rationalskepticism.org

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell alleged that the Obama administration did not provide the Trump administration with any information about the threat of a possible pandemic during a May 11 Team Trump Facebook Live discussion with Lara Trump.

Soon after McConnell made his playbook comment, Ronald Klain, the White House Ebola response coordinator from October 2014 to February 2015, tweeted out a link to a document titled “Playbook for Early Response to High-Consequence Emerging Infectious Disease Threats and Biological Incidents.”

The document, originally unearthed in March by Politico, is a 69-page National Security Council guidebook developed in 2016 with the goal of assisting leaders “in coordinating a complex U.S. Government response to a high-consequence emerging disease threat anywhere in the world.” It outlined questions to ask, who should be asked to get the answers and what key decisions should be made.

Nicole Lurie, another Obama administration official, confirmed to us the existence of the NSC pandemic playbook and also said similar documents were created for the Department of Health and Human Services and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

“To say there was no playbook was ridiculous,” said Lurie, who served as the assistant secretary for preparedness and response at HHS during both terms of the Obama administration.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said the Obama administration did not leave behind a “game plan” for a pandemic.

That’s wrong.

Multiple Obama-era officials have said they left a 2016 “pandemic playbook” that detailed exact steps to take in the event of an infectious disease outbreak. The White House press secretary even held up the actual document on the White House lawn.

There has been discussion in recent days as to whether the Obama plan was dated because it dealt with lessons learned from earlier outbreaks that may not apply to the current pandemic. Still, McConnell’s statement focused only on whether any such “game plan” existed, and ample evidence suggests it did.

We rate it Pants on Fire.