But a big part of the challenge was that officials at the CDC were applying a flu model to coronavirus. “People think that because you prepared for flu you were prepared for coronavirus, and it took eight to twelve weeks to realize that the two viruses behaved very differently,” one senior White House official said to me in the spring. When it came to a novel coronavirus, we also lacked a foundational infrastructure for testing and developing countermeasures: we can make new flu vaccines by changing the strain we use in existing manufacturing processes. Similarly, the country has a lot of flu
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