Thread by @karolcummins

⚠️The Trump Administration’s Response to the COVID-19 Pandemic

📌TIMELINE UPDATE

📌’The Trump Adm was made aware via *unclassified* DOS sources since JAN 2018 that China's biotech labs may have cultivated & exploited COVID-19’

It sure looks like the grim reapers are @SecPompeo @realDonaldTrump with an assist from @AmbJohnBolton

https://twitter.com/ericgarland/status/1250123836223356928?s=21

📌Friday, Jan. 13, 2017: The joint Obama-Trump transition teams run an exercise for pandemic preparedness.  

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📌May 11, 2017: The Intelligence Community’s Worldwide Threat Assessment warns of major pandemic risks.

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📌September 2017: The Trump administration contracts with a company to create a prototype of a reusable (rather than one-time use) N95 mask. 

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December 2017: The Trump administration bans the CDC from using the terms “evidence-based” and “science-based.”

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In January 2018, State Department cables warned of safety issues at Wuhan lab studying bat coronaviruses

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📌February 9, 2018: President Trump signs bill that cuts $1.35 billion in funding for Prevention and Public Health Fund at the CDC.

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February 13, 2018: The Intelligence Community’s Worldwide Threat Assessment warns of major pandemic risks

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April 10, 2018: Bolton fires Homeland Security Advisor, Tom Bossert.

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📌May 7, 2018: White House proposes cutting global health budget.

The White House sends a plan to Congress proposing budget cuts. It includes cutting out $252 million for health security preparedness  in funds remaining from the 2014-2015 Ebola epidemic.

justsecurity.org/69650/timeline…

📌May 7, 2018: The National Security Council’s director of medical and biodefense preparedness warns that pandemic flu is the top health security concern and that the country is not prepared for it.

justsecurity.org/69650/timeline…

May 8, 2018: The top WH official responsible for leading the U.S. response in the event of a deadly pandemic has left the adm, & the global health security team he oversaw has been disbanded under a reorganization by national security adviser John Bolton.

washingtonpost.com/news/to-your-h…

📌September 2018: The Department of Health and Human Services diverts funding from the CDC to pay for housing detained immigrant children.

justsecurity.org/69650/timeline…

📌September 2018: The Trump administration fails to follow through with an Obama-era project designed to protect against medical supply shortages during pandemics.

justsecurity.org/69650/timeline…

September 18, 2018: President Trump issues a Presidential Memorandum and National Biodefense Strategy designed to ensure a comprehensive and coordinated approach to biological incidents. 

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The National Biodefense Strategy outlines a high-level roadmap of the U.S. response to biological threats and incidents..

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The 2018 report identifies the need to “establish manufacturing surge capacity” for diagnostic tests and personal protective equipment in anticipation of a pandemic.
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📌January 29, 2019:  The Intelligence Community’s Worldwide Threat Assessment warns that the U.S. is vulnerable to a global pandemic. 

justsecurity.org/69650/timeline…

📌White House Economists Warned in 2019 a Pandemic Could Devastate America

A study published last fall went unheeded. One of its authors now says economic shutdowns to fight the coronavirus could last up to eight months.

nytimes.com/2020/03/31/bus…

📌The report explicitly warned against treating a pandemic as a seasonal flu — and demonstrated how such a mind-set could hamper our appreciation of the damage pandemics can do.

washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/…

📌Two months before the novel coronavirus is thought to have begun its deadly advance in Wuhan, China, the Trump adm ended a $200M pandemic early-warning program aimed at training scientists in China & other countries to detect & respond to such a threat

latimes.com/science/story/…

Field work ceased when the funding ran out in September, and organizations that worked on the PREDICT program laid off dozens of scientists and analysts, said Peter Daszak, president of EcoHealth Alliance, a key player in the program.

latimes.com/science/story/…

📌The contract to maintain the government’s stockpile of ventilators lapsed late last summer, and a contracting dispute meant that a new firm did not begin its work until late January. By then, the coronavirus crisis was already underway.

nytimes.com/2020/04/01/us/…

📌REMINDER: Before Virus Outbreak, a Cascade of Warnings Went Unheeded

📌That scenario, code-named “Crimson Contagion” and imagining an influenza pandemic, was simulated by the Trump adm’s HHS in a series of exercises that ran from last Jan to Aug.

