Booray said:That is true. While there are things that governors/mayors can do independent of Washington, it is pretty political difficult without wide warning from the federal government. And I am not sure what it is congressional Democrats were supposed to be doing to combat the virus in January and February,Sam Lowry said:Of course CNN is biased; taking bias into account doesn't mean rejecting what you don't like to hear out of hand. And while it may feel good to point out that Democrats reacted more slowly than Trump, it doesn't make up for lost time procuring ventilators and PPE. That is primarily the executive's job, and he should be accountable for it.Oldbear83 said:History matters, Sam/ CNN has long been biased against Trump, and has been caught in outright lies before.Sam Lowry said:If your questions are about the legitimacy of anonymous sources, I don't need to hear them. Journalists have always used such sources. There's nothing wrong with it whatsoever as long as they get confirmation.Oldbear83 said:** sigh **Sam Lowry said:Those refer to ABC's version, not CNN's.Oldbear83 said:Did you click my link from above?Sam Lowry said:The CIA and DIA haven't officially commented on CNN's version. I don't know what you mean when you say the other claimed sources don't support it, unless you have them on record elsewhere.Oldbear83 said:CNN's version is not supported by the DIA. CIA or any of the sources claimed by CNN.Sam Lowry said:US intelligence agencies started tracking coronavirus outbreak in China as early as NovemberOldbear83 said:Yeah, about that:Sam Lowry said:Maybe because of this?riflebear said:I don't blame either side early on. When the WHO sends out a tweet in Mid January telling the world that China said that COVID wasn't being transmitted between humans why would anyone take it seriously?blackie said:They were all wrong....Trump, the Dems, the Reps....all of them. Hard to see why they (and some on this board) thought it wasn't a big deal. Sure, we have people get sick of other diseases, but for the most part we have treatments. This thing was showing emphatically that it didn't have an effective treatment or vaccine and was being spread easily. Why would you NOT have thought it wouldn't be a problem. Short answer....it demonstrates the fact that politics in this country is more important than anything else. Trump was too concerned about his re-election and the Dems were too concerned about getting Trump not re-elected. Only when they saw it was becoming a big problem did they finally start to listen to medical people that knew what they were talking about instead of talking out of their a**.Quote:
Face it, New Yorkers have a lot of bravado, none of these guys really believed it would be so bad here, even though they could already see what was going on in Italy. The New York guys said they had the best Medical system anywhere and just didn't think it would be so bad HERE.
They were wrong, so was virtually everybody else.Quote:
U.S. Intelligence Warned of Coronavirus Outbreak as Early as November
By Zachary Evans
April 8, 2020 1:45 PM
U.S. intelligence officials warned of an uncontrolled illness in the region of Wuhan, China, in late November, ABC News reported on Wednesday.
The National Center for Medical Intelligence submitted a report based on satellite images and wire and computer intercepts showing a threat to the region's population from the as-yet unidentified contagion, since dubbed the "novel coronavirus" by the World Health Organization. The report apparently raised concerns about the health threat to U.S. military forces in Asia.
"Analysts concluded it could be a cataclysmic event," a person familiar with the report told ABC. It was then briefed multiple times to" the Defense Intelligence Agency, the White House and the Pentagon's Joint Staff.
https://www.nationalreview.com/news/u-s-intelligence-warned-of-coronavirus-outbreak-as-early-as-november-report/?fbclid=IwAR13PyNHVIcxvHTbSv5E-xmPIEjCfoEnGzDMaUppqjjW79Ia4hCVXVfmuWw
"NCMI and the Defense Intelligence Agency spent considerable time over the last 24 hours examining every possible product that could have been identified as related to this topic and have found no such product," said a defense official last night."
https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/policy/defense-national-security/pentagon-denies-abc-news-report-that-intelligence-warned-of-cataclysmic-coronavirus-pandemic-last-november
By Zachary Cohen, Jim Sciutto, Alex Marquardt, and Evan Perez
Updated 11:47 AM ET, Thu April 9, 2020
(CNN) US spy agencies were tracking the rise of the novel coronavirus as early as November, weeks before that information was included in President Donald Trump's daily intelligence briefing, a former US military official told CNN.
While the exact date of the first report remains unclear, sources told CNN that intelligence gathered in November and in the weeks following offered multiple early warnings about the potential severity of the pandemic now surging in the US.
Intelligence is often only elevated to the highest levels of the government once analysts and officials reach a certain threshold of confidence in their assessment. That day came on January 3, the first day the President's daily briefing included information the US intelligence community had gathered about the contagion in China and the potential it had to spread, including to the US, according to a person briefed on the matter.
But behind the scenes, the work had been going on for weeks, with the CIA and other intelligence agencies combing through their collection to find out what China was beginning to grapple with.
According to the person briefed on the matter, by early to mid-December, Chinese social media and even state-controlled media had begun providing public clues about the struggle to contain a respiratory illness that at the time was being compared to SARS, a similar 2003 virus outbreak that also emerged from China.
