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

by Scott Gottlieb

Across multiple administrations, the willingness to view pandemic preparedness through the lens of national security has waxed and waned, being downgraded only to be elevated after new threats emerged, and then marginalized again when the immediate risks seemed to recede. This cycle took place most visibly in relation to the National Security Council (NSC). At the beginning of the Bush administration in 2001, there had been a person charged with overseeing biothreats on the NSC, but the position was eliminated only to be reinstated after 9/11, with an emphasis on bioterrorism. In 2009, the incoming Obama administration disbanded the biothreats staff on the NSC, as the Bush administration initially had done, but then reinstituted the function after the H1N1 swine flu pandemic and the Ebola epidemic.22 And yet once again, in 2018, this NSC function was disbanded by the Trump administration, not long before COVID struck.