Why Wasn’t the US Better Prepared for Coronavirus?

Has anyone contacted you before this or since in particular and asked for your advice as to how they can better prepare, like in terms of like the president? The president hasn't, but I know a number of the people that are working in the White House. And they've contacted you? Oh yeah. Well, you know, I've served roles in the last five presidential administrations. I worked for two Republican governors, two Democratic governors, as you appreciate, one independent wrestler. I worked for two when he was governor, Jesse. And that's right. Yeah. And so, you know, I've never had a partisan, you know, I'm just a private in the public health army. And so I actually serve as a science envoy for this administration in the state department last year, you know, I'm still in my full time job at the university. And so I've never been, I mean, I'm there to give the best advice I can. And so I've talked to a lot of these people there at the CDC, at Health Human Services, et cetera. So yeah, we've given a lot of advice. And do you think there's anything that you could do now that could help them make sure that we don't have these shortages of masks and shortages of medicine and IV bags and something that could be done to, I mean, you obviously, you've laid out all these problems and you laid it out in your book here that people could buy right now. Go pick it up on Amazon, right? Is there an audio version of it as well? There is. All right. Do you read it? The book? Yes. I have. I don't know. I don't read it myself. No, there's actually a really good voice. It's not mine. Oh, it should be you, man. That drives me crazy. Someone else does it. Yeah. No, you know, this is the challenge we have is today in this environment, everything's just in time delivery. I mean, look at when you go online and you whatever place you're ordering from Amazon or wherever, you expect it there the next day. People forget that we don't have that capacity today to suddenly make lots of things. So right now, all the mass manufacturers in North America are working 110% time. But if they were trying to fill all the orders they've gotten just in the last few weeks, would take them years and years with the capacity they have. And you can't go build these new machines to make masks overnight. So this is something that should be set in advance of anything like this, any pandemic happening like long in advance, we should be prepared. You know, think about the issue with defense. You know, we prepare all the time well in advance. We don't build an aircraft carrier at the moment. We think we're going to go to the battle. We look at what all do we need. We don't do that in public health. We've tried. And so, you know, at stockpiling 500 million of these in 95s would have been the difference between night and day. And when you look at the price of one of those versus one airplane, not even close. If you look at the things like that, it's like these medications, I don't think about our own Defense Department employees are at risk of running out of these critical drugs because they get them from China. I mean, what a vulnerability. Yeah. So what we need to do is take a step back after we can start now, but we're not going to fix it now, is to say, what are the key things that we should do vaccines? You know, if we had been serious about this, we might very well have had a coronavirus vaccine that whether it works specifically for this strain, whether it worked for SARS or MERS, but right after SARS happened in 2003, everybody was hot on a new vaccine. And then when it went away, the interest weighed. Is it something like the flu where, you know, sometimes when they come up with a flu vaccine, it doesn't necessarily address the current strain? Yeah, it could be. And that's where a coronavirus family vaccine may not match up right here now, but it could. And the flu one, you've really hit an important point. There's one where, you know, we do have an imperfect vaccine, but it still does a lot of good. You know, 50% of the people are protected. That's a heck of a lot better than zero. If we had a vaccine right now that 50% of the people could be protected against this virus, man, think of all the lives we'd save. So the bottom line message is we can't wait until the crisis to fix these things. You know what? We're at about 0.0001% in public health compared to our Defense Department. And yet look how vulnerable. The bugs. It's not a war. It's not a missile. It's bringing down the world economy right now. It's a darn virus. And so this is where I think, and that's what I tried to say in my book, was all about that. I went into what we needed to do. In fact, I hate it when people come up and say, we're screwed. You know, my whole bottom line is, well, what are you going to do about it then? And that's what I laid out a whole plan in here. Like these vaccines, like the stockpiles of mass. We should have a plan in place already. What are we going to do with our schools when they close? Are we going to really close schools? Let's not try to make this on the fly. I just mentioned, if we close schools, we are going to really hurt some people. And people may die in health care facilities, hospitals, because we don't have enough nurses or health care workers. Why have to make that decision all of a sudden? We could have planned for that a long time ago. And so I think hopefully this is a wake up call, because nobody I think really believed this. I got to tell you, the market today, as you know, on this particular day crashed badly. And I think that up till 10 days ago, the market didn't even think this was a possibility. If you look at it, it was flying high. On Friday, I did a briefing for over 400 major financial investors around the world. And you know how I'm talking to you right now. I'm not trying to be scary. I'm just trying to tell the facts and make sure people understand it. The questions I got from these people almost remind me of a six year old who was afraid to have to go through it on a dark hallway. And I thought, I actually said to friends and colleagues, Friday night I said, you know what, Monday's market's not going to look good. Because I could hear the fear in these people. Well, we shouldn't be there. We should be, what are we going to do? We have a problem. It's like a forest fire, whatever. We got a problem. What are we going to do about it? Financially, how are we going to get through this? Where are we going to go with it? No plans again. It's caught everybody by surprise. You were the one of the few people that wanted to deal with this issue. We set this up several weeks ago. You guys saw it coming. And I think that's where the country hasn't seen it. Now they're getting it. Well, I'm paranoid. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry.