Pentagon Knew of Possible Coronavirus Threat for Years | Hacker News Reader

Pentagon Knew of Possible Coronavirus Threat for Years

npr.org

I’m so sick of articles about unpreparedness. It’s real rich coming from the same exact media rooms that tried to make me and others feel like idiots when we saw what was going on in Hubei in January — ”it’s no big deal”. Now all of a sudden it’s supposed to have been obvious for years? Just stop with this bullshit, please.

The media is not the Pentagon and it's clear that both the Pentagon (per this report) and epidemiologists have been aware of this possibility for years.

I do not understand exactly what you're suggesting here. Is this unworthy of reporting? The implication you're making is that no such articles should come out reporting on this material, since you believe the media made mistakes. Or maybe you're just venting – understandable, but it gives the appearance that you don't believe the article.

The problem, in my opinion, is they know about hundreds or thousands of scenarios that could possibly happen. It’s not possible or prudent to prepare for every one of them. Only hindsight is 20/20.

> from the same exact media rooms

can you point me to an article from NPR which was downplaying the outbreak?

And why does it matter?

They're a reporting and news agency. They're not in the business of strategically planning for an outbreak.

They were merely reporting the sentiment of the leaders of this country in the earlier days.

Here you go:

https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2020/01/29/8008132...

At the time, that was true.

By that logic, the Pentagon acted reasonably. So what's this new article about, then?

Different audience, different role. Their whole job is threat forecasting and risk management.

Hm ... Should we spend these 2 billion here on a multi-faceted pandemic response plan, or buy another air-craft-carrier? Let's do the carrier!

If only an aircraft carrier only cost 2 billion....

don't you mean trillion?

I see your 2 billion for a carrier and raise you $1 trillion for the F35

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/21/magazine/f35-joint-strike...

Bill Gates also knew about this threat for years, and so did the audience who watched that talk

https://www.ted.com/talks/bill_gates_the_next_outbreak_we_re...

Just saying, there is plenty of blame to go around for all of us, once this pandemic crisis is resolved.

Yeah, though at some point you have to ask the question:

“Where does the buck stop?”

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buck_passing

Lol Bill Gates is not an elected official. He has arguably more than enough for a private individual.

Maybe it should have read, "No one would heed a Pentagon report for years"

Why was this flagged? It's surprising to see something from NPR get flagged. I didn't see anything uncontroversial in the content.

It's political news: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

"Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic."

I wish this ‘guideline’ or any guideline would attempt to even define what the moderation team considers to be ‘political’ because it seems like the community itself cannot agree on a universal-enough term that would apply to the types of discussions where politics and technology may intersect.

I think the issue is not with the content, but with the comments. This entire thread is a hot mess

What kind of demented, clickbait article is this? Every epidemiologist of the world was aware a pandemy would have come. And, guess what? We WERE prepared. It's being managed, it hurts, yes, but it hasn't turned into a zombie apocalypse with millions of victims. - from Italy

It wasn't difficult to know, was it? Gates and some other were already alarming about this, even some documentaries were produced about this.

Imagine making headline news when you do your job

Not surprising at all.

The parent article https://www.thenation.com/article/politics/covid-military-sh... Not a Trump fan but this is very biased against the current administration. TLDR The pentagon warned the administration about coronavirus threats in 2017 but civilian politicians didn't ramp up supplies in case the threat was realized.

Almost every expert in disease prevention and public health has been warning about this for years. Intelligence agencies, the military even knew about the dangers of the outbreak as it was happening.

Most of the blame should lie solidly on Trump and how he runs the presidency.

A really good breakdown of the complete mess the current administration is and their inability to accept the facts and respond appropriately.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2020/04/04/...

Archive link: http://archive.is/3qCa4

You're delusional if you don't recognize that this was a mass failure throughout the width and breadth of US corporate and government administration. Practically no one at federal, state, or local levels took any initiative to prepare. Same across the medical industry. Same for manufacturing - not a single company thought to ramp up mask or ventilator production when we've been hearing about this since January.

It's popular to hate on the president but needlessly political to place the blame solely on his shoulders. And at the risk of posting flaimbait, note that Trump made a very early move to close the border to Chinese travel, and was met with condemnation of sinophobia from high ranking Democrats (like Schumer) and media.

"The buck stops here", said someone.

