It’s a familiar litany by now: As Covid-19 spread, ravaged lives, and upended the global economy over the past two months, President Donald Trump first downplayed the virus—assuring Americans that it was going to go away—then chalked it all up as a complete surprise. On January 22, at the World Economic Forum in Davos, it was all business as usual. He promised CNBC’s Joe Kernan there were no worries about a pandemic: “We have it totally under control. It’s one person coming in from China, and we have it under control. It’s going to be just fine.”

A month later, Trump’s message was the same. “It’s going to disappear,” Trump said of the coronavirus on February 27. “One day—it’s like a miracle—it will disappear.” Then, as it became clear the virus wasn’t going away, Trump has instead tried to avoid blame, arguing that the novel coronavirus pandemic is a black swan, an unimaginable, surprise, out-of-left-field event. “This was unexpected,” he said on March 10. “It hit the world.” On March 16 Trump said, “This came up—it came up so suddenly. Look, he was surprised; we were all surprised.” And on March 24, he told a Fox News town hall, “Nobody ever expected a thing like this.”

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Except it was expected. Over the past quarter century, warnings have been clear and consistent from both US government leaders, scientists, and global health officials: A pandemic was coming—and whenever it arrived, it would be catastrophic to the global economy. In recent years red alerts have come almost monthly—sometimes weekly—and all three of Trump’s predecessors have dedicated significant personal time and public attention to the pandemic threat.

The most recent warning, a bipartisan report by the Center for Strategic and International Studies, cochaired by former US senator Kelly Ayotte, a Republican, and Julie Gerberding, George W. Bush’s one-time director for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, was published on November 18, 2019—one day after we now know that the first case of the novel coronavirus that would be later be named SARS-CoV-2 appeared in China's Hubei Province. That report’s number-one recommendation was to undo the Trump administration’s cuts to pandemic planning: “Restore health security leadership at the White House National Security Council.”

A careful review of past reports, books, planning documents, Congressional hearings, op-eds, speeches, and public testimonies make clear that all the problems of the current Covid-19 crisis were foreseen over the past 15 years, as officials and leaders like Bill Gates warned in increasingly dire terms about the government’s lack of sufficient preparation.

As early as 2005, President Bush said, “Our country has been given fair warning of this danger to our homeland.” Eight years ago, a report by the US Department of Health and Human Services cited the need to develop “social distancing” models to inform how we combat the spread of a pandemic; it also pointed to potentially dangerous shortfalls in ventilator stockpiles and noted that there were local shortages of masks during the H1N1 pandemic, though these were filled by the national stockpile equipment. Repeated public warnings came even from those on the front line of today’s response, including Health and Human Services secretary Alex Azar and Anthony Fauci, the longtime head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.

Despite substantial progress during the Obama administration—which grappled with the H1N1 scare and the 2014 Ebola outbreak and was so concerned about the threat of a pandemic that it even highlighted the threat in a tabletop exercise with incoming officials during the transition—the Trump administration let pandemic planning efforts lapse.

That trend, too, was clear early. As early as seven weeks into the Trump administration, a group of Democratic lawmakers, including Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, were raising concerns that the Trump administration was undermining pandemic preparedness efforts. As she and four other members of Congress wrote then to Health and Human Services secretary Tom Price, “Actions taken by President Trump could also impair our readiness in the face of a public health crisis, such as a flu pandemic.”

The truth is, it isn’t just the Trump administration that failed to sufficiently heed the tsunami of warnings. Leaders in state and local government, industry, and multinational institutions—all of whom share the responsibility to be prepared—were equally on notice that a pandemic was coming. But in the United States, we look to the federal government to lead the efforts on problems too big and too complex for any one jurisdiction or company.

The following oral history of public pandemic warnings has been compiled from government and other official reports, medical journals, videos, books, op-eds, congressional hearings, news articles, statements, and other public records. None of the following quotations are backward-looking “I told you so’s”; all are contemporaneous, forward-looking warnings and predictions. None was classified; all but one was publicly released and available for all to read. The one document not released to the public: A National Security Council pandemic playbook reportedly written by the Obama administration in 2016 and passed off to the Trump administration in 2017.