The date this article about the coronavirus was written almost 2 years to the date (Dec. 19, 2017) before the SARS-CoV-2 was reported in China and became a pandemic.

From The New York Times: A Federal Ban on Making Lethal Viruses Is Lifted

“The N.I.H. will create expert panels to assess controversial research into creating pathogens that easily infect humans.”

The US government has lifted a three-year ban on making lethal viruses in the lab, saying the potential benefits of disease preparedness outweigh the risks.
Published: 20 December 2017

Labs will now be able to manufacture strains of influenza, Sars and Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS).

The ban was imposed following safety breaches at federal institutions involving anthrax and avian flu.

Now a scientific review panel will have to green-light each research proposal.

It will only be allowed to go ahead if the panel determines there is no safer way to conduct the research and that the benefits it will provide justify the risk.

Critics say such "gain-of-function" research still risks creating an accidental pandemic.

But supporters of removing the ban say many US states are poorly prepared for an almost-inevitable outbreak of a deadly virus.

"I believe nature is the ultimate bioterrorist and we need to do all we can to stay one step ahead," said Samuel Stanley, chairman of the National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity, which provided guidance on the new policy.

"Basic research on these agents by laboratories that have shown they can do this work safely is key to global security."

The ban was imposed in 2014 after embarrassing safety lapses including:

In addition, there was concern that research into transmissible pathogens, which is published, could be used to deliberately engineer a mutant virus.

Published: Jan 2, 2018 - Cenk Uygur, host of The Young Turks, breaks it down.

In 2018, the Trump administration fired the government’s entire pandemic response chain of command, including the White House management infrastructure.

In the spring of 2018, the White House pushed Congress to cut funding for Obama-era disease security programs, proposing to eliminate $252 million in previously committed resources for rebuilding health systems in Ebola-ravaged Liberia, Sierra Leone, and Guinea.

Other White House efforts included reducing $15 billion in national health spending and cutting the global disease-fighting operational budgets of the CDC, NSC, DHS, and HHS, and the government’s $30 million Complex Crises Fund was eliminated.

Nov. 6, 2019
Chief executives are leaving in record numbers this year, with more than 1,332 stepping aside in the period from January through the end of October, according to new data released on Wednesday. While it's not unusual to see CEOs fleeing in the middle of a recession, it is noteworthy to see such a rash of executive exits amid robust corporate earnings and record stock market highs.

On February 3, 2020, The Trump administration argued for cutting spending for a federal agency at the forefront of the efforts to combat the coronavirus, while also seeking to slow spending in certain parts of the Medicare and Medicaid programs.

They all knew ahead of time Covid-19 was about to hit the US so they changed their investment portfolios to capitalize off of the demise of their fellow Americans.

SARS-CoV-2 did not originate in China but instead spontaneously broke out in various countries around the world at the same time it was breaking out in China.

It was in France and the US before December of 2019.

Covid-19 was already spreading in France in late December 2019, a month before the official first cases in the country," the team at Groupe Hospitalier Paris Seine in Saint-Denis wrote in a study published Sunday in the International Journal of Antimicrobial Agents.

The first official reports of Covid-19 in France were reported on Jan. 24, in two people who had a history of travel to Wuhan, China.

Intensive care specialist Dr. Yves Cohen and his hospital colleagues wrote that they decided to check the records of earlier patients, in case the virus had been spreading undetected.

Researchers in the US have also started finding evidence that the virus was infecting and killing people earlier than the country's first reported cases.

The French team looked at people admitted to the hospital with flu-like illness between December 2 and January 16 who were not ultimately diagnosed with influenza. They tested frozen samples from those patients for coronavirus.

"One sample was positive taken from a 42 year old man born in Algeria, who lived in France for many years, and worked as a fishmonger," the team wrote. "His last trip was in Algeria during August 2019."

The man had not been to China, and one of his children had also been sick, the team reported.

"Identifying the first infected patient is of great epidemiological interest as it changes dramatically our knowledge regarding SARS-COV-2 and its spreading in the country. Moreover, the absence of a link with China and the lack of recent travel suggest that the disease was already spreading among the French population at the end of December, 2019," they wrote.

“The US has added to research from Italy and France that indicates the coronavirus might have been circulating among people in a number of countries before it was identified in China and erupted into a pandemic.

Scientists from the US Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) said on Monday that tests of blood samples taken in the United States from December 13 last year revealed evidence of antibodies for the Covid-19 virus, known as Sars-Cov-2.

The samples were taken more than two weeks before the December 31 official confirmation of the outbreak in the central Chinese city of Wuhan and as much as a month earlier than the first confirmed case of Covid-19 in the US on January 19, according to the CDC report.”

MADRID (Reuters) - Spanish virologists have found traces of the novel coronavirus in a sample of Barcelona waste water collected in March 2019, nine months before the COVID-19 disease was identified in China, the University of Barcelona said on Friday.