Trump did listen to pandemic experts — but they failed him

WASHINGTON >> 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 that 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.

Researchers at the University of Notre Dame found that only 1,514 cases and 39 deaths had been officially reported by early March, when in truth more than 100,000 people were already infected. Gottlieb said that as COVID-19 was spreading, CDC officials were “telling the coronavirus task force … that there was no spread of coronavirus in the United States,” adding, “They were adamant.”

On Feb. 20, Gottlieb coauthored a Wall Street Journal op-ed raising concerns that infections were more widespread than CDC numbers showed. The next day, Anthony S. Fauci said in a CNBC interview that he was confident this was not the case. “Certainly, it’s a possibility,” Fauci said, “but it is extraordinarily unlikely.”

So, when Trump told the American people on Feb. 25 that “the coronavirus ... is very well under control in our country. We have very few people with it,” he was not lying or playing down more dire information.

Trump did make serious errors of his own during this early period. On deputy national security adviser Matthew Pottinger’s advice, he barred travel by non-U.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 — almost six weeks later — because of objections from his economic advisers. The outbreak in New York, the worst of the pandemic, was seeded by travelers from Italy.

The main reason we were not able to contain the virus is that for six weeks, the experts told the president COVID-19 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.