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FGI Doc of the day: NSC’s pandemic playbook plus 4 other pandemic preparedness documents
Today’s document of the day is actually a super trifecta of documents all having to do with COVID-19 and the US government’s preparedness (or lack thereof). It started out with a document cited in this Politico news story: Trump team failed to follow NSC’s pandemic playbook. Politico cited and included a copy of the National Security Council document “Playbook for early response to high-consequence emerging infectious disease threats and biological incidents.” The story caught my eye because it started out “The 69-page document, finished in 2016, provided a step by step list of priorities – which were then ignored by the administration.” This document was unfortunately stamped “Not for public distribution” so I couldn’t report it to GPO as a fugitive document — but I *could* save a copy to the Stanford Digital Repository (it’ll take a couple of days to process and catalog, but this link should soon be live).
BUT, the Politico story referenced a few other documents which I tracked down. I reported the FEMA and USAID documents to GPO as fugitive. The White House document was in the CGP, and PanCAP Adapted was a leaked document that the NY Times put online (I saved that one too in the Stanford Digital Repository!).
- National Biodefense Strategy. White House.
- Biological Incident Annex to the Response and Recovery Federal Interagency Operational Plans. Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA).
- PanCAP Adapted. US Government COVID-19 Response Plan. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) (Stanford digital repository copy).
I also found and reported another document cited in one of the above documents:
- Lessons From USAID’s Ebola Response Highlight the Need for a Public Health Emergency Policy Framework. Office of Inspector General, USAID.
Government-Funded Database Blocks Users from Searching for Abortion Articles
This story is going around on the medical/life sciences library listservs today. Apparently, the POPLINE database has made the word “abortion” (and possibly other related terms) into search stopwords like AND or THE which cannot be searched. The term is still listed as a keyword, but entering it in the search box as a subject or keyword gets zero result. According to an email exchange forwarded around on these listservs, this appears to be a purely political decision, not based on that being a non-useful search term in the database. The POPLINE database, funded by USAID and hosted at Johns Hopkins U is a free database on population issues.
- Why is a Government-Funded Reproductive Health Database Blocking Users from Searching for Abortion Articles?, by Rachel Walden, MLIS (Nashville, TN), Women’s Health News, April 2, 2008
[E]ntering “abortion” as a search term in the POPLINE database now returns zero results because of a move by the database personnel to block that search. For background, POPLINE is “the world’s largest database on reproductive health, containing citations with abstracts to scientific articles, reports, books, and unpublished reports in the field of population, family planning, and related health issues.”
The librarian who noted the problem inquired about it, and was informed that it wasn’t a simple technical glitch; the response she received was, “We recently made all abortion terms stop words. As a federally funded project, we decided this was best for now.”
I found a document, Abortion-seeking behaviour among Nigerian women, that includes the keyword ABORTION and clicked on the link to that term at the bottom of the citation and got other hits, but, as noted above, using the search function did not return these articles.
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