Beijing officially notified the World Health Organization of an outbreak of a pneumonia of unknown cause on December 31.
Multiple officials say that open source information served as a jumping off point for intelligence officials early on and was combined with information gathered through other methods before it was ultimately included in the January 3 Presidential Daily Briefing.
https://www.cnn.com/2020/04/08/politics/intel-agencies-covid-november/index.html
Or try these:
https://www.bizpacreview.com/2020/04/09/pentagon-issues-rare-public-rebuke-against-abc-for-claim-white-house-was-warned-of-pandemic-in-november-906664
https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2020/apr/9/pentagon-says-covid-report-cited-abc-doesnt-exist/
Did you forget all you knew about critical thought, Sam?
Or are you so credulous that you don't ask the obvious questions about ABC/CNN's story?
Riflebear's question was why we should have taken Covid seriously when China was supposedly denying the problem. The answer should be obvious. No matter whose reporting you believe, our own intelligence agencies were warning Trump about it at least in early January, if not before. And even the Chinese were admitting it by late December.
China's own internal records, released in March, show the first case in Wuhan around November 17. China did not publicly admit the new virus existed until a month later.
https://www.livescience.com/first-case-coronavirus-found.html
China's advisory to the WHO (China office) was December 31, 2019.
https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/69/wr/mm6905e1.htm
The WHO declared a global emergency January 30, 2020.
https://www.statnews.com/2020/01/30/who-declares-coronavirus-outbreak-a-global-health-emergency/
By that time, President Trump had already done the following:
January 3: CDC Director Robert Redfield sent an email to the director of the Chinese CDC, George Gao, formally offering to send U.S. experts to China to investigate the coronavirus.
January 5: CDC Director Redfield sent another email to the Chinese CDC Director, George Gao, formally offering to send U.S. experts to China to investigate the coronavirus outbreak,
January 6: The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) issued a travel notice for Wuhan, China due to the spreading coronavirus.
January 7: The CDC established a coronavirus incident management system to better share and respond to information about the virus.
January 11: The CDC issued a Level I travel health notice for Wuhan, China.
January 17: The CDC began implementing public health entry screening at the 3 U.S. airports that received the most travelers from Wuhan San Francisco, New York JFK, and Los Angeles.
January 20: Dr. Fauci announces the National Institutes of Health is already working on the development of a vaccine for the coronavirus.
January 21: The CDC activated its emergency operations center to provide ongoing support to the coronavirus response.
January 23: The CDC sought a "special emergency authorization" from the FDA to allow states to use its newly developed coronavirus test.
January 27: President Trump tweeted that he made an offer to President Xi Jinping to send experts to China to investigate the coronavirus outbreak.
January 27: The CDC issued a level III travel health notice urging Americans to avoid all nonessential travel to China due to the coronavirus.
January 27: The White House Coronavirus Task Force started meeting to help monitor and contain the spread of the virus and provide updates to the President.
January 29: The White House announced the formation of the Coronavirus Task Force to help monitor and contain the spread of the virus and provide updates to the President.
I will not bring up the Democrats' behavior during this period, except to observe that the Democrats were slower to respond than the White House in terms of action.
The media during this time showed no particular urgency regarding the virus, but were focused on the impeachment trial
On February 5, the President delivered the State of the Union address to Congress, which included references to the new virus emerging in China at that time.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/05/us/politics/state-of-union-transcript.html
Taken in toto, the statements and actions of both political parties and the media are all consistent with no new information beyond what was already reported to the public. Further, CNN's story is essentially the debunked ABC claim with a few details tweaked but unsupported by anything.
If we had intercepted electronic communications in China regarding the virus, the NSA would have reported the new information, not the DIA. It's important to understand the province of the different agencies with regard to sources and where they work. The CNN report is not consistent with known IC behaviors, nor is there any valid 'open source' intelligence available for review prior to mid-December.
The actions of both political parties are indeed consistent with a lack of information. That's troubling enough in itself, since we have procedures and personnel dedicated to providing that information. What's more troubling is the evidence that our people were doing their jobs but couldn't get Trump to take the threat seriously. You haven't debunked that evidence, and there's plenty more where it came from.
The DIA collects "integrated, all-source intelligence," including electronic communications, for reporting to the DOD and other government organizations. They have NSA personnel on staff for that purpose.
We failed to appreciate the properties and seriousness of the virus. That failure likely resulted from a combination of Chinese dishonesty and protecting the economy because it is the only thing POTUS really cares about. Like it or not, American government takes its cues from the White House. The White House's initial reaction left something to be desired. It cost us, but that cost is incremental; we were never going to completely escape the virus.
The questions for me are whether we can learn from our mistakes and (1) get out of this as soon as possible with minimal loss of life and economic devastation and (2) be better prepared for the next one?