Top administration officials said last year threat of pandemic kept them up at night
Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar and Tim Morrison, then a special assistant to the President and senior director for weapons of mass destruction and biodefense on the National Security Council, made the comments at the BioDefense Summit in April 2019.
“Of course, the thing that people ask: ‘What keeps you most up at night in the biodefense world?’ Pandemic flu, of course. I think everyone in this room probably shares that concern,” Azar said, before listing off efforts to mitigate the impact of flu outbreaks.
President Donald Trump has repeatedly said no one predicted a pandemic crisis like the one caused by coronavirus.
The White House defended the President’s comments in a statement, saying he had shown a “great commitment” to global health security.
“It is not inconsistent to acknowledge the threat posed by pandemics and posture the government to respond, and also acknowledge that this is a new or never seen before virus that came out of nowhere and was initially covered up by the Chinese Communist Party,” a senior administration official told CNN.
Health and Human Services did not respond to a request for comment on Azar’s remarks.
At the 2019 summit, Azar also said, “It’s a cardinal rule of leadership that you have to have accountability, which means picking a leader, and that’s a leadership lesson well understood by President Trump, who has a particular interest not just in our national security, but in preparedness for biodefense in particular.”
“When people ask me what am I really worried about, it’s always the thing we’re not thinking about,” Morrison said. “The thing we’re not prepared for that we should be. And when we were working on the Biodefense Strategy, we started thinking a little bit about what would we likely confront, what’s likely to come next?”
Morrison then described the impact of the 1918 pandemic, noting in raw numbers it killed “more people than any other outbreak of disease in human history.”
“So when people ask me what keeps me up at night, it’s issues like that,” he added.
Morrison, a longtime Republican staffer, left the Trump administration in October 2019. He notably testified in the impeachment inquiry of Trump last fall, telling House impeachment investigators that he was told Trump wanted a top Ukrainian official to announce an investigation that would help the President politically before US security aid to Ukraine would be released.
He is currently a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute, a conservative think tank.
In an email to CNN, Morrison defended the Trump administration’s preparations for a pandemic, and heavily criticized China’s handling of the coronavirus outbreak.
Morrison wrote the Trump administration was “highly active in drafting the strategy” to prepare for pandemics and “already very engaged in dealing with the epidemic of Ebola in the Democratic Republic of Congo (which was ultimately defeated).”
Morrison also blamed the Chinese Communist Party “work[ing] so hard to conceal from the Chinese people and the world the origins of the virus and the extent of its spread, costing the rest of the world months of response time, and compromising the independence of the WHO. We expected the CCP would have learned from its mistakes in 2003 during the outbreak of SARS. Even now, no one believes the numbers being released by the CCP.”
