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

by Scott Gottlieb

This wasn’t because the United States had never imagined it might fall victim to a deadly pandemic. We certainly had imagined the possibility. In some respects, we had been preparing for this moment through three presidential administrations, starting with George W. Bush, who warned in a 2005 speech, following the outbreak of Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome, or SARS-1, and then avian flu, that “scientists and doctors cannot tell us where or when the next pandemic will strike, or how severe it will be, but most agree: At some point, we are likely to face another pandemic. . . . Our country has been given fair warning of this danger to our homeland and time to prepare.”8 We had a pandemic playbook on the shelf, ran exercises simulating the threat countless times, and developed the Strategic National Stockpile to store the medical countermeasures that the top experts thought the country would need. But when the pandemic we long feared finally arrived, we weren’t ready. Many of the plans and preparations turned out to be a technocratic illusion. The stockpile lacked key essentials. A lot of what it contained didn’t work. It was a metaphor for our fragile response.