TRUMP'S FIRST COVID MISTAKE

Despite early human intelligence about the virus in Wuhan, the president was slow to act

President Donald Trump leaves the White House for Walter Reed National Military Medical Center on October 2, 2020, after he and his wife both tested positive for Covid-19. / Photo by Drew Angerer/Getty Images.

This is a story about the very early days of what would become a worldwide pandemic that led to more than 7 million deaths and put the United States, and the entire world, on hold for months. It was a crisis that was mismanaged by President Donald Trump in ways not known at the time because the president and his senior aides chose not to listen to the unwanted facts that the American health and intelligence communities had obtained.

I learned this week that a US intelligence asset at the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China, where the Covid virus was first observed, is safe and out of danger. The asset, highly regarded within the CIA, was recruited while in graduate school in the United States and provided early warning of a laboratory accident at Wuhan that led to a series of infections that was quickly spreading and initially seemed immune to treatment. As is the case today, many senior US officials were reluctant to tell the president what he did not want to hear. But early studies dealing with how to mitigate the oncoming plague, based on information from the Chinese health ministry about the lethal new virus, were completed late in 2019 by experts from America’s National Institutes of Health and other research agencies. Despite their warnings, a series of preventative actions were not taken until the United States was flooded with cases of the virus. All of these studies, I have been told, have been expunged from the official internal records in Washington, including any mention of the CIA's source inside the Chinese laboratory. It was a cover-up to protect a president who did not do the right thing.