See the triangle just below this paragraph? That’s from the government’s Public Health Emergency website and shows the organization of responsibility envisioned by President Donald Trump’s National Biodefense Strategy -- a strategy meant to protect the U.S. long-term against biological threats like coronavirus. There, at the top of the triangle, is the Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs, better known as the president’s National Security Advisor, who at the time was one John Bolton, of current impeachment controversy fame.
The strategy was announced in September 2018, five months after Trump tapped Bolton to join the White House and a year before he was fired.
At the time, Bolton presented the strategy to reporters, alongside Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar, and emphasized that the HHS, not the White House National Security Council, would be the operational lead in implementing the strategy -- citing Iran-Contra as a reason the NSC should not be operationally in charge. But Bolton’s position was the top of the pyramid because the National Security Advisor was the “coordinator” of all things biodefense within the government.
While much of the strategy focused on threats from human-made biological weapons, it acknowledged the dangers of naturally occurring threats.
“An infectious disease outbreak—even in the most remote places of the world—could spread rapidly across oceans and continents, directly impacting the U.S. population and its health, security, and prosperity,” the strategy says.
The strategy created a cabinet-level Biodefense Steering Committee, headed by Azar, and including heads of departments from the Pentagon to agriculture. The committee is “responsible for overseeing and coordinating the execution of the strategy and its implementation plan, and ensuring federal coordination with domestic and international government and non-governmental partners.”
Along with that the 2018 strategy called for a Biodefense Coordination Team within HHS that’s meant to monitor the implementation of the strategy and “maintain awareness of biodefense activities conducted by agencies, relevant interagency entities, and non Federal partners in the broader biodefense enterprise, including relevant private sector stakeholders.”
A spokesperson for HHS told Code and Dagger that the Biodefense Coordination Team generally meets weekly. But when it comes to the coronavirus, the spokesperson said that neither the steering committee or the coordination team are on outbreak response duty. “They are long-term strategy [entities] to be sure the nation has the capacity to respond.”
Rather, a new task force set up by Trump Thursday specifically for the coronavirus, led by Azar and “coordinated” through the White House National Security Council, will “lead the Administration’s efforts to monitor, contain, and mitigate the spread of the virus, while ensuring that the American people have the most accurate and up-to-date health and travel information,” the White House said in a press release.
Today Azar and the current National Security Advisor, Robert O’Brien, held a press briefing with other officials to declare the coronavirus a public health emergency and new, temporary restrictions on some foreign nationals attempting to enter the U.S. -- though Azar said the current risk to Americans “remains low.”
Amid many, many tweets about impeachment, Trump attempted to reassure the public this week that his administration is closely monitoring “ongoing developments” related to the coronavirus. On Wednesday the president tweeted photos of what appeared to be a briefing in The Situation Room -- apparently with Central Intelligence Agency and National Security Agency officials visible on monitors in the back -- and said, “We have the best experts in the world, and they are on top of it 24/7!”
Primary Source: National Biodefense Strategy (PDF)
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