WASHINGTON — The House Intelligence Committee voted Thursday to create a new office — and new authorities — designed to push U.S. intelligence agencies to provide earlier warnings about disease outbreaks and pandemics.
A provision inserted by committee chairman Rep. Adam Schiff, D.-Calif., into the bipartisan annual intelligence authorization bill — which was voted out of committee during a classified session late Thursday afternoon and is likely to become law — creates new authorities designed to counter foreign biological threats, a committee official tells NBC News.
The legislation, if signed by President Joe Biden, would change the name of the National Counterproliferation Center — a department of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence that focuses on containing the spread of nuclear, biological and chemical weapons — to the National Counterproliferation and Biosecurity Center, reflecting its new responsibility of focusing on disease threats.
The official added that the bill’s classified annex includes several provisions designed to boost pandemic preparedness and global health security.
May 25, 202104:16
The new provisions were drafted based on the results of a mostly classified so-called “deep dive” by the House Intelligence Committee into how the spies dealt with the Covid pandemic, and whether there is more the CIA and other agencies should be doing to collect medical intelligence, Congressional officials said. The review concluded that the spy agencies should play a more prominent role in gathering information that could help policy-makers have more visibility in the early days of a health crisis.
Intelligence gathering is viewed as especially important if the pandemic arises in an authoritarian country such as China, which has not been transparent about disease outbreaks. U.S. officials and outside experts say the Chinese government initially covered up the extent to which Covid was transmissible among humans. But reports have since emerged showing that the truth was circulating in message traffic among Chinese scientists — emails and other communications that were not necessarily a focus of American intelligence gathering.
President Biden signaled his intent to focus the spy agencies on pandemics during July remarks at the ODNI, when he noted that more people have died in the U.S. from Covid “than in every single major war we fought combined.”
“There’s a lot of research going on,” he added. “You’re going to have to increase your ranks with people with significant scientific capacity relative to pathogens.”
Among those calling for the spies to do more on pandemics has been former FDA Commissioner Scott Gottlieb, who says the impact of Covid could have been mitigated early if the U.S. had better intelligence on what the Chinese knew.
“I think going forward we’re not going to just be able to depend on countries voluntarily sharing information,” Gottlieb said on CNBC earlier this month. “We’re going to have to go in and have the capacity to collect it and to monitor for these things, and that means getting our foreign intelligence services much more engaged in the public health mission globally.”
Writing in the Washington Post, Gottlieb said that the U.S. can’t rely only on the Centers for Disease Control and other public health agencies to gather information as a pandemic is emerging, he said.
“The CDC has a retrospective mindset, looking backward to do careful analysis of known contagions,” he wrote. “It isn’t in the businesses of gathering and sharing real-time, partial data to inform active decision-making.”
When a fog of conflicting signals began to emerge from China in early 2020, the U.S. needed “something akin to a Joint Special Operations Command for generating actionable information, analysis and coordination,” he wrote. “Instead, what we had, in the CDC, was an agency that operated like an academic department of public health.”
As NBC News has reported, a little-known department of the Defense Intelligence Agency, the National Center for Medical Intelligence, is focused on gathering information about disease outbreaks.
In November 2020, months before the full impact of Covid was understood, that and other U.S. spy agencies collected raw intelligence hinting at a public health crisis in Wuhan, China, NBC News has reported. But the information was not viewed inside the government as the first warning signs of an impending global pandemic.
Current and former intelligence officials tell NBC News not everyone at the CIA and other spy agencies is eager to take on the pandemic warning mission. House investigators encountered some “cultural resistance” as they inquired about the issue over the last year and determined that the spy agencies have done very little on their own to boost their capabilities to collect medical intelligence, three sources familiar the matter told NBC News.
Gottlieb wrote that in 2014, the Obama administration developed a Global Health Security Agenda that deliberately put the words “health” and “security” together.
“This move sparked controversy among both camps, with each worried that mission creep would degrade their core functions,” he wrote.
The CDC did not respond to a request for comment and the ODNI had no immediate comment.
Source: | This article originally belongs to Nbcnews.com
