White House adviser Peter Navarro says medical experts are 'tone deaf' over coronavirus lockdown and warns extended economic closure could cause 'very significant losses of life'
- Peter Navarro warned of 'very significant losses of life' if lockdowns extended
- White House trade adviser accused medical experts of ignoring economic risks
- He said that there was 'very real mortal dangers' with closing the economy
- It emerged Navarro privately warned pandemic could cost many American lives
- Memos by Navarro in late January said trillions of dollars could be wiped off the economy while at the same time telling the public it had 'nothing to worry about'
- Learn more about how to help people impacted by COVID
President Trump's trade adviser has described medical experts as 'tone deaf' for pushing for extending the coronavirus lockdown and warned the economic fallout could cost even more lives.
Peter Navarro accused health advisers of ignoring the potential long-term consequences for the public's health by extending the national shutdown.
Navarro was one of the first of Trump's advisers to warn about the economic cost of efforts to slow the spread of the virus by imposing restrictions on mass gatherings and shuttering non-essential businesses.
He has clashed with Dr Anthony Fauci, the federal government's top infectious disease expert, who has warned against easing the lockdowns too soon and causing a second wave of the virus.
Last week it emerged Navarro privately warned that a pandemic could cost hundreds of thousands of American lives and wipe trillions of dollars off the economy while at the same time telling the public that it had 'nothing to worry about'.
White House trade adviser Peter Navarro, who is now serving as national defense production act policy coordinator, speaking about the coronavirus last week
National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Director Dr Anthony Fauci at a White House briefing yesterday. Navarro has clashed with Fauci over the easing of the lockdowns
He wrote two memos in late January and late February to his White House colleagues expressing alarm over the prospect of a pandemic.
These memos came at a time when Trump was actively playing down the threat of the coronavirus.
White House economic advisers have clashed in recent weeks with health experts over how to balance containing the virus without crashing the economy.
Navarro has now warned of 'very significant losses of life' if there were extended economic shutdowns.
He told The New York Times on Monday: 'It's disappointing that so many of the medical experts and pundits pontificating in the press appear tone deaf to the very significant losses of life and blows to American families that may result from an extended economic shutdown.
'Instead, they piously preen on their soap boxes speaking only half of the medical truth without reference or regard for the other half of the equation, which is the very real mortal dangers associated with the closure of the economy for an extended period.'
President Trump speaking at the Coronavirus Task Force press briefing at the White House in Washington yesterday. He originally hoped to restart the economy by Easter but now wants at least a partial reopening by the end of the month
Navarro, who is known to a trade protectionist, made headlines last week when it was revealed by the Times he wrote a memo to the White House warning the coronavirus could become a 'full-blown pandemic, imperiling the lives of millions of Americans'.
The memo came at a time when Trump was actively playing down the threat of the coronavirus.
The January memo marks the earliest known high-alert to circulate within the West Wing as officials planned their first substantive steps to confront the disease that had already spiraled out of control in China.
The second memo, dated February 23, was much more dire. It warned that up to 2 million Americans could die and trillions of dollars would be lost because of the virus.
Navarro also warned the US economy faced a 'China shock' worse than at the start of the century when the Communist regime joined the World Trade Organization and a link was made between a rise in Chinese exports and decreasing American manufacturing jobs.
Medical personnel moving a deceased patient to a refrigerated truck serving as make shift morgues at Brooklyn Hospital
A police line blocking entrance into Navy Pier in Chicago, Illinois, as lockdowns were imposed across many areas of the US
He told the Times: 'The unfair China trade shock that hit so many of America's communities in the 2000s not only destroyed over five million manufacturing jobs and 70,000 factories; it killed tens of thousands of Americans.
'As numerous academic studies have documented, economic shocks like China's trade shock can increase mortality rates associated with suicide, drug overdoses, alcohol poisoning, liver disease, lung cancer, poor diet and cigarettes...while destroying families through higher rates of single-parent households, child poverty, and divorce and lower rates of fertility and marriage.'
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Many medical experts in the government, including Dr. Anthony Fauci and Dr. Deborah Birx, have cautioned that easing up on social distancing too soon could lead a new wave of the disease that would require shuttering the economy again, with disastrous results.
A team, expected to be formally announced as early as Tuesday, has already begun meeting behind closed doors in the West Wing to tackle how to begin reopening the American economy.
The council, which is not expected to include health officials, could bring to the forefront the push-pull tensions within the White House between economists and public health officials over how quickly to reopen the economy vs. proceeding cautiously to ensure the virus doesn't spike again.
A man pushing a cart of boxes through the normally bustling intersection of Eldridge Street and Division Street of New York's Chinatown on Monday
With the country barreling toward a likely recession ahead of November's election, Trump is eager to spur an economic revival, hoping to steady financial markets and restore some of the 16 million jobs already lost due to the pandemic.
He originally hoped to have the country stirring again by Easter but now wants at least a partial reopening by the end of the month.
Governors on both coasts of the US announced on Monday that they would join forces to come up with a coordinated reopening at some point, setting the stage for a potential conflict with Trump, who asserted that he is the ultimate decision-maker for determining how and when to reopen.
In the US, about half of the more than 22,000 deaths reported are in the New York metropolitan area.
Among those expected to be part of the new team: Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin, Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross, Housing and Urban Development Secretary Ben Carson and White House economic advisers, past and present, Kevin Hassett and Larry Kudlow. New White House chief of staff Mark Meadows is expected to chair the effort.
MEET 'RON' NAVARRO, THE ECONOMIST FOUND ON AMAZON BY JARED - AND WHO HAD A FAKE CHARACTER IN HIS BOOKS
Peter Navarro is, like many of Donald Trump's advisers, not from conventional government fields. But he may be the only one found by Jared Kushner when the-then candidate's son-in-law was browsing Amazon.
Navarro had a long-time career as a minor Californian academic at U.C. Davis with a string of books to his name, many attacking China's role in the world economy.
He was a notably liberal Democrat, running five times for offices including mayor of San Diego, and losing each time.
At the same time he became increasingly hawkish on China, in first academic papers, then in books.
But in 2011 his Death by China book was made into a movie voiced by Martin Sheen, and it changed his political positioning, moving him into the Tea Party sphere of anti-free traders who were then on the very fringes of Republican thought.
Perhaps he did not mention his previous support for wind energy, low-energy lightbulbs and carbon taxes.
But five years later his new position in the fringe-conservative world was to prove an advantage.
Man in the middle: Trade adviser Peter Navarro, who Jared Kushner found on Amazon, has confronted Dr. Tony Fauci, the nation's leading epidemiologist, on the use of a drug pushed by Donald Trump to 'cure' coronavirus
As the Trump campaign looked to find people who backed the president's 'America First' agenda, Kushner was browsing Amazon when he stumbled across the book Death by China.
In its author Kushner found a man happy to back the Trump agenda, and talk it up in aggressive terms on television.
Navarro had espoused isolationism, framing trade as a national security issue and simply leaving NAFTA for some years, although it was a re-framing of his academic career (which also included courses on person finances); the PhD he boasted about in the wake of his row with Dr. Tony Fauci was in fact about energy regulation.
He went into battle for Trump, whom he is not known to have met in any form before the campaign, writing an 'economic analysis' with Wilbur Ross - now the commerce secretary and a long-time Wall Street investor with bogus claims to be a billionaire - in favor of Trump's agenda in the weeks before the 2016 election.
He accused opponents who called it 'an immediate an unmitigated disaster' and 'phony numbers' of simply being opposed to Trump.
Entering government as a trade advisor - a position not subject to Senate confirmation - he has proven a reliable, if thin-skinned, warrior for Trump on television.
In particular he has spoken up for tariffs, denying repeatedly that they are bad for the U.S. economy, and trying to offer cover to the president's claim that they are not paid by U.S. purchasers but by foreign importers, which is derided as untrue by economists.
Affable on air if difficult to pin down and prone to filibustering, there have been whispers of clashes off-air over questions he dislikes.
But his newly-high profile earned him the sort of scrutiny his books had not gained before.
Curiously, an Australian academic discovered, five of them included a character who was reliably anti-Chinese: Ron Vara.
'You've got to be nuts to eat Chinese food,' said 'Ron,' in one of his appearances, setting a broadly anti-Chinese tone. 'Ron' was a Gulf War veteran turned businessman in China.
Strangely, there was no real 'Ron Vara'; in fact it was an anagram of Peter Navarro's surname.
The views were same, but the military service was not: Navarro, now 70, was not drafted and appears to have benefited from college deferrals; after graduating he joined the Peace Corps and was a member when the draft for Vietnam was abolished.
Navarro tried to laugh off his fake character as a 'literary device' and a 'joke' despite his books not being fiction, and compared himself to Alfred Hitchcock making cameos in his own movies.
Death in China's publisher had to add a note to future editions that it included a fake character; a co-author of one book said he had no idea that Navarro had used such a device.
Amazingly, 'Ron' made a re-appearance in a memo sent round Washington from his 'own' email address late last year, raising questions over whether his 'thoughts' were subject to records acts and freedom of information laws.
Navarro has recently gained a greater spotlight through a slightly uncertain role co-ordinating supplies of vital medical equipment - a role he appears to share with Kushner and possibly a three-star Navy admiral - at the same time as pushing for legislation to force manufacturing of such equipment in the U.S.
Never shy to praise his boss, he has substituted 'Trump time' for the plain English of 'quickly,' and repeatedly blamed the Obama administration for the lack of equipment, even though the Trump administration has been in power three years.
He has used a string of TV appearances to boast of 'successes' in tackling the pandemic, but is not in fact a member of the coronavirus task force, although he has increasingly appeared at their meetings - which was where he tried to confront Dr. Fauci over hydroxychloroquine.
That culminated in his boast about his PhD which apparently qualified him to 'look at statistics' on medicine, and to claim 'doctors disagree all the time.'
Navarro, whose father was a jazz musician, married architect Leslie LeBon in 2001, and taught a course with his stepson Alex on personal finance. The couple, who shared a $3 million home in Laguna Beach divorced last year.
