Former U.S. Deputy National Security Advisor Matt Pottinger, who was previously declared under Chinese sanctions by the Chinese Foreign Ministry, was recently confirmed as a Distinguished Visiting Fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution. He spoke about the Trump administration’s response to the spread of the new coronavirus and the lessons learned in the early stages of the outbreak in a Feb. 21 broadcast on CBS’s “Face the Nation.
On Jan. 20, as Biden was being sworn in, Beijing announced a list of sanctions against 28 members of the Trump Administration, including former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, former National Security Adviser O’Brien, Bolton, Bomen and former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Krafft. “These individuals and their families are banned from entering mainland China and Hong Kong and Macau, and they and their affiliates and agencies have been restricted from dealing and doing business with China,” the related statement said. Shortly after, Pompeo announced via Twitter on Feb. 27 that he officially joined the Hudson Institute, a Washington think tank, as a distinguished fellow on Feb. 1.
Bo Ming, who is also under Chinese sanctions, has been confirmed as a distinguished visiting fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution. He is involved in the institute’s “China’s Global Power” research program. It is also reported that Bomen will participate in the Nixon Foundation’s monthly foreign policy roundtable mechanism, which Pompeo announced recently and which he co-chairs with O’Brien. On Sunday’s broadcast of “Face the Nation,” Bomen described the Trump administration’s response to the new outbreak as a “serious mistake” in waiting until last April to recommend that the U.S. public begin wearing masks as a means of preventing the spread of the virus. It was a “serious mistake. The mask blunder cost us dearly,” Bomen told host Margaret Brennan.
Last March, when the outbreak began spreading rapidly in the U.S., key officials on the Trump White House Coronavirus Task Force publicly recommended against wearing masks, in part because hospitals were facing a severe shortage of personal protective equipment at the Time. Bomin is known to have asked the Taiwanese government for help during this period, obtaining a shipment of masks to aid and distribute to White House medical staff and the U.S. national security team. The rest of the masks were donated to the U.S. National Stockpile, he said. And the CDC did not issue official mask-wearing guidelines to the public until April.
Reports indicate that after the outbreak in China, Bomen sounded the alarm early on within the Trump administration about the potential ferocity of the new coronavirus and its impact on the United States. He said the information he received by personally calling local doctors in China was more accurate than the information shared by the Chinese government with its CDC counterparts. Bomen also noted that collecting and analyzing data related to the spread of the virus in real time is a serious issue. He believes the problem has not been corrected under the Biden Administration. Bomen said he chose to speak out now in hopes of supporting the new CDC director, Dr. Rochelle Walensky, in her attempts to reform the CDC and to expand such virus sequencing and surveillance to more rapidly track the spread of the virus.
Bomen said, “…… (where the virus) is showing up and how it’s evolving genetically so we can get ahead of it and make sure we don’t get sucked into a new variant that could compromise the effectiveness of our vaccine.” Bomen, who began his tenure in the Trump White House back in 2017, resigned as deputy U.S. national security adviser after the Jan. 6 congressional onslaught. In response, he told the program, “That was the moment I felt I should leave.”
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