White House blames Obama administration for inadequate pandemic planning

The White House on Friday touted it's extensive pandemic planning exercises and claimed the administration warned of the threat in 2018.

Speaking to reporters at the White House briefing, press secretary Kayleigh McEnany said the Obama administration left President Trump's White House nothing more than "a thin packet of paper" regarding plans for a pandemic.

McEnany displayed a copy of the Obama plan dismissively for reporters before hoisting two binders of what she called the superior Trump plans.

"The Trump playbook in the whole of America response to this pandemic has far exceeded what this administration inherited," she said.

Trump has repeatedly said that the blame for the federal government having inadequate stockpiles of crucial supplies and machines needed to cope with an outbreak lay with his predecessor, Barack Obama.

Obama has been a persistent foil for Trump on a number of issues, but in the case of planning for the pandemic he has devoted little attention to the 69-page "playbook" from the Obama administration about the threat of a viral outbreak that might include Ebola or an airborne respiratory illness like coronavirus.

McEnany said that in 2018 the Trump administration issued its own pandemic crisis action plan and last summer conducted "Crimson Contagion 2019," a simulation to test the nation's ability to respond to a large-scale outbreak. In January, the Department of Health and Human Services issued an after-action report.

"This exercise expounded upon — exposed rather — the shortcomings in legacy planning documents, which inform President Trump's coronavirus response beginning as early as January," McEnany said.