“Chipping away at 317 funds — even if the majority of cuts are going toward vaccine purchases — jeopardizes the immunization system in general, public-health officials and advocates say. It restricts the ability of local public health departments to prepare for and respond to outbreaks and educate providers, Chris Aldridge, senior director for infectious disease at the National Association of County and City Health Officials, told The Washington Post in 2015.

During the current coronavirus pandemic, money that government disease detectives first tapped to fight the latest outbreak was a congressional fund created for health emergencies. Congress, which has strongly supported the CDC and NIH, rejected a Trump administration budget that might have cut their funding.

BIDEN’S CORONAVIRUS PRESS BLITZ MARRED BY DISTRACTING GAFFES

While some public health experts have said a bigger concern than White House budgets is the steady erosion of a CDC grant program for state and local public health emergency preparedness — the front lines in detecting and battling new disease. But that decline was set in motion by a congressional budget measure that predates Trump.

“The CDC’s response has been excellent, as it has been in the past,” said John Auerbach, president of the nonpartisan Trust for America’s Health, which works with government at all levels to improve the nation’s response to high-risk health crises. Some Democrats have charged that Trump decimated the nation’s public health leadership, but Auerbach said CDC’s top scientific ranks have remained stable the past three years.

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And, it emerged this week United States was ranked the best-prepared country in the world to handle a pandemic in late 2019 by the Nuclear Threat Initiative (NTI) and the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security (JHCHS) — an assessment seemingly at odds with claims by Democrats that the Trump administration left the country vulnerable to the ongoing coronavirus outbreak.

The Global Health Security Index was «developed with guidance from an international panel of experts from 13 countries, with research by the Economist Intelligence Unit» from 2018 to 2019, The Washington Post reported last year. «More than 100 researchers spent a year collecting and validating publicly available data.”

At the same time, the paper noted that the U.S. score was still not perfect, and that «factors driving down the U.S. score include the risks of social unrest and terrorism, and low public confidence in government.»

SEE THE FULL 2019 GLOBAL HEALTH SECURITY INDEX RANKINGS

Trump’s campaign has argued in recent days that misinformation may be one of the leading causes of that lack of confidence. For example, Trump’s team has pointed to Biden’s claims that «no one on the National Security Council staff was put in charge» of pandemic preparedness, based on a report that in May 2018, then-National Security Adviser John Bolton eliminated the NSC’s Office of Global Health Security and Biodefense in a reorganization effort.

Rear Adm. R. Timothy Ziemer reportedly was ousted as senior director, and no replacement was named. But, FactCheck.org has determined that the matter amounted to a reorganization, and that “some team members [of the NSC pandemic office] were shifted to other groups, and others took over some of [the top official’s] duties.”

Separately, the Biden team has repeatedly argued that the president once referred to coronavirus as a «hoax.» That claim has been refuted by numerous fact-checkers, including the Post’s, which found that Trump was clearly referring to Democrats’ efforts to blame him for the pandemic, not the virus itself. Biden’s advisors nonetheless were repeating the claim on Friday.