Not too long ago, I shared a timeline here of Donald Trump’s various lie-filled statements concerning the coronavirus outbreak, starting with, “We have it totally under control,” which he said on January 22, 2020. In that post, as you may recall, I not only included quotes from Donald Trump, but, where possible, I added other facts, in order to provide the appropriate context. For instance, when I noted that Donald Trump, on March 2, said, “I’ve heard very quick numbers (for a vaccine), that of months,” I was also sure to add that, a week before, on February 26, Dr. Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said that a useable vaccine was “about a year to a year and a half” away. Well, in the three weeks since I posted that timeline, we’ve come to know a lot more about what the President actually knew about the coronavirus outbreak, and when he knew it. So, I thought that I’d mark today — the day that the United States overtook Italy as the country with the most official COVID-19 deaths — by filling in a few more details on our timeline. What follows is by no means complete. Hopefully, however, it’ll at least give you a little to chew on while we wait for the inevitable congressional commission to start its investigation.
SPRING 2018, NSC PANDEMIC RESPONSE TEAM IS DISBANDED
Donald Tump has made it clear that he accepts no responsibility at all for what’s happened. He’s actually come right out and said, “I don’t take responsibility at all.” The truth is, however, that his administration not only failed miserably in the response to COVID-19, but started laying the groundwork for the pandemic years before the first case was discovered in China. Most notably, as we’ve discussed in the past, the Trump administration, in the Spring of 2018, disbanded the pandemic response team within the National Security Council that had been established during the Obama administration. This was done over the warnings of our public health and national security communities, and politicians like Senator Sherrod Brown, who wrote to the President on May 18, 2018, asking him to reconsider the decision.
OCTOBER 2019, INTERNATIONAL PANDEMIC PREPAREDNESS PROGRAM IS SHUT DOWN
In October of 2019, just over a month before the coronavirus outbreak was to start spreading through Wuhan, the Trump administration shut down the Predict program, an initiative started under our second president Bush, and continued under Obama. The mission of the program, according to USAID, was the “detection and discovery of zoonotic diseases at the wildlife-human interface.” [Zoonotic diseases are those like COVID-19 that jump from animals to humans.] According to Senator Chris Murphy, Predict, which had been “actively working in China” at the time that it was shut down by Trump, “had found 1,200 viruses (and 160 coronaviruses) in 10 years.” So, we had zoonotic disease researchers on the ground in China in October — scientists who had been able to effectively identify 160 different coronaviruses over the previous decade — and the Trump administration shut the program down.
NOVEMBER 2019, WE HAD EARLY INTELLIGENCE OF AN OUTBREAK IN CHINA
It’s unclear as to whether or not it ever made its way to the desk of Donald Trump, but it’s looking as though our U.S. spy agencies had raw intelligence data as early as November indicating that there was an outbreak of some kind in Wuhan, China. According to NBC News, this information came “in the form of communications intercepts and overhead images showing increased activity at health facilities.” This information apparently made its way to some federal public health officials in late November in the form of what’s called a “situation report.” But, for some reason, this information never found its way into formal intelligence reports until December. As for when the situation in Wuhan was first brought to the attention of the Pentagon, here’s Defense Secretary Mark Esper saying that he doesn’t recall. [One hopes he can come up with a better response by the time the investigations begin.]
TRUMP KNEW HOW BAD THIS WAS BY JANUARY 18 AT THE LATEST, BUT REFUSED TO ACT
According to reporting by the New York Times, the National Security Council “received intelligence reports in early January predicting the spread of the virus to the United States.” And we know that, by January, this information had made its way into the President’s intelligence briefings. Reporting on this subject, however, is always clear to point out that we have no way of knowing whether or not Donald Trump, who is known to prefer Fox News to real intelligence, actually read these reports. What we do know, however, is that, on January 18, Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar called Donald Trump to brief him on the seriousness of the outbreak. Two days later, we would have the first confirmed case in the United States. And, as we know now, there was talk inside the government at this time about “shutting down cities the size of Chicago.” In spite of this, Donald Trump said publicly on January 22, “We have it totally under control.” And he wouldn’t get behind those plans to shut cities down until March, only after U.S. governors had stepped in to issue shelter-in-place orders.
TRUMP DEFINITELY KNEW THE SITUATION BY THE END OF JANUARY, AND YET STILL REFUSED TO ACT
You could argue, as other have, that Donald Trump didn’t hear what Alex Azar had told him on the phone on January 18, and that he hadn’t read his intelligence briefings. We know, however, that, by January 29, he was fully aware of the seriousness of the situation. We now this because, on January 29, Trump trade adviser, Peter Navarro, submitted a memo to the President saying that as many as 500,000 Americans could die as a result of COVID-19, and that our economy could see trillions of dollars in losses. And we know that Trump read the memo, which said, “The lack of immune protection or an existing cure or vaccine would leave Americans defenseless in the case of a full-blown coronavirus outbreak on U.S. soil.” Navarro went on to write, “This lack of protection elevates the risk of the coronavirus evolving into a full-blown pandemic, imperiling the lives of millions of Americans.”
