US researchers at the WHO told Trump administration about coronavirus in 2019, report says

• Americans working at the World Health Organization (WHO) warned the federal government about the coronavirus outbreak late last year, the Washington Post reported on Monday.
• More than a dozen doctors, researchers, and health experts sounded the alarm for the Trump administration, according to anonymous officials.
• Some of those workers were employees of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, temporarily stationed at the WHO, a spokesperson for the Department of Health and Human Services told the Post.
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Americans working at the World Health Organization warned the federal government about the novel coronavirus outbreak late last year as the outbreak spread in real-time.

More than 12 doctors, researchers, and health experts told President Donald Trump's administration that a viral outbreak had been discovered late last year in Wuhan, China, the Washington Post reported on Monday, citing anonymous officials.

"Many" of the Americans working at the WHO were employees of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which regularly sends employees on rotation to the WHO's headquarters in Geneva, Switzerland.

The Post did not say when the workers warned the administration about the virus.

In January, 16 CDC employees were stationed in Geneva, according to Caitlin B. Oakley, a spokesperson for the Department of Health and Human Services.

They "were working on a variety of programs, including COVID-19 and Ebola," Oakley told the Post. She tried to reject implications from the Post's reporting, saying that the workers were not "decision-makers."

Trump has repeatedly claimed that the WHO, an arm of the United Nations has a pro-China bias in an attempt to shift the focus away from the administration's bungled response to the outbreak. He has called the UN agency "China-centric."

Dr. David Nabarro, a special envoy to the WHO, rejected Trump's claims outright during an interview with NBC's "Meet the Press" in mid-April.

He said the Chinese government invited a diverse team of fact-finders to the country in mid-February.

"There were no restrictions on what that team investigated," Nabarro said. "It included American experts as well as experts from others in the world."

"We need a strong WHO, a trusted WHO. And we hope all leaders will continue to work with us in that way," he said.

Nabarro said though there could be some "examinations afterwards" into the organization's overall response, leaders and public health officials across the world need to move forward as a united front with the given information.

"We have been given access to the information we requested. And so therefore, I don't like, at any time, to say we don't believe," he added. "We believe what we've got. We work with what we've got. That's how we operate in the World Health Organization."

Previous reports describe warnings to Trump's administration going unheeded

The Post's is the latest report to find that the Trump administration knew about the threat of the coronavirus.

US intelligence officials were aware of the novel coronavirus outbreak in China as early as November, according to sources familiar with a secret report released that month by the military's National Center for Medical Intelligence (NCMI), an arm of the Pentagon's Defense Intelligence Agency.

Four sources told ABC News that US intelligence circles knew of the looming pandemic; two officials who spoke with ABC News saw the report, which warned that a viral outbreak could harm US military personnel in Asia.

"Analysts concluded it could be a cataclysmic event," one person said of the NCMI report, which included intercepted wire and computer messages, and satellite images. "It was then briefed multiple times to" the White House, the Defense Intelligence Agency, and the Pentagon's Joint Staff, according to the ABC News report.

In addition to the NCMI report, the Pentagon warned of a potential viral outbreak in 2017.

"The most likely and significant threat is a novel respiratory disease, particularly a novel influenza disease," said an internal Pentagon report that year, which was published on April 1 by The Nation magazine. "Coronavirus infections [are] common around the world," it added.