UKC

Building on this recent post:

https://www.ukclimbing.com/forums/off_belay/are_any_of_these_facts_disputab...

which largely focuses on UK events and actions in the build-up to the pandemic.

There was no reference to Intelligence activity in this timeline - were they on strike ? Apparently not. Britain - as NATO - and also as member of The Five Eyes countries was informed of the virus outbreak. Neither the USA, NATO nor Israel took much notice of this 'cataclysmic event' ! What is astonishing is the date this took place - long before the WHO declaration.

So here is that NCMI report in the context of Ciro's post -

Nov, 2nd week 2019: NCMI report warns of 'cataclysmic' virus outbreak

etc

April 8th: ABC News names the NCMI report dating to early Nov

April 17th: NCMI does U-turn on existence of named report

// "Analysts concluded it could be a cataclysmic event," one of the sources said of the NCMI’s report. "It was then briefed multiple times to" the Defense Intelligence Agency, the Pentagon’s Joint Staff and the White House. //

https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/intelligence-report-warned-coronavirus-cris...

// The Pentagon’s National Center for Medical Intelligence (NCMI) circulates a report identifying a contagion sweeping through Wuhan, China. NCMI bases its report on wire intercepts, computer intercepts, and satellite images. “Analysts concluded it could be a cataclysmic event,” a source tells ABC News (in April 2020). //

https://www.justsecurity.org/69650/timeline-of-the-coronavirus-pandemic-and...

// US intelligence informed the Trump administration, “which did not deem it of interest,” but the report said the Americans also decided to update two allies with the classified document: NATO and Israel, specifically the IDF. //

https://www.timesofisrael.com/us-alerted-israel-nato-to-disease-outbreak-in...

// According to the ABC report, the American intelligence analysts quickly concluded that what they were seeing was developing into a "cataclysmic event", and duly reported this to their superiors.

The Pentagon hurried to deny this news story, claiming that no such "product or assessment" existed during the month of November. Yet nobody in Washington now bothers to deny persistent and by now multiple claims that the US intelligence community knew about a Chinese health emergency around Wuhan by mid-December, and that the US President himself was briefed about it at the beginning of January.

Other members in the Five Eyes structure are likely to have either acquired or shared the same information within the same timeframe. //

https://www.straitstimes.com/opinion/coronavirus-outbreak-worst-intelligenc...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pa5cRIYZv-M&list=RDPa5cRIYZv-M&star...

Have you actually read the Eyal article you link at the bottom? He explains pretty clearly how even if the NCMI did pick up on something, why "Washington" took no notice of it. That's how "intelligence product" works. Eyal knows his stuff, he explains I think pretty clearly that intelligence agencies are structurally not able to really understand public health information. I feels like you are looking for some conspiracy here, but surely it just shows how governments aren't very flexible or responsive?

The Israeli article is just repeating and Israeli TV station's report so we don't know anything about their sources. This bit: "the report said the Americans also decided to update two allies with the classified document: NATO and Israel, specifically the IDF." sounds really weird. NATO isn't one ally, it's 30 members. Maybe it's a journo who doesn't know what they are talking about or is making up quotes. The big member states don't share anything sensitive through "NATO" because lots of the members are very leaky towards Moscow! If there really was some some info that something was happening in Wuhan in November and it got blasted out through NATO it would have been considered very unimportant, and probably just of interest to any countries with troops in East Asia where they might get infected.

Would it be fair to say that 'Intelligence' agencies tend to have a fairly well-defined remit, addressing deliberate external attack? And that natural threats are usually expected to be dealt with elsewhere?

In this case, the 'defence'style' intelligence from interception revealed a natural, medical emergency. They possibly only considered it in terms of its effect on China as a military or financial threat. The sensible thing to have done might have been to pass that on to their public health agencies, but, given the source of the intelligence (eavesdropping), may have considered that too risky, at least not without a plausible alternative source of information.

NCMI is specifically medical.

Not one anybody had heard of though!

ABC News 9th April

https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/intelligence-report-warned-coronavirus-cris...

"Concerns about what is now known to be the novel coronavirus pandemic were detailed in a November intelligence report by the military's National Center for Medical Intelligence (NCMI), according to two officials familiar with the document’s contents.

