So you're quibbling over the gap between "Dramatically downsizing" and "no longer working". Check.
Dramatically downsizing probably means they've abolished all their front-end spending programs and now only operate an office there that liaises with local health officials. Because the first thing you cut is frontline spending, and the last thing you do is close your branch office there.
Ok, so they only "dramatically downsized" their international disease prevention efforts in 80% of countries. Given that the point is asking whether the CDC slashed spending on disease prevention or not, the fact that they didn't slash exactly 100% of spending from any one country is kinda not the point here.
It's like someone saying their "pay was slashed to nothing", and you ask them how much they make now and it's "20 cents an hour" and you call them a liar, because 20 cents isn't "nothing". 20 cents and hour is functionally closer to not being paid at all than it is to earning a full salary, the same as dramatically slashing disease-prevention measures is functionally closer to just giving up than it is to making an effort.
Well it turns out it's not true anyway:
For starters, Trump hasn’t succeeded in cutting the budget.
He’s proposed cuts but Congress ignored him and increased financing instead. The National Institutes of Health and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention aren’t suffering from budget cuts that never took effect.
Yeah, sorry about that Bumber, I did look at the actual CDC website for the figures myself and there's been no decrease. When the secondary sources are all conflicting and seem to come from reputable papers then it's hard to determine what the facts are.
However, the "Trump didn't slash the budget" thing isn't related to the "funding was slashed in 39/49 countries" thing. Those are completely unrelated issues, and thus proving that Trump didn't get that budget-cut through Congress doesn't mean the claim that funding was slashed in 39/49 countries is a false claim.
What I think the mix-up here is that the CDC
did slash spending in those ~ 40/50 countries to next to nothing, but it turns out that the original spending was part of a specific bill for funding those programs, with a specific amount of dollars allocated to it - there was no
yearly funding for any of this. The money then ran out and Congress never did anything to renew the funding. This was money the CDC was getting
in addition to their stated budget, but that money no longer exists. So overall, the CDC's amount of money
is lower, even though you can still truthfully claim that "their budget is the same". So, it's the grey area between "reducing their budget" and "not renewing discretionary budget items".
This then seems to have morphed in the news into "CDC cuts 80% of funding for XYZ", when it really was that they didn't have any funding left for the entire project, so withdrew from 80%
of countries, and took money from the CDC's discretionary budget spending to maintain a remnant of the program in a short-listed selection of countries.
So yes, the true part is that spending was massively slashed in 39/49 countries, basically because the funding ran out for that, and the CDC has had to cobble-together a smaller program out of it by taking money from the main budget.
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Topic: Untamed Virus Containment Thread:COVID-19: Lurking Omni-Flu Edition (Read 497736 times)