The Republican head of the Senate Intelligence Committee dumped stocks and warned donors of a looming disaster in February even as the White House played down the coronavirus threat, United States media has reported.

Senator Richard Burr, who receives almost daily briefings from the US intelligence community on threats to the country, himself wrote on the Fox News website on February 7 that the US government was “better prepared than ever” for Covid-19, assuring Americans that they were well protected.

The reports will likely add fuel to accusations that President Donald Trump and the US leadership knew of the serious threat but delayed action that could have curbed the spread of infections. The US has more than 14,000 cases and 205 deaths.

As Mr Trump repeatedly said the virus would not hit the US hard, on February 13 Mr Burr and his wife suddenly sold off at least $582,000 (about £500,130) and as much as $1.6 million in stocks, according to ProPublica, who cited financial filings.

And two weeks after that, on the same day that Mr Trump was telling the public that the 15 cases reported could be the US peak, the North Carolina senator told a private gathering of wealthy donors that coronavirus was a threat like the 1918 Spanish Flu, which killed tens of millions, according to National Public Radio.

NPR obtained a recording in which Mr Burr told the donors that they should curtail their travel, 15 days before Mr Trump shocked the country with a ban on arrivals from Europe.

“There’s one thing that I can tell you about this: It is much more aggressive in its transmission than anything that we have seen in recent history,” he said on the recording.

Russian media have deployed a “significant disinformation campaign” against the West to worsen the impact of the coronavirus, generate panic and sow distrust, according to a European Union document seen by Reuters.

The Kremlin denied the allegations on Wednesday, saying they were unfounded and lacked common sense.

The EU document said the Russian campaign, pushing fake news online in English, Spanish, Italian, German and French, uses contradictory, confusing and malicious reports to make it harder for the EU to communicate its response to the pandemic.

“A significant disinformation campaign by Russian state media and pro-Kremlin outlets regarding COVID-19 is ongoing,” said the nine-page internal document, dated March 16, using the name of the disease that can be caused by the coronavirus.

“The overarching aim of Kremlin disinformation is to aggravate the public health crisis in Western countries…in line with the Kremlin’s broader strategy of attempting to subvert European societies,” the document produced by the EU’s foreign policy arm, the European External Action Service, said.

An EU database has recorded almost 80 cases of disinformation about coronavirus since Jan. 22, it said, noting Russian efforts to amplify Iranian accusations online, cited without evidence, that coronavirus was a U.S. biological weapon.