The report was the result of analysis of wire and computer intercepts, coupled with satellite images. It raised alarms because an out-of-control disease would pose a serious threat to U.S. forces in Asia -- forces that depend on the NCMI’s work."

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Center_for_Medical_Intelligence

"NCMI's mission is to monitor, track and assess a full range of global health events that could negatively impact the health of U.S. military and civilian populations"

There must have been some understanding of the need or they would not have set up the medical intelligence organisation.

Not really, there's a lot of fairly esoteric stuff that gets picked up. Even in open source information from news broadcats theres often economic stuff that's of interest as it indicates if a country is stockpiling fuel or other materials to prepare for conflict.

A disease that could potentially lay low the Peoples Liberation Army would be flagged up fairly rapidly.

What interests me here is the collection and dissemination of intelligence - esp in respect of the UK.

It seems that the UK does not have an agency dedicated to medical/health threats - and if we don't have one then this is likely to be true for many other countries. The USA does - in this named body NCMI - and this creates a hierarchy in the flow of such specialist info. In the ABC video interview Trump makes his excuses for ignoring action on the growing pandemic threat (though its not clear at which stage/ date).

If the USA didn't think there was a risk worthy of attention - would reports (really) have been handed on to other member countries (NATO, Five Eyes), and even if they had been, would such smaller member nations act on info that the States judged to be of no concern ?

One hopes the UK gov will be motivated to seek autonomy for the future. 

My reading of this is that the NCMI's remit would here have been force protection of US troops in Japan, S Korea and elsewhere in E Asia. So they hear some stuff that there is a weird pneumonia in China, and they email their "product" (and like Eyal says, they have intelligence analysts not epidemiologists working for them) to some senior-ish medical officer at US pacific fleet or at the big base in Okinawa (USAF? Can't remember.). This could have been not much more than "we read an independent news website reporting some doctors getting sick in this city called Wuhan. We'll let you know if we hear more."

If something really was shared through NATO channels I suspect it would have been very practical kind of information like that. I interviewed a British officer seconded to NATO's intelligence staff in Brussels back in the early 2000s for a report I was writing. He was pretty funny about it being so leaky, but his argument was that it worked quite well for sharing practical information, and normally directly relevant to military forces/MoDs, with (then) 27 members quite quickly. You just wouldn't use it to share anything you didn't want the Russians knowing! We were looking at terrorism post 9/11 and it was clear NATO just wasn't structured to have any role in that, because its mainly police and intelligence agencies not soldiers involved.

Intelligence reports will have been shared across 5-eyes. The fact it has been shared doesn't indicate any particular serious nature of the intel - lots of reports are shared.

All this really demonstrates is the benefit of hindsight. Unfortunately not supplied when intel reports are shared.

I rather thought that they encompassed a much wider range of skills, for example estimating crop yields from spectrographic datasets, with part of their remit being to understand the economic and practical levers being applied to nations on The List.  Pandemics would fall into that category, and I’d have imagined a public health expert is retained in an advisory capacity.  

As you say it seems unlikely they would have wanted to reveal what they potentially knew in November/December lest doing so compromise sources.  There was once a knack to hinting at someone else outside of the business where they might look, so that they discover things themselves.  Or at least that’s the way it works in my perpetually unfinished novel... 

Public Health England presumably, with Porton Down presumably doing a bit more specifically for MoD/military.

The US the CDC which WAS the great public health institute in the world, the model for PH institutes around the world.

This is public health stuff. It should be done by public health institutes staffed by doctors and scientists, not spies.

That's the sort of thing I expected to be in their remit; as Toby says, a force protection issue.

I guess someone in the military has a passing memory of 1918...

I don't really think there has been a need for any sort of covert intelligence gathering function around health. As you point out it is done by doctors and public health organisations around the world.

Maybe there should have been, but it seems that this stuff really should be in th overt arena.

This largely seems to focus on whether more attention should have been paid to this report - which is either a criticism of the content of the report, the circulation of the report, the assessment by the readership, or simply the fact that we now have 20:20 hindsight.

A number of states are rather secretive, though, especially if their defence is potentially affected. The Chinese, after all, did try to suppress the news until it became impossible to do so. I'd bet the North Koreans would too; a major epidemic could leave them vulnerable to attack (if only in their paranoid minds). As might any state that considers itself under constant threat of attack.

