Trump listened to experts on virus, but they failed him

A narrative has taken hold since the release of Bob Woodward’s latest book that President Donald Trump was told in late January that the coronavirus was spreading across America at pandemic rates but ignored the dire warnings of government experts.

That narrative is wrong and unfair.

The truth is that during the crucial early weeks of the pandemic, the government’s public health leaders assured Trump the virus was not spreading in communities in the United States. They gave him bad intelligence because of two catastrophic failures: First, they relied on the flu surveillance system that failed to detect the rapid spread of COVID-19; and second, they bungled the development of a diagnostic test for COVID-19 that would have shown they were wrong, barred commercial labs from developing tests, and limited tests to people who had traveled to foreign hot spots or had contact with someone with a confirmed case. As a result, according to former Food and Drug Administration chief Scott Gottlieb, they were “situationally blind” to the spread of the virus.

They also failed to detect the spread, Gottlieb said, because for six weeks, they “had no diagnostic tests in the field to screen people.” That is because the FDA and HHS refused to allow private and academic labs to get into the testing game with COVID-19 tests of their own.

It is often noted that on Feb. 25, Nancy Messonnier, director of the CDC’s National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases, pointed to the spread of the virus abroad and said, “It’s not a question of if this will happen but when this will happen and how many people in this country will have severe illnesses” — and Trump reportedly nearly fired her. But Messonnier also said in that same interview, “To date, our containment strategies have been largely successful. As a result, we have very few cases in the United States and no spread in the community.” She added that the administration’s “proactive approach of containment and mitigation will delay the emergence of community spread in the United States while simultaneously reducing its ultimate impact” when it arrives. She had no idea it already had.

It was not until Feb. 26 that the first possible case of suspected community spread was reported. Even then, senior health officials played down the danger. On Feb. 29, CDC director Robert Redfield said: “The American public needs to go on with their normal lives.” It was not until early March that the experts realized just how wrong they had been.

So, when Trump told the American people on Feb. 25 that “the coronavirus ... is very well under control in our country,” he was not lying or playing down dire information. He was repeating what experts told him.

Trump did make serious errors. On deputy national security adviser Matthew Pottinger’s advice, he barred travel by nonU.S. citizens from China on Jan. 31. But he did not also shut down travel from much of Europe, as Pottinger recommended, until March 11 because of objections from advisers. The outbreak in New York, the worst of the pandemic, was seeded by travelers from Italy.

But the main reason we were not able to contain the virus is that for six critical weeks, experts told the president the virus was not spreading in U.S. communities when it was, in fact, spreading like wildfire. They were wrong. The experts failed the president — and the country.