In response to the piece,”Opinion: We need to keep holding politicians accountable for their role in the pandemic: a response to a recent call to do otherwise.” 
It may only have been about a week ago since the U.S. agreed that celebrities should sit out the COVID-19 pandemic. It’s important to note that global health organizations have warned about our lack of preparedness for a pandemic for decades and that politicians have made little effort to improve this through increased funding of disease research and medical preparedness, making them complicit in this pandemic.
There are many posts on social media blaming  COVID-19 on Republicans from George W. Bush to Donald Trump to Bobby Jindal. This is because Republican policy has been vocally against funding for science-driven medical research and healthcare. This inaction on the part of the Republican party is exhausting, and it is not solving the actual problem at hand: our unpreparedness for this crisis.
In 2005, President George W. Bush warned the country about the need to prepare for a potential health crisis, “If we wait for a pandemic to appear, it will be too late to prepare. And one day many lives could be needlessly lost because we failed to act today.” No one listened, and we are seeing the results of that today.
The first time the COVID-19 was discussed on “Morning Joe” was January 24th, but warnings from the CDC about the threat of infectious disease to America go back for decades. The rewriting of recent history is not the issue at hand—it is the present administration’s continued failure to implement public health measures needed to manage a pandemic response. With respect to the Trump administration, these failures didn’t happen in mid-January but rather the day the administration took office and did not act to bolster the nation’s medical systems.
Call me a radical, but I do see productivity in holding politicians, be they 1997 Louisiana politicians or 2020 United States politicians, for a pandemic that the World Health Organization has been warning would happen for decades.
While pointing fingers at inept politicians on either side of the political spectrum may not fix the fact that over 4,000 people are suffering from COVID-19 in New Orleans and over 16,000 people are suffering from the disease statewide, holding past, present and future politicians accountable for their failure to enact the necessary medical framework to handle a crisis. 
The truth is that the poor pandemic response we see today is the fault of your politicians, as it is their job to manage emergency response within your state and nation. Everyone in a position of leadership could have done more to prevent the spread of COVID-19, and they should be held accountable for their failure to do so. They’ve been warned that a major pandemic was not a matter of “if,” but “when,” for most, if not all, of their political careers.