But this is internal healthcare - no overseas capability surveying threat from afar.

MI5, MI6, Defence Intelligence and GCHQ more likely - all have greater foreign presence / reach but here the problem - they are all looking for military or political threat

Picking up on what TobyA comments - I can see the possibility for journalistic hype here - in both the Malaysian and Isreal journal - creates a good story to say the report came to UK - and others at this time.

The Trump interview on ABC took place on/close to 8/5/20, and his explanation of decision making assumes the veracity of the report - whenever. Trump argues that he was protecting economy and normal life - in the face of a viral outbreak with 'cataclysmic' potential. It was his decision. Had he at this point consulted with epidimologists / viroligists ? 

Trump's decision in the intel hierarchy could easily have blocked the report going further - OR - of it being taken seriously

Just because it doesn't have a special acronym of its own, doesn't mean it's not happening. There are several classified research places like Porton Down which do work in conjunction with the security services. 

Have a look at wiki for ncmi, it's at the intersection of public health, biowarfare back to cold war and bioterrorism with sources like satellite and intercept they won't want in the public domain.

Foresight in January, not hindsight in May.

https://www.ukclimbing.com/forums/off_belay/novel_coronavirus_--_wuhan_chin...

I am far from a Trump fan, but there are loads of intel reports from all sorts of agencies produced all the time.

It "could" have reached the President, but as I mentioned, it may well not gave been directed anywhere bear him - dependant on its circulation list, its content, the assessment of it by whoever recieved it, etc etc.

I think there is a real danger that because someone in a government agency made an assessment at some point then the conclusion is the government "must"have known about it - and more importantly "should" have acted on it. That's a judgement that is based on hindsight having 20:20 vision.

And if you read that thread, the threat is pretty much dismissed as well.

As I said hindsight is always 20:20 which is why intelligence about really novel things is not always treated as seriously as it might be, especially when set against a tonne of intelligence about "known" risks and threats.

You'd really hope government would be able to work out what is happening better than one person on UKC.

"We work closely with public health professionals in Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland, and internationally." https://www.gov.uk/government/organisations/public-health-england/about

With public health bodies, the NHS, and within academia there are loads of international networks aimed at sharing information. My dad, who is a retired environmental health officer, is still very active in the international federation of environmental health professionals - he was the president for a few years I think, and that organisation is part of the world federation of public health. You have all these networks, up to the WHO, that absolutely do share public health information. The whole "China scandal" that Trump is trying to whip up, and the Australians are getting punished for pushing, is because they claim the Chinese government deliberately suppressed information on covid 19. The expectation is that a country should immediately share any information on a public health threat internationally. The dynamics in China in December look very complicated, particularly with the weird balance between national and local authorities, I don't think it is clear yet whether it was local authorities hiding things from Beijing or Beijing hiding things from the WHO that is really the issue. Trump wants it to be the latter because then he can blame 90,000 dead Americans on China and not on his incompetence and stupidity.

MI5 doesn't - it's domestic. But, yes - they don't really have a role in public health from my understanding.  

Every single person dismissed it. And there's a pretty interesting spread of expertise on UKC.

To be honest, I was abroad immediately prior to lockdown in March, and even then it wasn't being taken particularly seriously. It fell in to that blind spot, where a pandemic was anticipated for years, but we've had a few that haven't ever impacted on the West (insular I know), and it was such a horrifying concept it's easier to file as "unlikely".

Not every one

You mentioned your "colleagues at Imperial" in that post John - was that the group that Ferguson is part of?

Your post reads as VERY prescient now.  

Jon commented 19th Jan so when he linked to Imperial it must have just been report 1 from 17th Jan.

http://www.imperial.ac.uk/mrc-global-infectious-disease-analysis/covid-19/r...

It's very simple - to get several cases outside of China when only a minority travel at any particular time you have to have many more cases (ie potential significant) within Wuhan.

Yes, Neil heads the MRC group there.

For anyone who had thought about what an emerging pandemic would look like in emerging in China (whether it was a SARS-like virus or AH7N9 or other influenza), this looked exactly like that. Even then though it wasn't clear that it wasn't going to become like SARS and get shut down relatively easily, as you can tell from the cautious language I used. I'd expect intelligence agencies would also keep an eye on ProMed. Here's the first mention of the outbreak (I recall thinking at the time.... Hmm....)

https://promedmail.org/promed-post/?id=20191230.6864153

Are they all like pop stars now? With a fan club and hoards of screaming young epidemiologists throwing their statistical modelling codes at them where ever they go? Of course Prof Ferguson has had his obligatory brush with the gutter press as I'm sure any rock and roll group lead singer could have warned him! 

