The US intelligence agencies started tracking coronavirus outbreak in China as early as November 2019. But, at the end, the most of us suffered because of lack of business, black economic empowerment and racism/discrimination from the ANC government. Against white businesses and people.
*
Concerns about what is now known to be the novel coronavirus pandemic were detailed in a November intelligence report by the military’s National Center for Medical Intelligence (NCMI), according to two officials familiar with the document’s contents.
The report was the result of analysis of wire and computer intercepts, coupled with satellite images. It raised alarms because an out-of-control disease would pose a serious threat to U.S. forces in Asia — forces that depend on the NCMI’s work. And it paints a picture of an American government that could have ramped up mitigation and containment efforts far earlier to prepare for a crisis poised to come home.
“Analysts concluded it could be a cataclysmic event,” one of the sources said of the NCMI’s report. “It was then briefed multiple times to” the Defense Intelligence Agency, the Pentagon’s Joint Staff and the White House. Wednesday night, the Pentagon issued a statement denying the “product/assessment” existed.
From that warning in November, the sources described repeated briefings through December for policy-makers and decision-makers across the federal government as well as the National Security Council at the White House. All of that culminated with a detailed explanation of the problem that appeared in the President’s Daily Brief of intelligence matters in early January, the sources said. For something to have appeared in the PDB, it would have had to go through weeks of vetting and analysis, according to people who have worked on presidential briefings in both Republican and Democratic administrations.
“The timeline of the intel side of this may be further back than we’re discussing,” the source said of preliminary reports from Wuhan. “But this was definitely being briefed beginning at the end of November as something the military needed to take a posture on.”
The NCMI report was made available widely to people authorized to access intelligence community alerts. Following the report’s release, other intelligence community bulletins began circulating through confidential channels across the government around Thanksgiving, the sources said. Those analyses said China’s leadership knew the epidemic was out of control even as it kept such crucial information from foreign governments and public health agencies.
NCMI is a component of the Pentagon’s Defense Intelligence Agency. Together, the agencies’ core responsibilities are to ensure U.S. military forces have the information they need to carry out their missions — both offensively and defensively. It is a critical priority for the Pentagon to keep American service members healthy on deployments.
“As a matter of practice the National Center for Medical Intelligence does not comment publicly on specific intelligence matters. However, in the interest of transparency during this current public health crisis, we can confirm that media reporting about the existence/release of a National Center for Medical Intelligence Coronavirus-related product/assessment in November of 2019 is not correct. No such NCMI product exists,” Colonel Dr. R. Shane Day, director of the National Center for Medical Intelligence, said.
Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff John Hyten seemed to push back on reports that the US intelligence community was aware of the coronavirus in November, saying Thursday that the first intelligence reports he saw were in January.
The question of when the President was first aware of the Covid-19 threat has become politically sensitive as the US death toll surges, the administration’s response comes under fire and Trump repeatedly denies it was possible to know how deadly the virus would be.
*
The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services confirmed on Sunday that it is investigating a manufacturing defect in some initial coronavirus test kits that prompted some states to seek emergency approval to use their own test kits.*
Screening
BEIJING, Feb. 26 (Xinhua) — Dr. Bruce Aylward, team lead of the WHO-China joint mission on COVID-19, has given examples of China’s scientific and technological measures taken to fight the virus:
-Routine medical services provided online
-Real-time, long-distance contact, support, investigation between experts, researchers on 5G platform
China “turbo-charged it (classic approach for infectious disease control) with modern science and modern technology in a way that was unimaginable even a few years ago,” Aylward told the press on Monday.
See what China has done with science and technology to better fight the virus.
ONAFHANKLIK 