In 2003, a CIA analyst warned of a coming pandemic, but her report was largely ignored.
WASHINGTON — The warning was written in clear, plain language. There was no ambiguity, nothing left to the imagination. A pandemic was coming, and the world was not ready.
Karen J. Monaghan was the acting national intelligence officer for economics and global issues at the National Intelligence Council — a think tank that draws on expertise from across the entire intelligence community — when she wrote her prescient report, “SARS: Down but Still a Threat.” The report is among the clearest evidence that, contrary to what President Trump has said, the coronavirus pandemic was not only predictable but was, in fact, predicted.
“SARS” is an acronym for “severe acute respiratory syndrome.” It is a type of coronavirus, a class of pathogen known for the spiky glycoproteins that protrude from its surface. “There are seven coronavirus that infect humans,” explains Ashita Batavia, an infectious disease specialist in New York City. “SARS, MERS-CoV and SARS-CoV-2 , and four others that cause the common cold. They’re all in the same viral family.
John Sipher, who spent 28 years at the CIA, agrees with Monaghan that getting the intelligence community to focus on any nonterrorism issue was impossible at that time. “It is clearly a national security threat,” says Sipher of pandemics. Once the SARS report was completed, Monaghan asked three medical experts to review the work. Among them was a 62-year-old National Institutes of Health epidemiologist who had gained renown in the battle against HIV/AIDS that had consumed the previous two decades: Dr. Anthony Fauci, who has become one of the most public faces in the coronavirus outbreak.
She noted, for one, that such a pandemic was more likely than before because population growth and economic development “are bringing more people into contact with non-domesticated animals, introducing new diseases more frequently into the human population.” SARS is believed to have originated in a civet, while the 2019 coronavirus may have jumped to humans from a pangolin that had been infected by a bat.
And even in 2003, before the rise of social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook, the distinction between sound information, fearmongering and outright untruth was already a concern. “Intense media attention and uncertainty about the disease fueled wide-spread fear, even in some areas without any cases, exacerbating economic disruptions,” Monaghan wrote in describing coverage of the SARS outbreak.
Many other countries, however, were left unprepared for a pandemic. “The cost of basic diagnostic and protective equipment is relatively modest yet still unaffordable for many countries,” Monaghan wrote. “SARS highlighted a widespread shortage of ventilators to support patients with pneumonia. The lack of adequate sterilization equipment raises the risk of spreading disease when medical instruments are reused.
Efforts at pandemic response received a boost in 2005, after President George W. Bush read John M. Barry’s about-to-be-published “The Great Influenza,” about the 1918 pandemic that killed millions. He instructed his homeland security adviser, Frances Townsend, to put together a pandemic response plan. Within days, however, a disaster of another kind would bear down on New Orleans in the form of Hurricane Katrina.
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