The Premonition: A Pandemic Story, Lewis - B

                     In 2019, the Economist and Johns Hopkins University partnered on the creation of Global Health Security Index. The US was ranked number one in its ability to manage a health crisis. As it turned out, with 4% of the world's population, we suffered 20% of the world's fatalities during the pandemic. This is part of the story of our underperformance.

                     The United States began to plan for a deadly pandemic in 2005, in response to concerns raised by Pres. Bush after he read a book about the 1919 Spanish Flu. The task was assigned to the Department of Homeland Security (DHS).  There were very few people in or out of government focused on pandemic prevention, and those who were planned on stopping disease from coming into the country. The few who truly understood the issue knew that the social transmission of illnesses was the real problem.  Containment needed to be the plan.

                   On January 24, 2020, the first American, someone who had just returned from Wuhan, was diagnosed with Covid. A loose knit group of  physicians and scientists (they called themselves the Wolverines*) who had studied this type of outbreak concluded that the US could be facing a million deaths if their back of the envelope calculations were correct. The CDC was downplaying the risk. This handful of professionals were the only informed people truly frightened. The Wolverines, some of whom had worked in the Bush and Obama administrations, had no access to power in Trump's Washington and could not pass on their concerns and recommendations to anyone. Soon, the government began to pay some attention to them. There was no testing ability outside of the CDC's main office, and the CDC didn't seem to think front line testing was important. Only in California, because of Charity Dean, the number two in the Department of Health, was there any response to the pandemic. Gov. Newsom ordered a stay at home directive in mid-March. Joe Derisi, who ran a search lab set up by the Zuckerberg's built the first test in a matter of days. In Washington, the president told the states they were on their own. By the summer, California was leading the country in Covid testing.

                 The entity that should have prepared the US for a pandemic, and then managed our response, was the Centers For Disease Control. They, of course, did not. The reason is that decades earlier, the director who insisted on the Swine Flu vaccinations, which caused a number of deaths, was fired after there was no pandemic. The directorship became a political appointment and the CDC became risk averse and lost its way. 

* Carter Mecher (VA), Charity Dean (Calif. Dept. of Health), Duane Caneva (DHS), Richard Hatchett (Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority), James Lawler ( US Navy), Michael Callahan ( Mass. General), Joseph Derisi (Chan Zuckerberg Biohub) - partial listing.