NPR - Report: Pentagon Knew Of Possible Coronavirus Threat For Years

[SheltieLover]

[link:https://www.npr.org/2020/04/05/827692672/report-pentagon-aware-of-possible-coronavirus-threat-for-years|

The Pentagon was aware of the likelihood of a pandemic brought on by a novel coronavirus years ago, predicting with startling accuracy shortages of masks, hospital beds and ventilators that could occur in an outbreak, according to a 2017 internal document reported by The Nation.

[DanieRains]

1. Of Course They Knew

But Trump said the system was broken so there!

[ck4829]

2. But you see the Pentagon is full of generals and Trump knows "more than the generals"

[SheltieLover]

3. Pffffft!

[The Wielding Truth]

4. And the Trump administration was presented an entire program of preparation when he took

office!

[ck4829]

5. They forgot one thing

When I hear "presented an entire program", I picture lots of words, big words at that, and technical diagrams.

Now if they had pictures of scary Muslims and Mexicans as well as "TRUMP IS GREATEST PRESIDENT EVER!!!" on the top of every slide, then maybe we would be somewhere else today.

... maybe.

[The Wielding Truth]

8. It's a crying shame that this guy is where he is.

[GulfCoast66]

6. We've know about it for years.

I read ‘The Great Influenza’ over a decade ago. It as a best seller published in 04.

After a very exhausting history of the the flu in 1917-19 he spent time speculating about one in our time.

If memory serves he hit the nail on the head.

[Igel]

7. By "likelihood" understand "probability".

And that doesn't mean "it's probable" but "it has a non-zero probability".

It was one scenario. It was one scenario out of many. It wasn't the most likely scenario. But it was a possible scenario.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/19/us/politics/trump-coronavirus-outbreak.html says all the same thing without the innuendo. The assumption is that in 2017 Trump must have read every report produced by the Pentagon; to believe that you'd also have to believe that the House DOD oversight committee would have been aware of it. Nobody wants to say the second must be true, but it's as true as the first part.

Notice that this was also not new in 2017. After the near pandemics for H1N1, SARS, and MERS, it was a big deal. Preparation didn't rise the level of a national emergency.

[Wounded Bear]

9. They plan shit, and sit around discussing the future and possibilities...

It's what they do.

Of course they could see this coming. A lot of people did.

[Steelrolled]

10. These stories are a dime a dozen

Predicting a viral pandemic and shortages of medical supplies is not a stretch. Even George W Bush did it back in 2005.

[Initech]

11. I never thought I'd find myself defending George W. Bush...

But I'd take a million of him over one Trump. Bush was obsessed with the idea that this could happen on his watch and did everything in his power to stop it. Of course we could not see the sheer, utter incompetence of the Trump administration coming.

[Azathoth]

12. It's been an open secret for decades that a viral respiratory pandemic was coming

And any microbiologist in the past 10 years would have told you the likliest candidates were influenza and a SARS/MERS-like coronavirus.

There is absolutely nothing going on here that wasn't already known and predicted back when Fauci was in medical school.