Trade adviser sounded virus alarm in January
Memo warned of impact as Trump downplayed risks
A top White House adviser starkly warned Trump administration officials in late January that the coronavirus crisis could cost the United States trillions of dollars and put millions of Americans at risk of illness or death.
The warning, written in a memo by Peter Navarro, President Donald Trump’s trade adviser, is the highestlevel alert known to have circulated inside the West Wing as the administration was taking its first substantive steps to confront a crisis that had already consumed China’s leaders and would go on to upend life in Europe and the United States.
“The lack of immune protection or an existing cure or vaccine would leave Americans defenseless in the case of a full-blown coronavirus outbreak on U.S. soil,” Navarro’s memo said. “This lack of protection elevates the risk of the coronavirus evolving into a full-blown pandemic, imperiling the lives of millions of Americans.”
Dated Jan. 29, it came during a period when Trump was playing down the risks to the United States, and he would later go on to say that no one could have predicted such a devastating outcome.
Navarro said in the memo that the administration faced a choice about how aggressive to be in containing an outbreak, saying the human and economic costs would be relatively low if it turned out to be a problem along the lines of a seasonal flu.
But he went on to emphasize that the “risk of a worst-case pandemic scenario should not be overlooked” given the information coming from China.
In one worst-case scenario cited in the memo, more than a half-million Americans could die.
A second memo that Navarro wrote, dated Feb. 23, warned of an “increasing probability of a full-blown COVID-19 pandemic that could infect as many as 100 million Americans, with a loss of life of as many as 1.2 million souls.”
At that time, Trump was still downplaying the threat of the virus. The administration was considering asking Congress for more money to address the situation, and the second memo, which circulated around the West Wing and was obtained by The New York Times, urged an immediate supplemental spending appropriation from Congress of at least $3 billion.
“This is NOT a time for penny-pinching or horse trading on the Hill,” Navarro wrote in the second memo, which was unsigned but which officials attributed to him. It was unclear whether Trump saw the second memo, whose contents were first reported by Axios.
The second memo seemed aimed at members of the White House Task Force established by Trump to manage the crisis, and reflected deep divisions within the administration about how to proceed and persistent feuding between Navarro and many other top officials about his role and his views.
“Any member of the Task Force who wants to be cautious about appropriating funds for a crisis that could inflict trillions of dollars in economic damage and take millions of lives has come to the wrong administration,” the memo said.
Among other things, the memo called for an increase in funding for the government to purchase personal protective equipment for health care workers, estimating they would need “at least a billion face masks” over a four- to six-month period. The administration ended up asking for $2.5 billion. Congress then approved $8 billion.
Navarro is now the administration’s point person for supply chain issues for medical and other equipment needed to deal with the virus.
The January memo written by Navarro was dated the same day that Trump named a White House task force to deal with the threat, and as the administration was weighing whether to bar some travelers from China, an option being pushed by Navarro. Trump would approve the limits on travel from China the next day, though it would be weeks before he began taking more aggressive steps to head off spread of the virus.
Questions about Trump’s handling of crisis, especially in its early days, are likely to define his presidency. Navarro’s memo is evidence that some in the upper ranks of the administration had considered the possibility of the outbreak turning into something far more serious than Trump was acknowledging publicly.
Neither Navarro nor spokespeople for the White House responded to requests for comment.
The memo was sent from Navarro to the National Security Council and then distributed to several officials across the administration, people familiar with the events said. It reached a number of top officials as well as aides to Mick Mulvaney, then the acting chief of staff, they said, but it was unclear whether Trump saw it.