Uncontrolled Spread: Why COVID-19 Crushed Us and How We Can Defeat the Next Pandemic

by Scott Gottlieb

“The public health people on the task force were saying that there was no spread, or we’d see it in the ILI,” one White House official who sat in on the task force meetings told me. “It wasn’t until the week of March 6 that you saw a clear separation, and that was retrospective that you saw the separation. Until then, we were never told the ILI was picking up anything weird ever, we were told they were using the ILI network and it’s not detecting coronavirus spread. . . . CDC was telling us we have a surveillance system and it’s the [influenza-like illness surveillance] network and that we’re in good shape and that was totally untrue.” That same week, on March 5, the assistant secretary for health at HHS, Dr. Brett Giroir, told a group of reporters at a Capitol Hill press briefing that the “best estimate” of the overall mortality for COVID might be as low as one-tenth of 1 percent, which would have put it in the range of flu, to which he explicitly compared it. And it certainly wasn’t higher than 1 percent, he said. The best estimates of the case fatality rate that spring put COVID’s mortality higher than 1 percent. But in linking it to the death rate from flu, it was a measure of how much some health officials were still viewing COVID through the lens of influenza. By that point, others in HHS had a firmer grasp on the virus’s true pathogenicity. Anthony Fauci had sent an email to a Wall Street Journal columnist three days earlier, on March 2, alerting them that for COVID...