Preventable Quotes

“This was a constant truth of the pandemic. Saving lives was always possible, if we chose to do it.”
― Andy Slavitt, Preventable: The Inside Story of How Leadership Failures, Politics, and Selfishness Doomed the U.S. Coronavirus Response

“Healthy and nutritious foods are less likely to be available in predominantly black neighbor's, while candy bars, and alcohol, and low-cost fast food are more likely to be in abundance. Consistently studies have shown that these factors are related to race, independent of income. All of this puts Black communities at higher risk of developing more severe COVID 19. So do more densely packed neighborhoods with less green space, more poorly ventilated living arrangements, and more frequent use of public transportation.”
― Andy Slavitt, Preventable: The Inside Story of How Leadership Failures, Politics, and Selfishness Doomed the U.S. Coronavirus Response

“Health outcomes for black people are worse across the board during non-pandemic times. Black women are 22% more likely to die from heart disease than white women and 71% more likely to die from cervical cancer. Blacks are diagnosed with diabetes at a 71% higher rate than whites. Minorities receive lower quality care for their diabetes, resulting in more complications, such as chronic kidney disease and amputations. The list of conditions which Blacks suffer more extend to mental health, cancer, and heart disease.”
― Andy Slavitt, Preventable: The Inside Story of How Leadership Failures, Politics, and Selfishness Doomed the U.S. Coronavirus Response

“A report by the IHME, released in late October 2020, estimated that 130k lives could be saved in the United States between the fall of that year and spring 2021 if people universally wore masks.”
― Andy Slavitt, Preventable: The Inside Story of How Leadership Failures, Politics, and Selfishness Doomed the U.S. Coronavirus Response

“There's an old saying that when American catches a cold, Black people get the flu. Well in 2020, when American catches Coronavirus, Black and Latinx people die.”
― Andy Slavitt, Preventable: The Inside Story of How Leadership Failures, Politics, and Selfishness Doomed the U.S. Coronavirus Response

“During the periods of stay-at-home orders, more people of color were going to work riding the train and working in places with more and longer exposure to the virus. Yes, this is known as structural racism.”
― Andy Slavitt, Preventable: The Inside Story of How Leadership Failures, Politics, and Selfishness Doomed the U.S. Coronavirus Response

“What plagues the US healthcare system is not universally poor outcomes, but poor outcomes for the bottom rungs of society. Low income populations and racial minorities. As with much inequalities, the factors that result in this outcome feed on one another to make the problem worse. Black Americans are less likely to be able to find a physician who will treat them. The physicians they do find are less likely to give them a needed prescription for pain relief as they are more likely to be seen as drug seekers. They are also less likely to be able to afford the prescriptions they are given, they are more likely to have unaddressed trauma, often multi-generational and childhood trauma.”
― Andy Slavitt, Preventable: The Inside Story of How Leadership Failures, Politics, and Selfishness Doomed the U.S. Coronavirus Response

“The old, the poor, and the sick were being relegated to 2nd class citizenship. Our real values are not the ones that disappear in hard times, they are the ones that show up in hard times. All it took was one little pandemic and we started writing people off.”
― Andy Slavitt, Preventable: The Inside Story of How Leadership Failures, Politics, and Selfishness Doomed the U.S. Coronavirus Response

“I walked to work by cutting across the Washington Mall in front of the US Capital to the Hubert Humphrey building … In an overly large lobby … High on one of the walls is a quotation from Hubert Humphrey, the Minnesotan who served as Vice President to Lyndon Johnson. It reads, "The moral test of government is how that government treat those who are in the dawn of life: the children, those who are in the twilight of life: the elderly, and those who are in the shadow of life: the sick, the needy, and the handicapped.”
― Andy Slavitt, Preventable: The Inside Story of How Leadership Failures, Politics, and Selfishness Doomed the U.S. Coronavirus Response

“These studies showed that delaying the mask mandates and bar closures was associated with increased cases. On May 20th, we sent analysis to every governor and the mayor of every major city showing the significant benefit of early action. Too few changed their approaches but facing a rising sea of local doubters even many elected officials who didn't make changes were silently grateful for someone publicly pushing them to do the right things.”
― Andy Slavitt, Preventable: The Inside Story of How Leadership Failures, Politics, and Selfishness Doomed the U.S. Coronavirus Response

“You can fix a lot of things, but you can't un-die people.”
― Andy Slavitt, Preventable: The Inside Story of How Leadership Failures, Politics, and Selfishness Doomed the U.S. Coronavirus Response

“In a study comparing mask wearing practices across 198 countries, the mortality rate from COVID 19 in those countries where mask wearing was either government policy or culture norm, increased by 8% per week on average, compared to 54% per week for countries that did not encourage mask wearing.”
― Andy Slavitt, Preventable: The Inside Story of How Leadership Failures, Politics, and Selfishness Doomed the U.S. Coronavirus Response

“Because of the hassle that came from traveling around the jungle, the decided to tear it down to build a road. The workers to build this road did not have time to stop and build fires for cooking food, so instead would eat bush meat - raw or minimally processed meat from monkeys that inhabited the jungle. What the workers did not know, however was that a virus was present in the moneys they were eating. Very quickly a worker got sick from the virus and passed it on to other humans… And that's the story of HIV. … There are lots of viruses that live in animals without hurting them. The moral of the story is that when we do something to mess up nature, that makes viruses spill over into humans.”
― Andy Slavitt, Preventable: The Inside Story of How Leadership Failures, Politics, and Selfishness Doomed the U.S. Coronavirus Response

“deep-seated issues that are part of our culture and national identity emerged to haunt us: Our obsession with individual liberties, even at the expense of others’ lives and health. Our belief that the country can isolate itself from the rest of the world and rely on our wealth to protect us from global problems. Our increasingly unequal and separate nation, where people like Ahmed shoulder the lion’s share of the risks and burdens. Our health care system, which is inaccessible to many even in normal times. Our diminishment of science and expertise.”
― Andy Slavitt, Preventable: The Inside Story of How Leadership Failures, Politics, and Selfishness Doomed the U.S. Coronavirus Response

“But the country’s experience during the pandemic is also a culmination of many of the things that had begun to distort our society for a number of years— gross inequality based on race and income, the growing distrust of expertise, a media addicted to promoting controversy, and a people long out of the habit of shared sacrifice for the common good.”
― Andy Slavitt, Preventable: The Inside Story of How Leadership Failures, Politics, and Selfishness Doomed the U.S. Coronavirus Response