In late January, President Trump’s economic adviser Peter Navarro warned his White House colleagues the novel coronavirus could take more than half a million American lives and cost close to $6 trillion, according to memos obtained by Axios…
By late February, Navarro was even more alarmed, and he warned his colleagues, in another memo, that up to 2 million Americans could die of the virus.
- Navarro’s grim estimates are set out in two memos — one dated Jan. 29 and addressed to the National Security Council, the other dated Feb. 23 and addressed to the president. The NSC circulated both memos around the White House and multiple agencies.
- In the first memo, which the New York Times was first to report on, Navarro makes his case for “an immediate travel ban on China.”
- The second lays the groundwork for supplemental requests from Congress, with the warning: “This is NOT a time for penny-pinching or horse trading on the Hill.”
Why it matters: The president quickly restricted travel from China, moved to delay re-entry of American travelers who could be infected, and dispatched his team to work with Congress on stimulus funds.
- But Trump was far slower to publicly acknowledge the sort of scenarios Navarro had put in writing.
Read the full story in Axios, including screenshots of key Navarro memos, here: https://www.axios.com/exclusive-navarro-deaths-coronavirus-memos-january-da3f08fb-dce1-4f69-89b5-ea048f8382a9.html
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Peter Navarro memo warned Trump of coronavirus catastrophe in late January (Newsweek)
President Donald Trump’s trade adviser, Peter Navarro, wrote a memo in late January warning of the potential for “a full-blown pandemic” caused by the new coronavirus, “imperiling the lives of millions of Americans,” The New York Times reports…
A second memo in February, published by Axios, predicted a possible “loss of life of as many as 1-2 million souls” in the U.S. from COVID-19.
Navarro also detailed expected needs for personal protective equipment in the second memo, writing: “We can expect to need at least a billion face masks, 200,000 Tyvek suits, and 11,000 ventilator circuits, and 25,000 PAPRs (powered air-purifying respirators….)”
To read the entire article from Newsweek, click https://www.thedailybeast.com/peter-navarro-memo-warned-trump-of-coronavirus-catastrophe-in-late-january
