Citing a memo by Navarro dated January 29, the Times reported he told officials, “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.”
“This lack of protection elevates the risk of the coronavirus evolving into a full-blown pandemic, imperiling the lives of millions of Americans,” the memo said.
The memo was written the same day President Donald Trump announced the White House coronavirus task force, and the Times reported the memo “is the highest-level alert known to have circulated inside the West Wing as the administration was taking its first substantive steps to confront” the coronavirus.
Navarro also said in the memo the Trump administration had to choose how aggressive it should be in containing an outbreak and mentioned the costs to human life and the economy would be low if it turned out to be on the level of seasonal flu, the Times reported.
He also said the “risk of a worst-case pandemic scenario should not be overlooked” while looking at information about the virus coming from China where the outbreak began. More than 500,000 Americans could die in one worst-case scenario Navarro mentioned in the memo, the Times reported.
CNN has reached out to the White House for comment, but has not received a response.
US Surgeon General Jerome Adams, a member of the White House coronavirus task force, said on NBC’s “Today” Tuesday morning that he did not see the memo, but said “there were preparations going on the entire time” for the virus.
“Well, what I know based on my interactions with the task force — and, remember, I joined the task force later — was that there were preparations going on the entire time,” he said. “I can tell you from within (the Department of Health and Human Services) that Secretary Azar, from the time this started to develop in China, was looking at the stockpile, was trying to come up with plans. And so there was work going on behind the scenes.”
The memo also came a week after Trump said at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, that he is not worried about the virus turning into a pandemic as health experts sounded the alarm about the threat of the virus.
The Washington Post reported last month the President ignored reports from US intelligence agencies in January that warned of the scale of the coronavirus outbreak.
The President has been criticized for downplaying the virus at the beginning of the outbreak. There are now more than 368,000 confirmed cases of coronavirus across the United States and over 10,900 deaths, according to Johns Hopkins University’s tally of cases.