It is the president the one who sets the tone and priority for these issues, and having been wisely advised, he obviously sat around, downplayed the issue, and yes, his response was absolute sinophobia given that a couple dozen additional measures would have have to be shown to display competency in this.

He is easily the most incompetent person that could lead this crisis.

"The buck stops here", said someone.

That someone was Harry S. Truman, who succeeded Roosevelt during WW II. And was succeeded in turn by Eisenhower.

I randomly picked up https://www.amazon.com/Where-Buck-Stops-Personal-Writings/dp... in a used bookstore. I'm glad I did. It is Truman's take on every president up through Eisenhower. Truman was known for his blunt language, but even he asked that it not be published until after he and his wife died.

I don't agree with him on many things. But his take on leadership is very enlightening.

>his response was absolute sinophobia given that a couple dozen additional measures would have have to be shown to display competency in this.

You are blinded by your hatred. Half the country has become totally unable to evaluate anything the president does objectively.

What proportion of world governments are xenophobic now for closing down borders?

>It is the president the one who sets the tone and priority for these issues, and having been wisely advised, he obviously sat around, downplayed the issue

And so did just about every other world government. Including your "model" "democratic socialist" European nations - hell, Sweden is still betting on herd immunity.

Rational thinking ceases when anyone brings up Trump. I'd also caution anyone evaluating this crisis response to recognize the unprecedented smear by the media. How many "US commandeers masks" articles have been corrected over the last few days now? Look it up, I bet you didn't hear about the quiet corrections. This happens all the damn time.

Trump is a shitty president but much of the hate he gets is pure partisan hysteria. Look at how quickly the tide turned against Chloroquine simply because he tweeted about it. Pure idiocy.

There's an old saying that people deserve their rulers.

Edit: and by the way, on the subject of rising claims of sinophobia: the CCP is not your friend. The world is paying now for their lies. All the little trickles of COVID symptomology that we are still just getting today should have been officially announced by China months ago while they were trying to cover up and downplay the virus to a much deeper degree than our president. There is a propaganda war waging right now across the internet with China attempting to set a narrative and by ignorantly screaming "sinophobia!" You are playing right into their narrative.

Lots of partisan voting in this thread but I thought this was well said. I'm more concerned about the systemic failures in this case.

This isn't true. You may only be hearing about the failures because that makes a better news story. 3M, for instance, increased production of masks in January because they knew demand would go up. There are surely countless others.

Several regulators added pandemic preparedness to business continuity planning requirements following H1N1. In recent years most of those requirements have been significantly relaxed if not removed entirely. To give you a quick idea of how drastically things have changed in a very short time you can look at the Business Continuity Planning Handbook the FFIEC[1] publishes as a compliance guide.

The prior version[2] used the word "pandemic" 139 times while the current version[3] mentions it only 18 times.

Considering financial institution compliance is hardly known for speedy updates that is an absolutely monumental shift in guidance in less than four years.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Financial_Institutions...

[2] https://ithandbook.ffiec.gov/media/391101/ffiec-itbooklet-bu...

[3] https://ithandbook.ffiec.gov/media/296178/ffiec_itbooklet_bu...

It really does. I don't often attribute major changes in the economy to a sitting president. But after dismantling and shunning half of the security apparatus, and not listening to advisors, this is what we get. He single handedly dismantled the CDC when he became president [0]. He routinely doesn't listen to his national security advisors [1]. If we just had started social distancing 2 weeks before, we would be in an entirely different situation.

[0] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/mar/24/trump-cuts-u...

[1] https://newrepublic.com/article/147366/anti-intelligence

I already began social distancing more than a month before the guidelines were released, and I didn't need to wait for the government to tell me to do it. My lungs seem to be working fine as of now.

> He single handedly dismantled the CDC when he became president.

From what I can tell, that was a 2021 budget proposal (done before this all started) that hasn't been approved or taken effect.

https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/trump-cut-cdc-budget/

Based on this chart (and the article you posted) he has proposed cuts to their non-infection disease related programs but congress has kept the funding intact.

https://envirodatagov.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/Screen-...

I think people are confusing the CDC with the Pandemic Response Team: https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/trump-fire-pandemic-team/

You are right, the biggest funding cuts came when the “Tea Party” led GOP came into control of congress, during the previous administration.

See e.g. https://www.propublica.org/article/us-emergency-medical-stoc...

