Report: Israel failed to act on coronavirus in November

The U.S. government was alerted to the coronavirus threat in mid-November and shared the information with Israel, according to the report.

By Aaron Sull, World Israel News

Israel’s Health Ministry failed to act on the coronavirus threat months before it reached its shores, reports Israel’s Channel 12 News.

According to the report, the U.S. government was alerted to the coronavirus threat in mid-November 2019 and shared the information with Israel.

The IDF discussed what impact this “unknown disease” would have on the country, and the information was passed onto the Health Ministry but “nothing was done,” the report said.

How much the U.S. actually knew about the coronavirus before it became a pandemic was questioned by ABC News last week.

Last November, the U.S. National Center for Medical Intelligence (NCMI) prepared an intelligence report warning of the virus’s dangers, two unnamed officials familiar with the document’s contents said, as quoted by ABC News.

The U.S. government knew “as far back as late November” that the contagion was “sweeping through China’s Wuhan region” and “posing a threat to the population,” the sources said.

Col. R. Shane Day, director of the NCMI, denied that such a report ever existed in his department.

“In the interest of transparency during this current public health crisis, we can confirm that media reporting about the existence of a National Center for Medical Intelligence Coronavirus-related assessment in November of 2019 is not correct,” Day said a few hours after the scandalous report broke.

“No such NCMI product exists,” he said.

On April 9, John Hyten, vice-chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General, issued a similar statement.

“I can tell you that we went back and did a deep dive into everything we could find,” Hyten said.

“We went back and looked at everything in November and December. The first indications we had were reports out of China in late December that were in the public forum. And the first intel reports I saw were in January,” he added.

coronavirusUS-Israel relations