(Photo by Markus Spiske from Pexels)
There’s a somber day each year in which America’s top intelligence officials line themselves up before Congress to tell lawmakers and the public of what to be afraid and how afraid they should be.
The Worldwide Threat Hearing, which reportedly might not take place openly this year, is an annual gut-check and an opportunity for the intelligence chiefs to talk about aggressive Russia, rising China, extant terrorism and the bold, still-new world of cyber-warfare. In 2019, it also included a section that has much more immediate relevance than it had at the time: the threat of a global pandemic.
“We assess that the United States and the world will remain vulnerable to the next flu pandemic or largescale outbreak of a contagious disease that could lead to massive rates of death and disability, severely affect the world economy, strain international resources, and increase calls on the United States for support,” the 2019 threat report says.
READ: 2019 Worldwide Threat Report (PDF)
The report says that while the international community has made “tenuous improvements in global health security,” they wouldn’t be enough to take on “what we anticipate will be more frequent outbreaks of infectious diseases […].”
One of the reasons the nation’s intelligence agencies were concerned was the “growing proximity of humans and animals has increased the risk of disease transmission. The number of outbreaks has increased in part because pathogens originally found in animals have spread to human populations” — currently the way experts believe the novel coronavirus COVID-19 started.
But at the time, the section garnered little attention. It was a short write-up settled into page 21 of a 42-page document, and the word “pandemic” is only used the one time throughout. A transcript of the live hearing shows that pandemics were not discussed between the intelligence heads and lawmakers, at least in the non-classified setting. Similarly, news coverage of the hearing, including a report I co-authored for ABC News, generally don’t mention the pandemic threat, instead focusing on what then-Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats called the Big Four: China, Russia, North Korea and Iran.
READ: Intel Chiefs Challenge Trump’s National Security Claims (ABC News)
At the time Coats said, "The composition of the current threats we face is a toxic mix of strategic competitors, regional powers, weak or failed states, and non-state actors using a variety of tools in overt and subtle ways to achieve their goals… The scale and scope of the various threats facing the United States and our immediate interests worldwide is likely to further intensify this year. It is increasingly a challenge to prioritize which threats are of greatest importance.”
It’s just that a global pandemic didn’t seem high on the list.
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