Via CBC News, a disturbing report: Military medical intelligence warnings gathered dust as public health struggled to define COVID-19. Excerpt:
Public health officials failed to cite early warnings about the threat of COVID-19 gathered through classified military intelligence as the pandemic crisis emerged a year ago, CBC News has learned — an oversight described as a strategic failure by intelligence and public health experts.
For over seven decades, Canada and some of its closest allies have operated a largely secret formal exchange of military medical intelligence. That relationship regularly produces troves of highly detailed data on emerging health threats.
The small, specialized unit within the Canadian military's intelligence branch began producing warnings about COVID-19 in early January of last year — assessments based largely on classified allied intelligence. Those warnings generally were three weeks ahead of other open sources, say defence insiders.
But documents show the Public Health Agency of Canada's (PHAC) COVID-19 rapid risk assessments — which politicians and public servants used to guide their choices in early days of the pandemic — contained no input from the military's warnings, which remain classified.
Three of the five PHAC risk assessments — obtained under access to information law by one of the country's leading intelligence experts and CBC News — show federal health officials relying almost exclusively on assessments from the World Health Organization.
Even those writing the risk assessment reports acknowledged the dearth of intelligence.
Confidence level 'low'
"Due to the limited epidemiologic data from China, and limited virologic information available for the etiologic agent, the confidence level for this assessment is considered as 'low' and the algorithm outputs remain uncertain at this time," said the Feb. 2, 2020 PHAC risk assessment report.
The analysts at PHAC were uncertain because — as the world learned later — China was stonewalling the WHO about the extent of the Wuhan outbreak and assuring international health experts that everything was under control.
Meanwhile, in the military medical community, alarm bells were ringing. In the U.S., the National Center for Medical Intelligence (NCMI), located in Fort Detrick, Maryland, was not only gathering raw intelligence through various classified means — it was producing comprehensive assessments of the trajectory of the virus as of last February.
"This coronavirus pandemic is right in their wheelhouse, which is part of their core mission — to be on the lookout for any early indications of infectious disease," said Dr. Jonathan Clemente, a physician practicing in Charlotte, North Carolina who has researched and written extensively about the history of medical intelligence.
'Strategic surprise'
The original purpose of military medical intelligence among the allies was to assess sanitary and health conditions in the places around the globe where their troops were deployed.
But over the years, Clemente said, the mandate evolved to include "preventing strategic surprise" — such as pandemics and deliberate biological attacks.
"So there's a wide range of reports, from your short-form daily bulletins to long-form assessments," he said.
"It's important to know that this is different from, say, the World Health Organization because the NCMI has access to all-source intelligence, meaning they have access to the most secret levels of intelligence, including clandestine human reporting, satellites, signals intelligence and ... open [source] reporting."
The information gathered through such intelligence channels would be knowledge "that other traditional health care and public health agencies" don't have, he added. It's also the kind of knowledge that would have informed the Canadian military's medical intelligence branch as the pandemic was gathering momentum.
'A terrible failure'
The fact that PHAC didn't track what the military medical intelligence branch was seeing, coupled with changes to the federal government's own Global Pandemic Health Information Network (GPHIN), represent "a terrible failure," said Wesley Wark, a University of Ottawa professor who studies intelligence services and national security. He requested the documents through the access to information law.
