Reports surfaced last month that the U.S. intelligence community and even the Army warned the White House about the coming pandemic in both January and February, but that was not the first time they were warned.
According to ABC News, military intelligence became aware of threat as far back as November and began circulating that information among multiple agencies in the federal government and the National Security Council at the White House.
Curiously, the November intelligence report was apparently based on intercepted communications and images from China gathered by the Pentagon's National Center for Medical Intelligence (NCMI).
The report was the result of analysis of wire and computer intercepts, coupled with satellite images. It raised alarms because an out-of-control disease would pose a serious threat to U.S. forces in Asia -- forces that depend on the NCMI’s work. [...]
"Analysts concluded it could be a cataclysmic event," one of the sources said of the NCMI’s report. "It was then briefed multiple times to" the Defense Intelligence Agency, the Pentagon’s Joint Staff and the White House. Wednesday night, the Pentagon issued a statement denying the "product/assessment" existed.
From that warning in November, the sources described repeated briefings through December for policy-makers and decision-makers across the federal government as well as the National Security Council at the White House. All of that culminated with a detailed explanation of the problem that appeared in the President’s Daily Brief of intelligence matters in early January, the sources said.
Osama Bin Laden novel coronavirus determined to strike the United States.
China reported its first case of the novel coronavirus on November 17th, 2019 so this report suggests that military intelligence knew about it almost immediately if not before their first case was disclosed publicly by the Chinese government.
This obviously paints the Trump regime's response as an even greater failure as the threat posed by the virus was conferred to political leadership two months before the first case was reported in Washington state and nearly five months before the outbreak exploded nationally.
The Trump White House never took the threat seriously and never prepared for it and I see their lack of response as very similar to the Republican party's refusal to take climate change seriously.
We are governored be religious right numpties whose faith infects every facet of their life including their governing philosophy. They believe only God has the power to the change the earth's climate, not humans, and if the world is changing then it's God's will. Similarly, they believe God will protect the United States from a calamity like the coronavirus and if she doesn't then we should embrace death with open arms. A wide variety of religious and conservative pundits and elected Republicans have said we should reopen the economy and if that leads to countless deaths then so be it.
But death doesn't poll very well and there's an election coming up.