Last winter, Pottinger was struck by the disparity between official accounts of the novel coronavirus in China, which scarcely mentioned the disease, and Chinese social media, which was aflame with rumors and anecdotes. The National Security Council addresses global developments and offers the President options for responding. Because of heroic efforts on the part of public-health officials-and because sars spread slowly-it was contained eight months after it emerged. It ultimately reached some thirty countries. By then, sars was spreading to Hong Kong, Hanoi, Singapore, Taiwan, Manila, Ulaanbaatar, Toronto, and San Francisco. Authorities at the World Health Organization were eventually allowed to visit Beijing hospitals, but infected patients were reportedly loaded into ambulances or checked into hotels until the inspectors left the country.
The Chinese hid the news, and, when rumors arose, authorities minimized the severity of the disease, though the fatality rate was approximately ten per cent. In a very noisy Administration, he had quietly become one of the most influential people shaping American foreign policy.Īt the Journal, Pottinger had covered the 2003 sars outbreak. In September, 2019, Trump appointed him deputy national-security adviser. Scandal removed Flynn from his job almost overnight, but Pottinger stayed, serving five subsequent national-security chiefs. When Trump named Flynn his national-security adviser, Flynn chose Pottinger as the Asia director. In Afghanistan, he co-wrote an influential paper with Lieutenant General Michael Flynn on improving military intelligence. He left journalism at the age of thirty-two and joined the Marines, a decision that confounded everyone who knew him. Fluent in Mandarin, he spent seven years in China, reporting for Reuters and the Wall Street Journal. He is one of the few survivors of Donald Trump’s White House, perhaps because he is hard to categorize. We didn’t appreciate that until late February.” The first mistake had been made, and the second was soon to happen. “You’re going to be missing fifty per cent of the cases. “That whole idea that you were going to diagnose cases based on symptoms, isolate them, and contact-trace around them was not going to work,” Redfield told me recently. The virus in Wuhan turned out to be far more infectious, and it spread largely by asymptomatic transmission. The new pathogen was a coronavirus, and as such it was thought to be only modestly contagious, like its cousin the SARS virus. specialists visited China in early January, they would have learned exactly what the world was facing. Certainly, Redfield didn’t know that the virus was already present in California, Oregon, and Washington, and would be spreading in Massachusetts, Wisconsin, Iowa, Connecticut, Michigan, and Rhode Island within the next two weeks-well before America’s first official case was detected. Perhaps Gao had just been made aware that the virus had been circulating in China at least since November. Lawrence Wright on how the pandemic response went wrong.
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