Where was the Obama Administration during the H1N1 epidemic of 2009-2010?

This comes in over the transom from a concerned reader, who is a health care professional (certified registered nurse anesthetist: CRNA) with 20 years’ experience as a trauma nurse in busy adult hospitals and children’s hospitals in the USA. This CRNA remains anonymous, for obvious reasons…

Our CRNA writes:

“I wish some person in the White House press corps would ask those frauds Birx and Fauci why they didn’t tell Obama to shut the whole country down during the 2009-2010 H1N1 outbreak, which was much worse! Our hospitals were truly full then and lots of young healthy people died. I saw that with my own eyes. Both of those quacks worked for Obama then. So where were they??? Liars.
“I can only relay what I saw, but I saw plenty. I worked at the adult hospitals about 30% of my time and the other 70% was at a children’s hospital. All hospitals were full of inpatients. The ICU patients were extremely critical – lots of intubated patients that required prone positioning (Ed. note: this is when a patient lies face-down, and is used for patients in acute respiratory distress).
“And the worst part was many, many were placed on ECMO (Ed. Note: extracorporeal membrane oxygenation. The ECMO machine is similar to the heart-lung by-pass machine used in open-heart surgery. It pumps and oxygenates a patient’s blood outside the body, allowing the heart and lungs to rest.) We ran out of ECMO machines in {the US city where I worked}. The word was we had to borrow from the UK. Our hospital system had to open overflow units to care for these people, and they were literally in storage areas on ECMO machines.
“The local women’s hospital had so many pregnant women with it, many of whom also required ECMO. It seemed to hit pregnant women especially hard as well as young people. There was an internal medicine physician at a local hospital who was so sick from it. She was prone and intubated in the ICU for 2 weeks! She did survive.
“We saw lots of children in the same shape. I remember some of them were on ventilators for so long we had to trach them (ed. note: short for tracheotomy, a procedure that connects the ventilator through an incision in the throat, which is done for a patient who is expected to be on a ventilator for an extended period). I had one patient who was 6 years old, with H1N1, who could not get off a ventilator. I had a student working with me who had previously been an ICU nurse in another hospital across town. She relayed a story from her ICU colleagues that they had a pregnant woman in their ICU. Otherwise healthy. H1N1. They had to put her on ECMO. Both she and her baby died.
“It was like living in an alternative reality because we’d see all this craziness at work then NOTHING on the news. No one cancelled elective surgeries. The only elective surgeries that were permitted to be cancelled were the ones who would need an ICU post op. Emails and house-wide text messages were going out each morning from supervisors and hospital administrators to ‘please screen all inpatients carefully for possible discharge because we need the beds.’
“But no word from Obama. Nothing from the government. Then they created that vaccine and it was making people sicker! Most of us refused the vaccine. As I recall, Glenn Beck was the only one talking about this at the time.
“During H1N1, I was an anesthetist – working in the operating room (OR). The critical care staff saw the worst of it. But I was also seeing it in my capacity, so that tells you how bad it was. We had to house inpatients in our recovery room because there were no beds in the hospital.
“Because I don’t admit patients, I was unable to discharge patients. No anesthesia providers do. But because I’m on the medical staff, I’d receive the emails sent to the doctors who admit and discharge patients. They were instructed twice a day (before morning rounds and after the afternoon rounds) to please discharge anyone that was remotely capable of going home. The administrators were screaming for beds to put all these H1N1 patients
“Not a word from Obama or anyone in government for that matter. Fauci was apparently around then. But I never heard of the guy til now, when he told the President to shut the country down. Why is that?
“Twitter existed back then but I don’t recall seeing pictures of bodies piled up in the back of (alleged) freezer trucks. “