Why is it the United States' job to identify health problems in China? Does any other country have bureaucracies to identify public health issues in other countries? Why is the United States expected to be the police watchdog of the world, while simultaneously being critiqued for having a presence in other countries? Why is the United States expected to stand up a separate bureaucracy for public health in China while also paying for the majority of WHO funding, an org that is literally tasked with identifying major global health threats and helping countries get ready?

If the United States is now expected to have bureaucracies specific to China and other countries, one must wonder why we're expected to provide services to foreign countries while not actually having sovereignty over them.

If there's one thing the Trump administration has done right, it has been to slowly rid America of foreign entanglements. Thank goodness.

To invoke the notion of foreign entanglements in response to an epidemic, which knows no borders and can't really be contained to them, is kind of rich.

I think most people here are suggesting that we ought to, even as an isolationist state, if that is your preference, monitor and be prepared for pandemics even if they appear in other countries.

Indeed, and we pay for an organization whose purpose it is to do exactly that. We should be asking why that org (WHO) failed, instead of asking why we didn't fund yet another organization with the exact same mission.

The question is why the US should have a unilateral office dedicated to pandemics in China when we have another multilateral one. We should have one or the other, for sure -- monitoring pandemics is important for national security -- but why should we have two?

> Why is it the United States' job to identify health problems in China?

Because a health problem in China, or anywhere in the world, presents a RISK to the the United Stated

> Because a health problem in China, or anywhere in the world, presents a RISK to the the United Stated

Correct. This is why we are the primary fund-provider to WHO. We should be asking why that org failed us, not why we didn't have yet another org for the same purpose.

And after investigating the failure, we should consider whether or not continuing with that org makes sense, or if we should set up another organization and sever ties with the old one, in the interest of not duplicating effort.

Not sure what your point is

This seems like basic risk management.

This statement is hyperbolic nonsense:

"He single handedly dismantled the CDC when he became president[0]"

Few quotes you might have overlooked:

"repeatedly attempting to slash funding..."

" proposed a 20% cut to the CDC’s emerging and zoonotic diseases program"

Congress did not let this happen and has actually INCREASED the CDC budget.

The actual enacted program budgets for the CDC in 2016 and 2017 were both under $7.2 billion, but for 2020 the budget Congress adopted for it is nearly $7.7 billion.

"dismantle the CDC"- Please, give me a break...

Counterpoints/thoughts:

* In the end the US has responded, to the tune of losing half the GDP and tanking the stock market. This is true skin in the game and shows that the (true or hypothetical) oligarchs have been overridden.

* The POTUS is not a dictator and was never intended to have very much power. The fact that states and their governors have taken point illustrates this is working as designed.

* Of course this has been known for years, and people have been warning about it. But, SARS and H1N1 came and went without any serious consequences so I don't blame the system too much for not taking this epidemic more seriously.

> so I don't blame the system too much for not taking this epidemic more seriously

There are people whose only job is precisely to take these things seriously

The CDC, FEMA exist for this very reason - to prevent and lessen the damage of diseases or natural disasters

The US pays for these organizations to exist for loments like these

> This is true skin in the game and shows that the (true or hypothetical) oligarchs have been overridden.

Agreed, but who is losing their job? Not Barry Diller. As always, the average person suffers while the rich take a haircut.

> The POTUS is not a dictator and was never intended to have very much power. The fact that states and their governors have taken point illustrates this is working as designed.

You're confusing the federalist system with "dictator". It is literally the job of the federal government to coordinate on national issues. You don't ask Maryland to build tanks just to defend Maryland, do you? Why is a national pandemic just a states problem with piecemeal solutions? Why is every state bidding for resources individually? Why is every state pretty much on their own here?

> so I don't blame the system too much for not taking this epidemic more seriously.

This isn't the issue. There were many "in the system" that took this very seriously. There are entire parts of the government dedicated to this exact problem. The issue is that the people in charge, the current administration, outright ignored and played down medical facts due to ignorance, incompetence and politics.

Don’t know why downvoted. This is true.

The only special knowledge the Pentagon might have had is that “oh, specifically the corona type of viruses is particularly nasty because of the long symptom free incubation time”[1].

But people like Bill Gates, in addition to those disease prevention orgs, were shouting about pandemic risk from the rooftops.

Could they have done more to encourage a robust countermeasure strategy? Sure. But so could tons of other orgs and they’re not special or particularly evil in this respect.

[1] I probably have the terminology wrong there and welcome corrections, but I think I have the substance right.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com