ArgumentWe Were Warned

Published 24 March 2020

When, inevitably, an investigative commission will be set up to investigate the government’s response to COVID-19 crisis, it will conclude that signs of a coming crisis were everywhere. Uri Friedman writes that President Donald Trump has referred to the coronavirus outbreak as “an unforeseen problem,” as “something that nobody expected,” and as a crisis that “came out of nowhere,” but as is so often the case with Trump, he was not telling the truth. In fact, the investigative commission will conclude that the warning lights were blinking red for years, within the government and outside the government. Despite the warning lights, the voluminous studies, and the alarming reports from the U.S. intelligence community, the U.S. government was not sufficiently prepared when the virus SARS-CoV-2, finally came calling.

When the National Commission on the COVID-19 response is set up and launches its investigation, it will likely differ from the 9/11 Commission in that it will conclude that “the system was blinking red” not just in the inner sanctum of the U.S. intelligence community, but out in the open, as well. Uri Friedman writes in The Atlantic that the warning lights were blinking red for years, within the government and outside the government. Despite the warning lights, the voluminous studies, and the alarming reports, the U.S. government was not sufficiently prepared when the virus SARS-CoV-2, finally came calling.

President Donald Trump has referred to the coronavirus outbreak as “an unforeseen problem,” as “something that nobody expected,” and as a crisis that “came out of nowhere.”

As is so often the case with Trump, he was not telling the truth.

Friedman writes that

We were warned in 2012, when the Rand Corporation surveyed the international threats arrayed against the United States and concluded that pandemics “capable of destroying America’s way of life.” We were warned in 2015, when Ezra Klein of Vox, after speaking with Bill Gates about his algorithmic model for how a new strain of flu could spread rapidly in yesterday’s globalized world, wrote that “a pandemic disease is the most predictable catastrophe in the history of the human race.”

Friedman notes that we were warned in 2017, a week before inauguration day, when Lisa Monaco, Barack Obama’s outgoing homeland-security adviser, gathered with Donald Trump’s incoming national-security officials and conducted an exercise modeled on the administration’s experiences with outbreaks of swine flu, Ebola, and Zika. 

We were warned in 2018, on the 100th anniversary of the flu pandemic of 1918, when Ed Yong served notice that the “next plague” was coming, with influenza the most dangerous possibility. Friedman writes that We were warned in 2018 and 2019, when the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security convened public-health experts, business leaders, and U.S. government officials for simulations of the devastating humanitarian, political, social, and economic consequences of fictional novel coronaviruses that left tens of millions dead around the world.

And then, in 2019, we were warned of the grave threat of a new influenza pandemic by the U.S. intelligence community in its annual “worldwide threat assessment.” The U.S. intelligence had also cautioned of a coming pandemic in detailed reports in 2018. And in 2017. And in 2016. And in 2015. And in 2014. And in 2013.

Friedman writes:

The systemic failure stems in part from the fact that in recent decades successive administrations have not treated pandemic preparedness with the degree of seriousness they reserved for addressing other top security threats—from, say, terrorists or adversarial nations. The pattern repeats itself: Presidents rush to prioritize health security and lavish money on it after crisis strikes, then scale back resources and succumb to complacency once it subsides.

Funding for pandemic preparedness has long lagged behind other homeland-security priorities, “And the Trump administration has gone further—not only underfunding these efforts but also proposing steep spending cuts year after year to institutions, such as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, that are tasked with handling outbreaks.”

Trump’s “budget proposal for fiscal year 2021, released in February when the coronavirus outbreak had already reached the United States, called for the CDC’s overall funding to be slashed by hundreds of millions of dollars.”

The Trump administration has also downplayed global health threats through structural changes within the White House’s national-security architecture, especially through. In 2018, for example, the White house “closed a pandemic-response unit that the Obama administration had created after the Ebola outbreak.”

“When the novel coronavirus first broke out, there were no senior administration officials focused solely on combating such threats and coordinating global health security policy across agencies.”