Well, if such "product" existed, Pentagon head and former Raytheon lobbyist Mark Esper would be very much in the loop. He was duly questioned about it by ABC's George Stephanopoulos.
Question: "Did the Pentagon receive an intelligence assessment on COVID in China last November from the National Center for Medical Intelligence of DIA?"
Esper: "Oh, I can't recall, George," (") "But, we have many people who watch this closely."
Question: "This assessment was done in November, and it was briefed to the NSC in early December to assess the impact on military readiness, which, of course, would make it important to you, and the possible spread in the United States. So, you would have known if there was a brief to the National Security Council in December, wouldn't you?"
Esper: "Yes (") "I'm not aware of that."
So "no such product exists" then? Is it a fake? Is it a Deep State/CIA concoction to trap Trump? Or are the usual suspects lying, trademark CIA style?
Let's review some essential background. On November 12, a married couple from Inner Mongolia was admitted to a Beijing hospital, seeking treatment for pneumonic plague.
The Chinese CDC, on Weibo - the Chinese Twitter - told public opinion that the chances of this being a new plague were "extremely low." The couple was quarantined.
Four days later, a third case of pneumonic plague was identified: a man also from Inner Mongolia, not related to the couple. Twenty-eight people who were in close contact with the man were quarantined. None had plague symptoms. Pneumonic plague has symptoms of respiratory failure similar to pneumonia.
Even though the CDC repeated, "there is no need to worry about the risk of infection", of course there was plenty of skepticism. The CDC may have publicly confirmed on November 12 these cases of pneumonic plague. But then Li Jifeng, a doctor at Chaoyang Hospital where the trio from Inner Mongolia was receiving treatment, published, privately, on WeChat, that they were first transported to Beijing actually on November 3.
The key point of Li Jinfeng's post - later removed by censors - was when she wrote, "I am very familiar with diagnosing and treating the majority of respiratory diseases (") But this time, I kept on looking but could not figure out what pathogen caused the pneumonia. I only thought it was a rare condition and did not get much information other than the patients' history."
Even if that was the case, the key point is that the three Inner Mongolian cases seem to have been caused by a detectable bacteria. Covid-19 is caused by the Sars-Cov-2 virus, not a bacteria. The first Sars-Covid-2 case was only detected in Wuhan in mid to late December. And it was only last month that Chinese scientists were able to positively trace back the first real case of Sars-Cov-2 to November 17 - a few days after the Inner Mongolian trio.
Knowing exactly where to look
It's out of the question that U.S. intel, in this case the NCMI, was unaware of these developments in China, considering CIA spying and the fact these discussions were in the open on Weibo and WeChat. So if the NCMI "product" is not a fake and really exists, it only found evidence, still in November, of some vague instances of pneumonic plague.
Thus the warning - to the DIA, the Pentagon, the National Security Council, and even the White House - was about that. It could not possibly have been about coronavirus.
The burning question is inevitable: how could the NCMI possibly know all about a viral pandemic, still in November, when Chinese doctors positively identified the first cases of a new type of pneumonia only on December 26?
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