nytimes.com/2020/03/19/us/…

🔑The Trump administration received its first formal notification of the outbreak of the coronavirus in China on Jan. 3, 2020.

msn.com/en-us/news/pol…

Jan 2020: Within days, U.S. spy agencies were signaling the seriousness of the threat to Trump by including a warning about the coronavirus — the first of many — in the President’s Daily Brief.
#ReleaseThePDB

msn.com/en-us/news/pol…

📌It took 70 days from that initial notification for Trump to treat the coronavirus not as a harmless flu strain well under control, but as a lethal force that had outflanked America’s defenses & was poised to kill tens of 1000s of citizens.

msn.com/en-us/news/pol…

🔑That more-than-two-month stretch now stands as critical time that was squandered by the Trump Administration.

🔑Today we learn the Trump Adm DOS knew TWO YEARS AGO about the Wuhan Lab‘s ongoing research on SARS-coronavirus - COVID19

msn.com/en-us/news/pol…

Two years before the novel coronavirus pandemic upended the world, U.S. Embassy officials visited a Chinese research facility in the city of Wuhan several times and sent two official warnings back to Washington about inadequate safety at the lab,

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Which was conducting risky studies on coronaviruses from bats. The cables have fueled discussions inside the U.S. government about whether this or another Wuhan lab was the source of the virus — even though conclusive proof has yet to emerge.

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In January 2018, the U.S. Embassy in Beijing took the unusual step of repeatedly sending U.S. science diplomats to the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV). #G4S

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Which had in 2015 become China’s first laboratory to achieve the highest level of international bioresearch safety (known as BSL-4).

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What the U.S. officials learned during their visits concerned them so much that they dispatched two diplomatic cables categorized as Sensitive But Unclassified back to Washington.

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📌The cables sent to @SecPompeo Departmrnt of State warned about safety and management weaknesses at the WIV lab and proposed more attention and help.

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🔑The first cable, also warns that the lab’s work on bat coronaviruses and their potential human transmission represented a risk of a new SARS-like pandemic.

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In November 2017, just before the US officials’ visit, Shi’s team had published research showing that horseshoe bats they had collected from a cave in Yunnan province were very likely from the same bat population that spawned the SARS coronavirus in 2003.

washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/…

📌The Bats Behind the Pandemic

From Ebola to Covid-19, many of the deadliest viruses to emerge in recent years have the same animal source.

wsj.com/articles/the-b…

“Most importantly,” the 2018 cable states, “the researchers also showed that various SARS-like coronaviruses can interact with ACE2, the human receptor identified for SARS-coronavirus.

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📌This 2018 finding strongly suggests that SARS-like coronaviruses from bats can be transmitted to humans to cause SARS-like diseases.

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📌There is no evidence that the virus now plaguing the world was engineered; scientists largely agree it came from animals.

📌But that is not the same as saying it didn’t come from the lab, which spent years testing bat coronaviruses in animals.

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🔑”The cable tells us that there have long been concerns about the possibility of the threat to public health that came from this lab’s research, if it was not being adequately conducted and protected,” he said.

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There are similar concerns about the nearby Wuhan Center for Disease Control and Prevention lab, which operates at biosecurity level 2, a level significantly less secure than the level-4 standard claimed by the Wuhan Insititute of Virology lab, Xiao said.

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‼️Sources familiar with the cables said they were meant to sound an alarm about the grave safety concerns at the WIV lab, especially regarding its work with bat coronaviruses.

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‼️The embassy officials were calling for more U.S. attention to this lab and more support for it, to help it fix its problems. #G4S

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“The cable was a warning shot,” one US official said. “They were begging people to pay attention to what was going on” (in Wuhan)

No extra assistance to the Wuhan labs was provided by the US gov’t in response to these cables.
@realDonaldTrump @SecPompeo

washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/…

COVID-19 TimeLine v1

https://twitter.com/karolcummins/status/1245148181366599680?s=21

https://twitter.com/karolcummins/status/1245148181366599680

Sept 2019

Exclusive: U.S. axed CDC expert job in China months before virus outbreak

HT @ItheMissingLink

physiciansweekly.com/exclusive-u-s-…

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