Doddering old Joe Biden makes predictions.

From October 2019:

"We are not prepared for a pandemic. Trump has rolled back progress President Obama and I made to strengthen global health security. We need leadership that builds public trust, focuses on real threats, and mobilizes the world to stop outbreaks before they reach our shores."

From April 2020:

"Mark my words: I think he [Trump] is going to try to kick back the election somehow; come up with some rationale why it can't be held."

Has anyone here been this sharp and prescient? Anyone? Examples, please.

Exactly what "progress" did Obama and Biden make to strengthen global health security?   Seriously, I'm sure they did something.  George Bush said the same thing (during his presidency) about the US not being prepared for a pandemic, needing leadership that focuses on threats, mobilizes the world to stop outbreaks.  Hasn't happened, I guess.   Why?  Many reasons, but party because the specialties, including Public Health, are given lots of applause but mostly short shrift on attention and funding for action.   Plus dealing with other countries, other governments, institutions of higher learning who guard their information from prying eyes, because one day they will come out with magic vaccines and cures, take the credit and make zillions, theoretically.

In the 1990s and 2000s (up to 2014 when I retired!) I worked with a physician, a brilliant geriatrician who also had a passion for global health diseases, outbreaks, pandemics, etc.  She studied it as if her life depended on it, kept real time "outbreak" maps on her computer, could pull together a lecture that would wow any group of infectious disease experts in the nation.   But in her position, moving the information beyond conventions and publications was like moving a mountain...noboby willing to spend the time and money, they had other lives to live.  It was her contention that 'we the people' as well as those disease experts take the information the same way Congress has taken it from the Public Health Service sector...lightly.

I haven't talked to her since Covid-19 came along, but I'm sure she would say "I've been telling them for years..."  

JMHO.

Obama formed the pandemic response team that Trump dismantled, for one thing.

He also has to be given credit for Obamacare---at least, when the pandemic hit, more people had health insurance and could be treated than would have been the case before. You have even a modest percentage of the population who cannot access/afford health care during a pandemic, all containment efforts are useless.

That's one of the reasons that Republican/Trumpian efforts to kill Obamacare have been so stupid. Even from a purely selfish point of view on their part, Obamacare was valuable because it lowered the chance of a pandemic reaching up into their ivory towers and killing them. As bad as this has been, how much worse would it have been with 23 million+ more people uninsured?