The National Security Council addresses global developments and offers the President options for responding. Last winter, Pottinger was struck by the disparity between official accounts of the novel coronavirus in China, which scarcely mentioned the disease, and Chinese social media, which was aflame with rumors and anecdotes. Someone posted a photograph of a sign outside a Wuhan hospital saying that the E.R. was closed, because staff were infected. Another report said that crematoriums were overwhelmed.
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Pottinger went home and dug up files from his reporting days, looking for phone numbers of former sources, including Chinese doctors. He then called his brother, Paul, an infectious-disease doctor in Seattle. Paul had been reading about the new virus on Listservs, but had assumed that, like sars, it would be “a flash in the pan.”
If flights from China were halted, Matt asked, could America have more time to prepare?
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For three weeks, the U.S. had been trying unsuccessfully to send medical experts to China. The public-health contingent didn’t want to make decisions about quarantines or travel bans without definitive intelligence, but the Chinese wouldn’t supply it. When Pottinger presented a proposal to curtail travel from China, the economic advisers derided it as overkill.
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Nobody in the White House wore a mask until Pottinger donned one, in mid-March. Entering the West Wing, he felt as if he were wearing a clown nose. People gawked. Trump asked if he was ill. Pottinger replied, “I just don’t want to be a footnote in history—the guy who knocked off a President with covid.”