Trump has described COVID-19 as a problem that “came out of nowhere.” “Nobody would have ever thought a thing like this could have happened,” he said on March 26, as he steered his country to the worst nightmare of the pandemic so far.

That’s a lie. In this audio edition of The Long Version, I talked with Dr. Jonna Mazet, the former global director of the U.S. government project to identify and prevent viruses from jumping into human populations. Trump shuttered that project in September 2019, three months before the virus was first detected in Wuhan, China—by scientists Mazet had been working with until the funding ran out.

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Transcript (automatically generated, may contain errors)

Theme Music

Jonathan Myerson Katz:

Hello, and welcome to The Long Version. A newsletter by me, Jonathan Myerson Katz, which you can find online at Katz dot Substack dot com. That's K A T Z dot substack dot com. I hope everybody is doing well, away from other people to the greatest extent possible. These are frightening times. It is currently April 10th, 2020 and the coronavirus pandemic is raging in the United States of America. The new coronavirus is now the leading cause of death on a daily basis in the United States. The epidemic is worse here than anywhere else in the world. In just the city of New York alone, there have been more deaths than in any other country. And even if you don't buy those numbers, if you think that as is very possible, that China underreported the number of deaths in Wuhan city and Hubei Province you can't deny the fact that in New York there are unclaimed bodies being buried on Hart Island in the Bronx.

Jonathan Myerson Katz:

It's a nightmare. Donald Trump, the president of the United States in case you've somehow forgotten has said a number of times that this came out of nowhere, right? He said that on March 6th, a couple days later on March 19th, he said that this pandemic is something that just surprise the whole world, quote, "If people would've known about it, it could have stopped being in place. Nobody knew there would be a pandemic or an epidemic of this proportion." March 26, just a couple of days ago, he said nobody would have ever thought a thing like this could happen. He's obviously saying that to excuse his action, lack of action that has cost so many lives. But I think it's a statement that a lot of people can probably relate to, right? You know, for most of us, this does seem to have come out of nowhere. [That] it was hard to predict.

Jonathan Myerson Katz:

But he's wrong. There were people who were out there predicting this. There were a lot of people who had devoted their lives to trying to predict the next pandemic and more importantly, stop it or at least stop it from killing as many people as it otherwise could. And a lot of those people worked for the United States government. So I've written in the long version about the decision to shutter the National Security Council's pandemic response team for instance. You have also probably read about the fact that the Obama administration literally handed the Trump administration when it was coming into office in late 2016, early 2017 a playbook that had the word playbook stamped on the front about how to handle, you know, a potential viral pandemic. But the details are even worse than that. This one may blow your mind. It blew my mind. There was a program at USAID, the US Agency for International Development to identify potential viruses that could spread from animal populations into human populations with the explicit goal of preventing a global pandemic.

Jonathan Myerson Katz:

That project worked in about 30 countries around the world, including China and one of its partners where the virologists at the viral lab in Wuhan, the city where the COVID-19 pandemic would eventually start. That project was effectively shuttered by president Donald J Trump's administration in September, 2019. And of course the pandemic erupted in central China in Wuhan three months later. Now, a brief caveat, the PREDICT program was working with the scientists in Wuhan, but they were focusing in Yunan province in Southern China. It was somewhat limited because of a lack of funding under President Obama, but really under the Republican Congress that was in charge of funding it for the last several years. With more funding, it could have done even more than it already did. But of course it was completely unable to do anything once its fieldwork was shuttered in September, 2019.

Jonathan Myerson Katz:

So to get at the bottom of what happened, what might have been, what possibly still could be, I'm pleased and honored to have on the podcast today, dr Jonah Mozet for 10 years, dr Mazet was the global director of the predict project. And she is the executive director of the one health Institute of the university of California Davis. And if you stay tuned until the end of this podcast, I will have a comment from USA ID. Dr [inaudible], welcome to the long version. Thanks for having me. Thanks for being here. I wanted to, there's a lot I would like to talk to you about actually, but I want to start off by asking what was the predict project and what happened to it?

Dr. Jonna Mazet:

Well, the PREDICT project is a 10 year effort funded by us agency for international development where we built a consortium of people from the U S Canada and 35 low and middle income countries around the world to look for identify viruses just like this, SARS-CoV-2 in advance of their spilling over, understand the characteristics that might put us at risk, like what hosts and transmission interfaces. And at the same time we were sort of building what I like to think of as kind of a global immune system by training people in all of these countries to be ready anticipating this event and be able to jump into action.

Jonathan Myerson Katz:

You use the term spillover. What do you mean by that?

Dr. Jonna Mazet:

So spillover is, is what we think of when a a micro organism. We work mostly on viruses. Actually makes the jump from one host to another. And often in the host where it evolved, it won't have caused disease, but when it gets into a naive host, it may be able to cause disease. And so that's the spillover event is what we're after preventing. But even if we can't prevent all of those spillover events, we want systems to be ready and strong to be able to detect them early and control them at their source.

Jonathan Myerson Katz:

So basically in September 20, 19 fieldwork stopped like what, what, what, what exactly happened?

Dr. Jonna Mazet:

Correct. So we, we finish up with the field teams in the countries in September, 2019. So they were no longer you know, out in the field collecting samples from wild animals, people, domestic animals and they were no longer testing in the laboratory.

