Reply to NEJM editorial about Leadership

I think the scathing editorial amounts to both an unscientific and an un-academic mis-step. Bohdan Oryshkevich MD MPH at least had the courage to point out our public health shortcomings. Public Health lacks the teeth to impose quarantine and other isolation measures and lives with the US HIV numbers, testing and confidentiality limitations. Secondly our healthcare system remains among the poorest among other developed nations including infant mortality, nutrition, and longevity. Thirdly, most of our medical supplies come from China including test kits, drugs and devices, in fact, nearly everything medical. China closed the supply chain at the same time they left open the travel from Wuhan to the rest of the World. Trump closed travel from China against the advise from the medical establishment. That’s an indisputable fact. Furthermore, Trump rallied manufacturers. He staged daily TV and online briefings that rallied the nation. You can argue with his ambivalent attitude about masks and you are right, but the POTUS sees far greater responsibility than just the pandemic. One could just as well praise his leadership in putting the pandemic back in the hands of state governors, actually a constitutional question, while securing national security, defense and the economy. US health care must stop holding its-self out as all knowing and best quality. The NEJM editorial can be read as more of an inditement on those who wrote it and on a dysfunctional US healthcare system including Public Health than on over-all elected US leadership. One must ask, how much Chinese, CCP, bias motivated the editorial.