Trump canceled pandemic early warning program designed to find threats exactly like COVID-19

by Laura Clawson

Daily Kos Staff

Friday, Apr. 03, 2020 Friday, Apr. 03, 2020 at 7:50:54am PDT

This photo taken on February 24, 2020 shows medical staff treating patients infected by the COVID-19 coronavirus at a hospital in Wuhan in China's central Hubei province. - The new coronavirus has peaked in China but could still grow into a pandemic, the World Health Organization warned, as infections mushroom in other countries. (Photo by STR / AFP) / China OUT (Photo by STR/AFP via Getty Images)

The missed warnings and canceled programs to stop a pandemic like the one we’re experiencing now are getting to the point of being ridiculous. The latest is almost cartoonish.

In September, two months before COVID-19 emerged in Wuhan, China, the Trump administration stopped funding a pandemic early-warning program … that included work on novel coronaviruses and work with labs in Wuhan. Seriously.

The PREDICT program worked with foreign labs to identify viruses with the potential to become pandemics. The program trained scientists around the world to accomplish that, and had identified 160 new novel coronaviruses before shutting down just before this one, SARS-CoV-2, emerged. Wuhan Institute of Virology, the lab that ultimately did catch the emergence of COVID-19, was part of the PREDICT program.

PREDICT was launched in 2009 and funded through two five-year cycles before the Trump administration defunded it just in time for the exact scenario it was supposed to catch. It joins a genuinely astonishing list of other canceled programs and missed warnings.

In 2018, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention held a conference and webinar warning of pandemic.
Also in 2018, Donald Trump dismantled the National Security Council's global health section, which was supposed to fight pandemics.
Under Trump, the Department of Homeland Security stopped running pandemic simulations for preparedness.
But the Department of Health and Human Services did run Operation Crimson Contagion, exercises about a global pandemic conducted just last fall, months before completely missing the ball on an actual pandemic.
Also last fall, White House economists warned of the economic effects of a pandemic.
The Trump administration inherited a pandemic playbook from the Obama administration, which drew on the lessons of Ebola and H1N1.
And the Obama administration tried to prepare the Trump administration with a pandemic response exercise during the transition.

Every time one of these stories comes up, you think “this is ridiculous, there can’t possibly be any more missed warnings.” And practically every day, we learn about a new one.