The Trump Administration is today being attacked for not "following the science" and recognizing the threat of Coronavirus much earlier. It turns out the scientists themselves did not recognize the threat of Coronavirus early enough.
Why? In a word, China. The Chinese Government lied about the severity of the initial outbreak in Wuhan since the very moment it first learned of it. In turn, the World Health Organization (WHO) uncritically parroted what the world now knows to be Chinese propaganda for several critical weeks.
China first informed WHO of the novel Coronavirus on January First, three full weeks after the Chinese Government was almost certainly aware of its existence. And even though the Chinese also rather obviously knew that the virus was spreading from person to person, it issued a statement indicating that "the investigation so far has not found any obvious human-to-human transmission and no medical staff infection."
That same day, the Taiwanese Government told the WHO that it had clear evidence of human-to-human transmission, but the WHO seemingly ignored this and instead issued a tweet two weeks later relying solely on disinformation from China that read, "Preliminary investigations conducted by the Chinese authorities have found no clear evidence of human-to-human transmission of the novel #coronavirus (2019-nCoV) identified in #Wuhan, #China."
Based on this faulty guidance from the WHO, Dr. Anthony Fauci--the head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases--told Newsmax TV's Greg Kelly that Americans did not need to fear this new virus that had just been discovered in China.
"Well, you know, obviously, you need to take it seriously and do the kinds of things that the CDC and the Department of Homeland Security are doing," Fauci responded. "But this is not a major threat for the people of the United States, and this is not something that the citizens of the United States right now should be worried about."
Two days later, China placed four cities--including the virus' epicenter, Wuhan--on lockdown--but the WHO was still telling the rest of the world that it had nothing to worry about. That same day, January 23, Dr. Didier Houssin, the chairman an emergency committee that the WHO convened to respond to Coronavirus, said that it is "too early to consider that this event is a public health emergency of international concern."
Later in the day, Dr. Fauci appeared on the Journal of the American Medical Association podcast and noted that the United States at the time only had five cases, and that the disease was not likely to spread much beyond that. Even if it did, he assured the audience, this new Coronavirus was not likely to be particularly deadly.
"Whenever you have a respiratory infection like this, classically, you're going to have a spectrum of involvement," he said. "And I am absolutely certain that there are a lot of people who have some mild cough, some myalgias, who are not bothered by it, who go to work, or just going about their normal business who don't get counted. The only ones who are getting counted are the ones who present to a hospital for medical care. Of those, about 25 percent of them have serious illness requiring respiratory support, oxygen, and possibly even intubation. I am virtually certain that the denominator is much, much larger which means that the mortality rate is likely to be much less than the currently established mortality rate."
The very next day, Dr. David Heymann, who headed the WHO's response to the SARS epidemic in 2002, told the Associated Press that "it looks like [COVID-19] doesn’t transmit through the air very easily and probably transmits through close contact."
This, of course, was proven to be totally wrong, but based on the disinformation coming out of China that was serving as the world's only data on COVID-19, it was widely believed in the scientific community.
Even the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) was apparently fooled, as it issued a press release on January 24 indicating that, "based on current information, the immediate health risk from 2019-nCoV to the general American public is considered low at this time."
Two days later, on January 26, Dr. Fauci appeared on the CATS Roundtable podcast, and said that "the American people should not be worried or frightened by this. It's a very, very low risk to the United States. It isn't something that the American public needs to worry about or be frightened about."
On January 28, Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar said that the country's top infectious disease specialists had all concluded that "the risk to any individual American is extremely low."
The next day, President Trump seemed to be more concerned about the virus than either Azar or Dr. Fauci, as he created a Coronavirus Task Force and enacted a ban on flights to and from China two days later. Both Democrats and the media were furious, claiming President Trump was somehow ignoring science and spreading xenophobia and racism.
Vox.com wrote that "the evidence on travel bans for diseases like coronavirus is clear: They don't work. They're political theater, not good public health policy." Meanwhile, Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden told a crowd in Iowa that "this is no time for Donald Trump's record of hysteria xenophobia, hysterical xenophobia, and fear-mongering to lead the way instead of science."
New York City Health Commissioner Oxiris Barbot, meanwhile, was telling people not to give in to their innate racism and to instead take part in the city's Chinatown Lunar New Year celebration.
A few days later, she told New Yorkers that "there is no risk at this time about having it be transmitted in casual contact" and that they should "go about [their] lives, take the subway, go out, enjoy life."
Because of this incredibly foolish advice from New York City's top health official, the City is now far and away the disease's American epicenter. Yet throughout February, when there were almost no cases in the United States, even vastly more competent health officials than Oxiris Barbot were telling people that they had nothing to fear.
On February 18, Dr. Fauci told Yahoo! News that the threat of Coronavirus was "just miniscule" and that people should be far more concerned about "the seasonal flu."
On February 29th, Dr. Fauci appeared on the TODAY Show and again downplayed the threat that Coronavirus posed to the U.S.
“Dr. Fauci, it’s Saturday morning in America," asked anchor Peter Alexander. "People are waking up right now with real concerns about this; they want to go to malls and movies, maybe the gym as well. Should we be changing our habits, and if so, how?”
"No," Fauci responded. "Right now, at this moment, there is no need to change anything that you’re doing on a day-by-day basis. Right now the risk is still low, but this could change; I’ve said that many times, even on this program. You’ve gotta watch out because although the risk is low now, you don’t need to change anything that you’re doing. When you start to see community spread, this could change and force you to become much more attentive to doing things that would protect you from spread."
As recently as March 10, Dr. Fauci was still insisting that the risk to Americans was low.
"If you look at the totality of the country, the risk is relatively low of getting infected," he told National Public Radio. "But if you are infected and you are an individual who falls into the category of having underlying conditions, such as heart disease, lung disease, diabetes, immunosuppression for cancer and other types of diseases, then if you get infected, your vulnerability for getting a complication is high. So what we're doing in society is to try and protect those individuals."
Three days later, President Trump declared a National Emergency because of the Coronavirus outbreak. Right up until that moment, though, the country's leading scientists were saying that Coronavirus was not likely to be a significant threat to Americans.
Today, however, critics of the President claim that he didn't "follow the science" during the critical months of January and February and, because of that, America's Coronavirus outbreak is now more severe than it had to be.
This is nonsense. President Trump was following the science. The science was simply flawed.