Battle Creek Times

When the Trump administration first learned about the COVID-19 threat in January, it began “preparing for the worst,” Assistant to the President Peter Navarro told WJR's "The Frank Beckmann Show."

His comments were in response to a new book by journalist Bob Woodward saying President Donald Trump downplayed the virus to avoid creating a panic.

Behind the scenes, however, the Trump administration was taking COVID-19 very seriously even before they knew how deadly it could be, according to Navarro.

He pointed to Trump’s Jan. 31 decision to ban flights to the U.S. from China.  

“We were beginning already to make sure we had enough PPE (personal protective equipment), the N-95 masks, to bring that domestic production home,” Navarro said on the radio show. “We were working on therapeutics like monoclonal antibodies; we were working on testing capabilities.”

As early as mid-February, the administration “started the efforts for a horse race on vaccine development with the goal of having a vaccine by November,” Navarro told Beckmann.

A late as March, the administration still didn’t know if COVID-19 was similar to the flu or more deadly, said Navarro.

“What the president was doing -- this is the important thing -- was trying to maintain calm among our people, who he loves,” said Navarro. “We were working as quickly as possible, starting Jan. 31, to make sure America was protected against this virus from China. That's the lede that is getting buried in this Woodward book.”

COVID-19 is a “weaponized virus -- I don’t know if it was weaponized by the Chinese or by nature,” Navarro told Beckmann. “It’s weaponized in the sense that is has a very unusual, highly asymptomatic spread. It didn’t die in the summer from heat and humidity like everybody thought. There’s something really, really sinister about this virus from China. But we did not know that in February. We didn’t even know in March. But what we did know was that there was a possibility of danger and we prepared for that.”