On the one hand, this is the usual “Rehabilitate Bush to bash Trump” media angle. But what it really does is make the case that a Republican administration prepped for a pandemic, while a Democrat admin squandered its efforts. 

And there’s overlap between Bush era and Trump era personnel and advisers. 

In the summer of 2005, President George W. Bush was on vacation at his ranch in Crawford, Texas, when he began flipping through an advance reading copy of a new book about the 1918 flu pandemic. He couldn’t put it down.

Thus was born the nation’s most comprehensive pandemic plan — a playbook that included diagrams for a global early warning system, funding to develop new, rapid vaccine technology, and a robust national stockpile of critical supplies, such as face masks and ventilators, Townsend said.

That was the supply that the Obama admin gave away and never replaced.

But elements of that effort have formed the foundation for the national response to the coronavirus pandemic underway right now.

Translation, whatever framework we have comes courtesy of Republicans, not Democrats.

“There was a realization that it’s no longer fantastical to raise scenarios about planes falling from the sky, or anthrax arriving in the mail,” said Tom Bossert, who worked in the Bush White House and went on to serve as a homeland security adviser in the Trump administration. 

According to Bossert, who is now an ABC News contributor, Bush did not just insist on preparation for a pandemic. He was obsessed with it.

“He was completely taken by the reality that that was going to happen,” Bossert said.

This ought to silence the Obama admin people scuttling around and insisting that their guy would have been on it or that Hillary Clinton would be handling it better. 

It was a Democrat administration, their administration, that trashed out pandemic preparedness.