Trump team thought UK officials 'out of their minds' aiming for herd immunity, book say... - 0 views
www.theguardian.com/...herd-immunity-aftershocks-book
history politics US UK EU pandemic trump crisis policy
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US officials thought their British counterparts “were out of their minds” in aiming for herd immunity as part of Boris Johnson’s initial policy on dealing with the coronavirus, according to a new book about the global response to the pandemic.
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As the scale of the threat became increasingly clear in January and February 2020, officials in Donald Trump’s administration were trying to convince him to take the threat seriously, despite personal reassurances he had been given by the Chinese president, Xi Jinping, that it was under control.
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But they were even more shocked by the approach being taken in the UK. In a book to be published next Tuesday, Aftershocks: Pandemic Politics and the End of the Old International Order, British health experts at the time are described as being “oddly pessimistic about their capacity to defeat the virus”, rejecting measures such as a ban on mass gatherings.
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“We thought they were out of their minds. We told them it would be an absolutely devastating approach to deal with the pandemic,” one US official told the authors
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Johnson and the French president, Emmanuel Macron, backed Trump’s call for an in-person G7 summit at Camp David in the summer, which the US president saw as a way to show leadership and demonstrate that things were getting back to normal.
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But the plan was torpedoed by Angela Merkel’s decision not to attend. According to Aftershocks, the refusal was only partly motivated by the German chancellor’s concern about the health risks of an in-person summit. She also thought her mere presence would be counterproductive to reaching agreement because of Trump’s viscerally hostile reaction to her.
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Merkel told Trump of her decision not to come Camp David on 28 May and he reacted furiously, yelling and then hanging up on her. The president then announced the summit would be canceled and called into question the G7’s relevance, using the occasion to repeat his earlier calls for Russia to be readmitted.
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“With the Europeans now fully estranged from the United States, for all practical purposes the G7 ceased to exist,” Wright and Kahl argue. “As Covid-19 swept through every part of the world in 2020, it would be every nation for itself.”