Washington: The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) had issued at least 12 warnings to US President Donald Trump about the spread of the coronavirus in China and its implications for the US; warnings which Trump ignored and subsequently the pandemic gripped the US.
Current and former US intelligence officials told The Washington Post that Trump, in the month of January and February, had repeatedly ignored warnings conveyed in issues of the President’s Daily Brief, a sensitive report that is produced before dawn each day and designed to call the president’s attention to the most significant global developments and security threats.
For weeks, the PDB — as the report is known — traced the virus’s spread around the globe, made clear that China was suppressing information about the contagion’s transmissibility and lethal toll, and raised the prospect of dire political and economic consequences.
But, Trump continued to downplay the threat and skipped the reading of comprehensive articles on aspects of the global outbreak in the PDB’s reference to the novel virus, according to the officials, who told the Post on condition of anonymity to discuss classified material.
As of Monday (April 27), more than 55,000 people in the United States had died of C ovid-19.
The frequency with which the coronavirus was mentioned in the PDB has not been previously reported, and US officials were quoted as saying that the devlopment reflected a level of attention comparable to periods when analysts have been tracking active terrorism threats, overseas conflicts or other rapidly developing security issues.
The administration’s first major step to arrest the spread of the virus came in late January, when Trump restricted travel between the United States and China, where the virus is believed to have originated late last year.
