A CNN source tells the network that Peter Navarro, Trump’s trade adviser, warned the White House in a January memo about the health and economic risks of a potential coronavirus pandemic.
In the January memo, Navarro advocated for travel restrictions to and from China. It was an aggressive effort that Navarro and other White House officials pushed for weeks.
However, Trump continued to dismiss the notion that the virus was a threat to America. In a second memo, Navarro warned that the risk of a pandemic was greatly increasing and pleaded with the
Trump’s administration and the White House Coronavirus Task Force to secure billions in supplemental spending, according to sources familiar with the second memo.
The legitimacy of both memos has been confirmed and was first reported by The New York Times and Axios.
Navarro’s first memo was to showcase a worst-case scenario in which a half-million Americans could die. The second memo warned the was virus was spreading at a rate that cost the lives of 1.2 million people.
Navarro was not the only White House official firing flares as a warning; several public health experts also sent in memos that voiced their concerns over the growing risk.
The said memos are the latest piece of evidence that proves Trump and his administration was warned on multiple occasions of the looming pandemic and did not act accordingly, but rather downplayed the seriousness of the virus.
Navarro was eventually reassigned as the administration’s Defense Production Act coordinator, along with Trump’s son-in-law and senior adviser Jared Kushner, to address medical supply chain issues.
Despite not having any medical background, Navarro has become a voice for hydroxychloroquine, the drug that Trump wants to use as a treatment for coronavirus patients.
In the meantime, in an interview with NBC’s Today, US Surgeon General Jerome Adams said he had not seen the memo. But said that” there was preparation being made during the entire time.”
” Well, what I know based on my interactions with the task force and, remember, I joined the task force later, that there were preparations going on the entire time,” he said. “I can tell you that Secretary Azar, from the time this started to develop in China, was looking at the stockpile, was trying to come up with plans. And so there was work going on behind the scenes.”
Navarro’s initial memo came a week after Trump said at the World Economic Forum that” he is not worried about the virus turning into a pandemic.” Even while health officials started to send warnings about the threat of the virus.
Last month, The Washington Post reported that Trump ignored warnings from US intelligence agencies in January that detailed the severity of the outbreak.
Trump has faced backlash from the medical community and local and state officials for dismissing the virus as a threat, now more than 368,000 confirmed cases and counting plagued the United States with more than 11,000 deaths, according to Johns Hopkins University.