I hope not!

I hope not! Collectively, we've had a lot interest from budding epidemiologists and their Excel models of exponential growth. Julia Gog has summed it up well:

https://www.nature.com/articles/s42254-020-0175-7?fbclid=IwAR0n1y96aRY7RRBK...

I don't understand the technical stuff but I liked the line: "Nor would it help to send your first attempts at running the classic susceptible–infectious–recovered (SIR) epidemic model to your local epidemiologist, who already has an e-mail folder full of ‘my_first_epidemic.xls’ from well-meaning friends".

What it shows is there is no point in having a competent professional organisation staffed with experts when their reports and recommendations are then handed to a complete f*cking moron with no expertise, an obsessive political agenda and narcissistic belief in their own abilities and the superiority of 'common sense' to science.

US, UK, Brazil - three of the top four worst corona virus outbreaks in terms of death rates all led by morons obsessed by other issues.  If Obama (or even Bush senior) was President of the US or Blair (or even Cameron or May) was leading the UK we would not be half as screwed as we are now.  The gravity of the situation was reported to politicians and ignored.  Plans for pandemic disease were made and ignored or not funded.   The initial response was completely bungled and course was not changed fast enough.   They show total inability to do basic project management and continually select inexperienced organisations owned by political supporters to deliver difficult projects on an impossible timescale.

I don't actually disagree with much of your description of our government or the US's. But it is a lot more complicated than who the head of government is, i.e. it isn't solely down to having a moron at the top. France, Italy and Spain aren't far behind us in total deaths and Spain and Italy are still above the UK in deaths per million - so do we say that Macron is 75% moron compared to Johnson's 100 % Moron rating? Sánchez and Conte 80% moron? 

Meanwhile Orban guts the Hungarian constitution whilst no one is looking taking it back to a level of democracy it had in 89 when he was an uppity student getting into trouble for asking for democracy(!). But Hungary has had 500 deaths and has a death rate per million a tenth of the UKs, so is he only 10% moron?

It seems very unlikely that the specialist intelligence product that it seems is what the NCMI produces would end up in a president's briefing regardless of whether he is a moron or not. Bureaucracies just don't work like that.

The UK numbers I have seen are quite a bit worse than the others.  The UK government headline numbers are an intentional distortion, you need to look at excess deaths.    The other intentional distortion they are starting to use is to pretend we are at the same point on the curve as the other countries.  Their epidemics started earlier and were controlled by more effective lockdowns.  People die on the downwards slope from the peak as well and we are not as far along it.  We could easily get to 100k excess deaths.

That's exactly how they work.  A cretin like Trump or Johnson surrounds themselves with cretins like Patel, Raab, Handcock because only cretins agree with their bullsh*t.   Then the cretins they appoint fight with the more competent people in their department and start firing them or threatening them if they aren't obedient to their moronic party line.   The idiocy spreads gradually downwards from the top in organisations like the Home Office because the only people who will work for dickheads like Patel are careerists who are willing to eat sh*t for the money and prestigious job title and morons.   

It's not just one person on UKC, there's a youtube channel (bear with me ) run by a South African expat who lived in China, who basically left because of having state sponsored minders and 'netziens' hassling him, and then his wife (who is a doctor with medical contacts) which was the last straw and led to him saying everything which he'd been holding back while living there.  He shared information about what was happening in Wuhan from unnamed contacts still there, and basically gave advanced warning along the lines of Don't Listen To China. 

He's still sharing interesting and perturbing things now that he's left,  I didn't know that mobile crematoria are now in Wuhan to deal with the deaths there, or that 21 million cell phones have seemingly vanished without trace from China more widely within the covid19 timeline - that their users have too is a peculiar and dark implication which follows along. He's called serpentza on youtube.

Unfortunately, he seems to be right about the current head of the WHO being too closely aligned/sympathetic to China (or the CCP more accurately), too.

