Timeline points to US failures in preparedness

AFP

US President Donald Trump blamed the WHO for his administration’s COVID-19 debacle. In reality, the White House knew about the virus threat already on January 3 but chose not to mobilize until late March.

On April 14, Trump instructed his administration to halt funding to the WHO, as it conducts a “coronavirus review.”

It is not clear how he intends to withhold WHO funding, much of which is appropriated by Congress.

However, the review will be conducted by the same administration that delayed the virus response in the first place. That will virtually ensure a prejudiced outcome.

Why did Trump administration target the WHO, its projections and its chief? And why did he do it now?

From early January, the US has dismissed the risk of the novel coronavirus, repeatedly. Two days after the first virus case was identified in the US, Trump said at the World Economic Forum that “we have (the novel coronavirus) totally under control.” That was January 22.

After 10 days of national emergency in China and the WHO’s international emergency alert, Trump repeated that “we have it very well under control” (January 30). Even weeks later, he repeated his statement (February 23).

Soon thereafter, he declared in the White House that “(coronavirus is) going to disappear. One day — it’s like a miracle — it will disappear” (February 27).

Soon, he announced again that his administration had the virus fully under control thanking his health-care advisers (February 29) whose virus advice he had rejected since the first week of January.

In March, when the virus was about to have an almost free ride in New York City and the rest of America, he described the virus as “very mild” and suggested that the infected could get better by “going to work” (March 4) — a suggestion that virus specialists considered “idiotic.”

Barely a week later, the US declared the common flu worse than COVID-19 (March 9).

And yet, only a week later, Trump wanted Americans to believe he was taking the virus seriously. “This is a pandemic,” he told reporters. “I felt it was a pandemic long before it was called a pandemic … I’ve always viewed it as very serious” (March 17).

What changed the tone?

A raging internal debate

The simple answer is a New York Times expose one day before (March 16) and the impending presidential election.

As the Times reported, “From the beginning, the Trump administration’s attempts to forestall an outbreak of a virus now spreading rapidly across the globe was marked by a raging internal debate about how far to go in telling Americans the truth.”

What we know with certainty today is that, on January 3, Chinese researchers had completed the virus gene sequencing, initiated emergency monitoring and notified the WHO and relevant countries about the virus.

As Singapore and China’s Hong Kong began to prepare for the virus that same day, US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) director Dr Robert R. Redfield called Alex M. Azar II, Trump’s secretary of health and human services, to tell him China had discovered a new coronavirus.

Yet, there was no proactive mobilization in the White House. Rather, a long debate began within the Trump administration over “what to tell to the American public.”

Meanwhile, Cabinet members projected its mishandling on China.

This odd state of affairs lasted two and a half months.

Faced with the Times expose, one of the greatest failures in US pandemic preparedness and the impending fall election, President Trump declared that — actually — he had always viewed the COVID-19 as “very serious.”

Instead of taking responsibility for the disastrous delay, the US blamed it on China, the WHO, its chief and others who have been urging greater mobilization since mid-January.

Today 2 million people have the virus, which has already killed some 130,000 people. It will be followed by the worst global economic contraction since the Great Depression.

These nightmares were neither necessary nor inevitable. Most of them could have been avoided. That’s why President Trump ordered the “coronavirus review” — to rewrite the history of how his White House failed America.

Dr Dan Steinbock is an internationally recognized strategist of the multipolar world and the founder of Difference Group. He has served at the India, China and America Institute (USA), Shanghai Institutes for International Studies (China) and the EU Center (Singapore). For more, see https://www.differencegroup.net. The views are his own.