The Staggering Collapse of U.S. Intelligence on the Coronavirus
An agency tasked with tracking future bio threats fell down on the job, causing us to wonder what else we don't know.
The coronavirus pandemic has impacted the United States unlike any other event in recent history, proving to be far more disruptive to American society, and far most damaging to the U.S. economy, than even the events of 9/11.
The U.S. response is something President Trump has likened to a “war,” going so far as to label himself a “wartime President,” leading the U.S. against “the toughest enemy” in a struggle in which he vows “total victory.” If the fight against the coronavirus is a war, then the virus clearly took the U.S. government by surprise. “Certainly we didn’t get an early run on it, Trump noted in a press conference on March 17. “It would’ve been helpful if we knew about it earlier.”
It is the job of the U.S. intelligence community to provide senior U.S. government policy makers, including the president, with advance warning about potential crises. The U.S. taxpayer pays a premium for this service; in 2020, the budget for the National Intelligence Program, which includes all programs, projects and activities of the U.S. intelligence community, was $62.8 billion.
Included in this budget is a small, specialized intelligence unit known as the National Center for Medical Intelligence (NCMI), which operates as part of the Defense Intelligence Agency. The mission of the NCMI is to serve as the lead activity within the Department of Defense (DoD) “for the production of medical intelligence,” and to prepare and coordinate “integrated, all-source intelligence for the DoD and other government and international organizations on foreign health threats and other medical issues to protect U.S. interests worldwide.”
For a small agency, the NCMI packs a large punch in terms of the overall impact of its product. For example, in April 2009—two months prior to when the WHO and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) officially declared the global outbreak of H1N1 influenza a pandemic, NCMI published an intelligence product, known as an “Infectious Disease Risk Assessment,” which predicted that a recent outbreak of the Swine Flu (H1N1) would become a pandemic.
The positive work done by the NCMI in relation to the H1N1 outbreak contributed to the creation of the 2012 “National Strategy for Biosurveillance,” designed to help facilitate a full-time institutionalized process for obtaining timely and accurate insight on current and emerging biological risks. President Obama himself noted the critical role played by “accurate and timely information” during the 2009 H1N1 pandemic that enabled decision makers, including himself, to “develop the effective responses that save lives.
“The sooner we can detect and understand a threat,” Obama wrote in the introduction to the first National Strategy for Biosurveillance, “the faster we can take action to protect the American people.”
Providing this early detection of a threat is the mission of the NCMI. When it comes to diseases like H1N1 and the coronavirus, this task falls under the remit of the NCMI’s Infectious Disease Division, whose baseline requirement, according to a former commanding officer, Air Force Col. (Dr.) Anthony M. Rizzo, “is to understand the risk of every type of [endemic] infectious disease in every country.”
“When we think of the word biosurveillance, we think of the kinds of things that the public health community does—collecting cases, taking cultures, deciding which disease is which,” Rizzo said. “But we in the intelligence community are looking way before that to determine [if there are] threats on the horizon.”
The NCMI’s job, Rizzo noted, is predictive in nature—not to explain what is happening, but rather “what we believe is going to happen.” To do this, NCMI has access to the resources of the totality of the intelligence community, including intercepted communications, satellite imagery, and sensitive human intelligence, including covert sample collection.
https://www.globalresearch.ca/staggering-collapse-u-s-intelligence-coronavirus/5707525