Edit: ADVChina, laowhy86, serpentza, and China Uncensored are all worth checking out, the first three are from the same 2 people who have recently left and are now free to spill the beans and have contacts there still who pass information to them which China is keeping under wraps, they run their own channels, and do a collaboration called ADVChina where they talk about different aspects too.  They've both lived in China for more than a decade, and had some narrow squeaks with the CCP, and one of them has in laws with CCP connections too.

People change cellphone contracts all the time.  With a population of a little over a billion you'd expect churn in the tens of millions as people get new phones or change networks.

21 million people dying of Coronavirus almost undetected is simply not credible.   Put it in context: that would be 3x the number of deaths in the Holocaust.

Unfortunately, Trump has massively politicised this virus outbreak.  He is trying to deflect attention and blame onto China and directing US government agencies to follow his line.  He also has the industrial scale social media lying machinery which was used in his election campaign and the Brexit vote.   China is not the only country that can do disinformation.  

If this was true there would have been stories about it months ago.  The fact that they are coming out now, after Trump has started to talk about China strongly suggests that its the US and specifically the Republicans that are behind it.

I would suggest that you watching what they have to say about it on their youtube channels, rather than using Trump smearing the WHO as something to inform your viewpoint, would be a productive and useful thing to do. I rather don't have the time to watch it again myself to relay the information onto here (my short term memory isn't the best due to sketchy sleep patterns - hence much of the detail hasn't stuck). 

Even if you disregard Donald Trump, which is generally a sensible thing to do, the current head of the WHO 'is' giving all appearances of being too aligned to the CCP/China narrative to be independent and objective. 

Edit: The changing of contracts was taken into account IIRC, but the relevance was about the misshandling of covid19 by the CCP and it's openness with the rest of the world, rather than what is likely to happen in other countries. The open food markets and Chinese people prodding and poking vegetables and meat, and the habit of spitting in the street play a role in it's spread in China too, as does the type of housing which is common (shared spaces).

100% this. Much as it would be nice to be able to simply point at the top and blame them, the amount of intelligence assessments, summaries, reports and other paperwork generated by a whole variety of agencies, most of whom are dealing with much more imminent high risk and threat (or so we thought!!!) - mean that what reaches the top will have been filtered through a variety of mechanisms, the vast majority of which will be internal within the agencies, and operate pretty much immune to politics.

Monbiot called them 'the killer clowns'

The point here - is that such leaders become easy to manipulate by shadow controlling interests and easy to blame - taking the spotlight off the those same shadow interests -  and this all compounds with the filtering of intel which reaches them.

Who exactly is in control ? Who is filtering, and who is directing the show ? the same slowing down of intel has happened in the english speaking countries and many others.

Go on then, I'll bite. Who are these shadow controlling interests? Bill Gates again?

ah ha, new band name 'bill gates and the lizard men'

On topic, That some analyst made an assessment from the data they were viewing indicating a major event unfolding if true is pretty amazing understanding of interpretation of evidence. I cannot imagine many people drawing the same conclusion. I can see how, with no context, that it got ignored. It was a brilliant piece of analysis in hindsight. The stuff disaster movie heroes are made from. The geeky analyst that got ignored etc.
 

This disfunction between central and local government in China is it typical? hiding 'failure' from the bosses. I know it happens in companies, and happens in our government, as i have been aware of such event first hand and have had mu concerns fall on deaf ears. this time, with China, we are paying a dreadful price for it.

Bill Gates seems pretty honourable to me on the whole, his money gets invested in decent things.

I have increasing respect for him for the way he acknowledges and learns from mistakes - his and others. (He did this at Microsoft as well, when a team was developing Access they'd spent $150 million and weren't getting anywhere So with some fear and trepidation the team's boss went to Gates and explained the situation. I don't know how the conversation went, but the upshot was that the $150 million was written off, the project was re-started from scratch and in 6 months they had successfully produced the first version.)

I'm also impressed that his wife is a Catholic but is fully paid up to making birth control available to  women worldwide, as the single most effective path out of poverty. It must be odd going to confession each week and owning up to the same sin ... 'Forgive me father, but I've just distributed another million condoms ... again.' 

If you really want to know the dark side for someone use search terms

<name> criticism 

If you suspect them to be a real scoundrel try

<name> hypocrite

and check the Guardian - usually reliable