Jonathan Myerson Katz:

One of the countries that you were working in was China,

Dr. Jonna Mazet:

Correct. And we were working with the Wuhan Institute of Virology. They've been very instrumental in identifying this virus, the SARS-CoV-2. We had been working specifically on coronaviruses and worrying about coronaviruses all over the world. The PREDICT project discovered 160 new coronaviruses during its performance period. We were not working up in Hubei or near Wuhan. We were, we were kind of slated to work in Southeast Asia. So we were working in China, but on the just in Yunan province. So we didn't detect this particular one, but the project in China did detect more than 50 novel coronaviruses. And so, so they were ready at least to detect this one. I think what we've seen around the world is that the, the, the forward thinking side of looking for these viruses and being ready and being able to detect and diagnose them much quicker than, for example, what you saw with SARS, the original SARS proves that this can help. So it was days rather than weeks or months to get to the stage where we could actually do specific diagnostics. But we need to go so much farther because the rest of the systems as far as the healthcare systems policy, everything in most is not where it needed to be.

Jonathan Myerson Katz:

So the, okay, so, so fieldwork stops in September of 2019. At what, what, at what, what's the earliest date that we can say that the novel coronavirus that ended up becoming, you know, SARS-CoV-2 was detected?

Dr. Jonna Mazet:

So certainly right at the end of December, we know it was detected and the information was shared. The the virus itself was probably circulating quite some time for the course of the illness for those that, that were sick, that were identified as early cases for some time before that. But we don't have a definitive date.

Jonathan Myerson Katz:

So I mean, if you had been in place what might have gone differently, do you think it would've been possible that we would have, that you would have found the, the virus in October or November?

Dr. Jonna Mazet:

Well anythings possible, but we weren't working in that region of China.

Jonathan Myerson Katz:

Got it.

Dr. Jonna Mazet:

So unless we had expanded scope and had been working in that region of China, I'm not sure that the predict project itself would have helped with that. But what I'm super proud of is that the predict project, even though the teams weren't funded anymore, did help. Right. Then at the beginning of this whole then epidemic now pandemic did help in I think raising the flag in China, but then also in all of the countries surrounding China and in Africa. Frankly, the, our labs were the initial ones to be ruling out introduced cases before they're even first cases in places like Tanzania.

Jonathan Myerson Katz:

You guys were focused mostly in Yunan province, which borders Vietnam. Correct. and so why, why that province in particular?

Dr. Jonna Mazet:

Hm. So before at the beginning of the project, we used all the best scientific information we could find to target hotspots around the world where the most likely spillover events as we've talked about already could occur. Now they can occur anywhere, but we wanted to, you know, sort of target the resources to the highest likelihood locations. And we had to work with the portfolio of where USA ID wanted to and could make their investments. So when you overlay the scientific map with the geopolitical structure you come up with the portfolio, the best portfolio you can invest in as far as doing this work. And that took us to places with very specific characteristics where there's a lot of fever of unknown origin, where human populations are growing or changing the way they behave and interact with well the earth, but especially wildlife species. And then where there's high biodiversity. So there's a lot sources of viruses that we may not have seen in our evolutionary history.

Jonathan Myerson Katz:

The working theory, I mean, you obviously know much more about this so you can tell me about it. Is that the new coronavirus came from a bat, is that the idea?

Dr. Jonna Mazet:

Correct. Correct. So all of our work we, we certainly discovered coronaviruses in multiple species. And the reason coronavirus was we're sort of on our high risk list in our concerned list is that they seem to be able to be identified often in different species so that that gives us a hint that they're a jumper and this is known for other coronaviruses that were already known as well. So when we started the project, only a handful of coronaviruses primarily human pathogens and pet pathogens were known, but we dramatically expanded that and started to identify the ones that looked like they had multiple hosts that they could infect. So that's one of our high risk factors.

Jonathan Myerson Katz:

Do you wait for the virus to appear in a human or are you just picking, you're just picking up animals randomly and seeing if they're carrying viruses.

Dr. Jonna Mazet:

So just like I mentioned, what kind of, how you pick the countries where you're going to go. That's when we get into the countries. We work with, the ministry of health, ministry of agriculture, ministry of environment. Sometimes there's communication ministry and we get them all together and then we start working on the maps within the country to say where do those same factors I mentioned occur. And then we pick those sites where people are interacting in a either intimate or different way than they've interacted with in the past. So an example is certainly the wildlife farming all the way to wildlife, hunting to market, to restaurants some even live animal restaurants. So that was a certainly a very intimate, if you eat something that's about as much as you can get, right. So especially for the bat. Yeah, unfortunately. But but it's not just those, it's it's other interfaces that you might not think of. People farm, bat guano for example. So they're, they're attracting bats to their property in order to get their poop directly near their crops and put them straight onto the crops that go straight to market. So other things like going into caves that maybe humans have never been in to explore for minerals to make our phones better, faster, smaller. All of these things are high risk interfaces that we've been exploring and working with the communities.

Jonathan Myerson Katz:

In a lot of ways a US foreign policy was built on chasing guano around the world in the 19th century. So you're--you're in a long batshit tradition of U S government investment.

Dr. Jonna Mazet:

Yeah. [Laughs] Anytime to learn to do once it spills over. Now I think that's what we really need to strengthen. We need to keep going with this. We need to identify all the threats, but we also need to have a resilient systems that are ready for these detections hopefully before they sp