Trump administration was alerted about COVID-19 concerns in 'real time' by Americans working at WHO: report

According to a report from the Washington Post, Donald Trump administration officials were receiving warnings about the coming coronavirus pandemic early on from Americans working at the World Health Organization.

While the president has tried to put the blame on the COVID-19 health crisis that has shut down the U.S. and caused the economy to crash on the WHO, the report claims there was other information being delivered in "real-time" to U.S. authorities who were late in preparing the country for the coming pandemic.

More than a dozen U.S. researchers, physicians and public health experts, many of them from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, were working full time at the Geneva headquarters of the World Health Organization as the novel coronavirus emerged late last year and transmitted real-time information about its discovery and spread in China to the Trump administration, according to U.S. and international officials," the report states. "A number of CDC staffers are regularly detailed to work at WHO in Geneva as part of a rotation that has operated for years. Senior Trump-appointed health officials also consulted regularly at the highest levels with the WHO as the crisis unfolded, the officials said."

As the Post notes, the new report contradicts complaints from the Trump administration that were misinformed and were caught unaware of the growing crisis.

"The presence of so many U.S. officials undercuts President Trump’s charge that the WHO’s failure to communicate the extent of the threat, born of a desire to protect China, is largely responsible for the rapid spread of the virus in the United States," the Post reports.

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