It’s also worth noting that, at roughly the same time that the above is happening, emails are swirling through the federal government about the magnitude of what we’re likely facing. “Any way you cut it, this is going to be bad,” wrote Dr. Carter Mecher, a senior medical adviser at the Department of Veterans Affairs, in an email to a group of public health experts on January 28. “The projected size of the outbreak already seems hard to believe.” Here’s one of the notes in that chain of emails, which were sent under the title “Red Dawn,” in reference to the 1984 film about an unsuspecting United States being overrun by an army of foreign invaders.
And, on January 30, we know that that Health and Human Services secretary Alex Azar talked with Donald Trump a second time, and this time “directly warned” the president that we might have a pandemic on our hands. And we know that Trump heard him this time, as it’s been reported that the president “responded that Mr. Azar was being (an) alarmist.”
So we can be relatively certain that, when Donald Trump said on January 30, “We think we have it very well under control,” he knew that wasn’t the case. He had, by this point, been warned of a pandemic by Azar, told to expect as many as 500,000 deaths by Navarro, and received numerous intelligence briefings… the contents of which, we can be certain, will eventually come out. But yet, on January 30, he said that we had it all “under control.”
The very next day, by the way, Azar would declare a Public Health Emergency (PHE) for the United States.
And in spite of all of this, Donald Trump not only lied to the American people about the severity of what lay ahead, but refused to act. As Donald Trump’s failure to take action on the part of the American people has been well-documented, I won’t get into it here, but I would like to share this clip from Fox News, as I suspect it might carry a little more weight with some of the more heavily brainwashed Trump cultists. [For those of you who like real news, I’d suggest reading, “The U.S. was beset by denial and dysfunction as the coronavirus raged,” in the Washington Post, which is all about the 70 days that were wasted by the Trump administration.]
THERE HAD BEEN A PANDEMIC PLAYBOOK, BUT TRUMP HAD DISCARDED IT
In early 2017, members of the Obama administration public health team met with 30 Trump officials, to walk them through a number of pandemic scenarios and discuss the federal government’s pandemic flu playbook, which had been in existence, and evolving, since 2005. For those of you who are unaware of the “playbook,” here’s an excerpt from Politico.
“…(E)ven as the coronavirus threat arrived this January, the National Security Council set aside a step-by-step playbook carefully crafted by the Obama administration and career officials – based on their own sometimes rocky experiences dealing with H1N1 and Ebola — for an ad hoc process that’s left the White House running consistently days or weeks behind on its response.
…But the Obama-era warnings were largely ignored, forgotten or abandoned. Two-thirds of the Trump appointees who attended the 2017 pandemic transition exercise would end up leaving the administration before the coronavirus outbreak arrived this year. The pandemic playbook — which specifically warned of the high lethality of a coronavirus — was set aside.
…In the White House, Tom Bossert, a Bush administration veteran, was tapped as Trump’s first homeland security adviser where he was enthusiastic about the pandemic playbook prepared by his predecessors, advocated for readiness and began devising what became the 2018 National Biodefense Strategy.
….Bossert was already long gone (though). The pandemic-preparedness advocate had been dismissed in the spring of 2018 and the new national security adviser, John Bolton, dissolved the White House’s pandemic office and shifted the staffers into a broader National Security Council team. That meant Bossert was left trying to warn his former colleagues about coronavirus via Twitter and on TV, urging the administration to move faster to stop an outbreak that he predicted could kill hundreds of thousands of Americans…
So, essentially, there was a book that explained, in incredible detail, what had to happen at every point along the way, but no one in the Trump administration consulted it. If they had, the would have started acquiring personal protective equipment for America’s front-line health care workers three months ago. But they didn’t. And people are dying as a result… Here’s more background on the pandemic playbook.
As for when the Trump administration started procuring PPE, it wasn’t until mid-March. If you don’t believe me, here’s a quote from the Associated Press: “A review of federal purchasing contracts by the AP shows federal agencies largely waited until mid-March to begin placing bulk orders of N95 respirator masks, mechanical ventilators and other equipment needed by front-line health care workers.” And not just were they not acquiring PPE, they were actually allowing PPE to be exported. Just think about that the next time you see a photo of a nurse wearing a garbage bag.
So, when Donald Trump says, as he often does, that “Nobody could have predicted something like this,” he’s lying. People did predict this happening. They predicted exactly this. And they warned him repeatedly. They even gave him a playbook explaining what needed to be done, step by step, when the time came. But he chose not to listen. Instead, he fired the scientists and scrapped the playbook. And, as a result, 22,033 Americans are dead today, and there are mass graves in New York.
There’s more that I could say. There’s a lot more. There’s the fact that Fauci and deputy NSC adviser Matt Pottinger wanted to ban travel to Europe in early February, but Mnuchin and Trump, fearful of what it might do to the economy, overruled them. There’s the fact that Trump could have ramped up testing earlier, but chose not to as he thought that the results could hurt his reelection campaign. There’s the golfing and the rallies. There’s the blaming of Obama instead of taking responsibility… This list is endless… I’m going to have to end here for now, though. Good night, my invisible friends. Stay well. We’re going to need to in the fight.
