developing global supply-chains to ensure access to medical equipment. Cameron also said she’s convinced that senior leaders need to undergo many more, regular exercises that “force them to debate the toughest decisions,” like ventilator availability, so they can be better prepared to solve those problems in the middle of a crisis.

“Those kinds of things should be done relatively quickly when things aren’t in the distant rearview mirror,” Cameron said. “You can have perfect vision but that vision does start to become rosy after a while.”

Leavitt, Bush’s former health secretary, said he’s also worried that short-term thinking is crowding out long-term planning right now. “The vast majority of people are still thinking about this, talking about it like it’s a three-six month period and then we’ll get on with it,” he said. “This pandemic, like all pandemics, will change the world in fundamental ways.”

But what about officials like Azar and Kadlec, who engaged in those exercises and wrote out plans? Why weren’t they able to overcome the decades-long cycle of lessons learned and lessons lost? Leavitt acknowledges the irony but suggested that the blame should be directed elsewhere.

“Alex has now experienced both the ‘alarmist’ part and the ‘inadequate’ part” of being health secretary, said Leavitt, who defended his protege. “It is vastly unfair to personify inadequacy in just one department and in any one person — no secretary of health is alone in these decisions.”

As for Leavitt, he found himself in the uncomfortable position of a former official who sensed the pandemic that he warned about in 2005 finally manifesting in 2020.

“It is a time to make sure your family is prepared,” Leavitt wrote to his family and friends on Feb. 2, almost a month before the first U.S. death from Covid-19 would be announced.

In a sober, three-page memo that echoed his one-time briefings to the president, the former health secretary explained to the people closest to him how pandemics worked, warned that any vaccine was months away and urged others to brace for societal disruption — and stock up on necessities like food and medicine too — as the virus swept around the world.

“The consequences of being unprepared are too profound to ignore,” he wrote.

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