White House staff told me that, up until that point, they had little sensitive information to inform themselves on the scope of the risks. They were relying mostly on open-source material that they were pulling off the Internet and reports from friends on the ground. More ominously, they didn’t have a reliable plan to work from. For all the talk of a pandemic playbook that was purportedly on the shelf, initiated in the George W. Bush administration and refined under the administration of President Barack Obama, it was written for a pandemic involving a novel strain of influenza.
