Just The News: The U.S. biomedical expert entrusted for a decade to build an alarm system for the next pandemic says COVID-19 was detected a year ago in animals but did not trigger the global response needed to protect humanity, providing painful proof the world needs to radically reform the way it fights viruses.

“We need to stop playing victims – stop being reactive and on defense and be on offense and take the fight of global health security to the viruses themselves,” respected virus hunter Dennis Carroll told Just the News.

“We knew a coronavirus was out there a year ago in animals. Now, it is in us. We need to go after them instead of them coming to us,” he said of the viruses jumping from animals to humans.

Carroll is widely credited on both sides of the political aisle for predicting the current pandemic and was entrusted for 15 years with overseeing the U.S. Agency for International Development’s pandemic prediction unit under Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama.

In that role, he envisioned and developed the so-called PREDICT project that identified more than 1,000 viruses that could leap from animals to a human species lacking the antibodies and immune systems to fight them.

That program is still operating because the Trump administration extended it to this September. By 2016, though, Carroll had developed a vision larger than PREDICT and in September 2019 as the PREDICT project was coming to the end of its first decade at USAID, Carroll and his colleagues launched the Global Virome Project.

In a wide-ranging interview, Carroll said the global strategy of just preparing to react to the next inevitable pandemic has failed, as has efforts to permanently close wildlife trading markets in places like China that are potential breeding grounds for pandemics. read more