Peter Navarro Demanded 60 Minutes Prove They Covered Pandemic Preparedness Before Trump — So They Did

Peter Navarro suggested in a heated interview that 60 Minutes never covered pandemic preparation efforts from the presidencies before Donald Trump, prompting an instant fact check from CBS News.

Bill Whitaker interviewed the White House trade adviser for Sunday night’s episode of 60 Minutes, and asked why the Trump administration didn’t anticipate the Covid-19 pandemic despite early warnings.

“I don’t know what you mean. It’s like if an intelligence agency said a global pandemic could happen, right? I mean, I’m sure they’ve been saying that for decades and nobody took them seriously,” said Navarro. “This was the 500-year flood. This hasn’t happened since 1917. You can line up every president since then and say, ‘Why didn’t you think this could happen again,’ but that’s not productive right now.”

Navarro then issued a challenge to CBS:

“Show me the 60 Minutes episode a year ago, two years ago or during the Obama administration, during the Bush administration, that said, ‘Hey a global pandemic’s coming, you’ve got to do XYZ and by the way we would shut down the entire global economy to fight it. Show me that episode, then you’ll have some credence in terms of attacking the Trump administration for not being prepared.”

“I guarantee you we did,” Whitaker retorted.

From there, 60 Minutes aired clips from their past coverage on how governments contended with the swine flu in 2009 and the avian flu of 2005. The footage from 2005 included an interview with Dr. Anthony Fauci, currently the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, who warned that “right now, if we had an explosion of an H5N1, we would not be prepared for that.”

Watch above, via CBS.

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