[CLIP] Debbie Lerman: How America’s National Security Complex Took Over the Pandemic Response

So I find these plans and there's a March 13th version of the pandemic crisis plan. And on March 13th, 2020, you can see that they updated the 2018 plan for pandemic preparedness, which says all the things that I said. We have to be able to increase capacity, we have hospital capacity, we have to be able to, you know, each state has to respond based on how things are happening because there's an awareness in pandemic planning that it's not all happening at the same time everywhere, right? Because the virus is spreading in different places at different times. So some place like Utah or Texas might not have any cases for a few months while New York is experiencing like a huge, you know, explosion of cases. In that case, New York should be responding in a certain way and Utah or Texas should be responding in a completely different way. That's all in the plans. And so, but March 13th, 2020 version of the plan has a few little inserted things that say that, so there's an org chart that's in all the plans that says the CDC is doing this, the NIH is doing this, the Health and Human Services is the lead federal agency. Now, the lead federal agency is the government agency that's designated as the agency in charge. That means they make the policy, they decide what to do, when to do, you know, how to do. They get help from other agencies that are designated to help in different areas. So FEMA helps with, you know, on the ground help to different states that need the help at certain times. You know, the Department of Agriculture helps if it's affecting that. The Department of Transportation helps if it's affecting, you know, each department is helping, but HHS isn't. This document said all of a sudden there was a new square on the org chart that said policy and it said National Security Council. And underneath that, very interestingly, it said WMD, weapons of mass destruction. And why, first of all, why is the National Security Council suddenly in charge of pandemic policy? Second of all, why does it say weapons of mass destruction? Like what does this virus have to do with weapons of mass destruction? And if it does have to do with weapons of mass destruction, why aren't we being told? So that to me was like mind boggling, even more mind boggling in this document, not in this document. But this, so this document has a few footnotes and insertions. And that's where you find the information I've realized when, and I've heard this before, but I didn't realize it until I started researching. All the information that they don't want you to know is hidden in the footnotes. And the footnotes said that the National Security Council had a plan, but it wasn't included in this document. This was the old document. This was the CDC NIH document that they had just kind of inserted a few things into. So then I started looking on the internet for what their plan was, what was their plan. And then I found out. President Trump did something that was not reported anywhere. And what he did was he declared a, he invoked the Stafford Act. Never heard of it before. The Stafford Act is used when there's a disaster, like a hurricane or a flood, to release funds for FEMA. So it gives FEMA the ability to, and it allows the governor to declare a state of emergency or whatever. Like it starts the whole cascade of things that you need in order to help people when there's a national disaster. There's a whole list of natural disasters that FEMA's in charge of. Pandemic is not one of them, okay? Public health is not on the list of the things that they do. President Trump invoked the Stafford Act in all 50 states simultaneously. Never been done before. It means that, now this is in the public record. It's not like I had to FOIA any of these documents, but I had to dig. What that means is that he's saying, or I don't think it was him, I mean the National Security Council, who's now in charge of policy, is saying there is now a disaster in all 50 states at the same time. So this is exactly the opposite of what the actual pandemic preparedness document says if you're doing it in the public health way. All 50 states are completely different, right? Uniform blanket disaster decreed on the entire country and on that very same day. And I found this through Senate hearings on what went wrong during our initial pandemic response, and also some FEMA documents from the Inspector General who was commenting on what they did wrong or what went wrong. On March 18th, 2020, HHS was taken off as lead agency, so lead federal agency for pandemic response. That, to me, was more significant even than just the National Security Council taking over the policy. If the HHS, which is supposed to be the lead federal agency for pandemic response, isn't even in charge of anything, not communications, not implementation of policy, who's in charge? FEMA. And FEMA were like a deer in headlights. So nobody told them this was going to happen. A few weeks before this happened, there's a document, an internal document saying, you know, we should be prepared if certain states need our help, but there's nothing right now that we really need to worry about, right? So they were totally unprepared. And all of a sudden, they're in charge, and there's a new org chart in one of the Inspector General's documents that shows that everything that the CDC and the NIH and HHS were supposed to do as lead federal agency for pandemic response, now FEMA had to do. No preparation, no documents, no history of doing anything like that. And they, in their testimony to the Senate committee or whatever it was, said, we shouldn't have been put in that position. We shouldn't have been put in that position. We didn't know what the hell we were doing. Nobody in that hearing asked why. Why was HHS taken off, and why were you put in? Now FEMA is an agency that is under the Department of Homeland Security, okay? And the Department of Homeland Security and the National Security Agency are in charge of keeping us safe from wars and terrorism and things that threaten our national security. They're not in charge of keeping us healthy or safe from threats to our health. And so when I found that out, and when I realized that nobody else, I didn't have to FOIA any of those documents. I just found them digging and digging and digging, and nobody else knew or was reporting about it. And so I didn't sleep for a few days, and I thought, this is so really crazy. And it got published on Brownstone. And I thought, well, clearly, you know, somebody's going to see this, and, you know, it's going to be news, you know, like people are going to care.