60 Minutes - 5/2/2021: The Secretary of State, Chips, The Premonition

Episode Date: May 3, 2021

On this week's "60 Minutes," Secretary of State Antony Blinken tells Norah O'Donnell that he will visit Ukraine next week. This comes as  Russian President Vladimir Putin has pulled back in the last few days some of the more than 100,000 troops he's amassed at the Ukrainian border. The demand for microchips in the U.S. is growing, but fewer and fewer are being manufactured domestically. Lesley Stahl speaks with Pat Gelsinger, the new CEO of Intel, and Mark Liu, Chairman of TSMC, the Taiwanese company leading the world in advanced chip production. John Dickerson interviews author, John Lewis, about his book, "The Premonition," which follows doctors and scientists who saw the pandemic coming.  To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

There are very few things that you can be certain of in life. But you can always be sure the sun will rise each morning. You can bet your bottom dollar that you'll always need air to breathe and water to drink. And, of course, you can rest assured that with Public Mobile's 5G subscription phone plans, you'll pay the same thing every month. With all of the mysteries that life has to offer, a few certainties can really go a long way. Subscribe today for the peace of mind you've been searching for. Public Mobile, different is calling. Tonight, Secretary of State Antony

Blinken talks about how the Biden administration is handling Russia, the crisis at the Mexican border, and an increasingly bellicose China. Have you ever seen China be so assertive or aggressive militarily? No, we haven't. I think what we've witnessed over the last several years is China acting more repressively at home and more aggressively abroad. That is a fact. This is what it takes to enter a facility where they manufacture microchips. I'm Christine.

The tiny semiconductors that power everything from smartphones to automobiles to fighter jets. Problem is, there's a shortage of them, revealing a serious national security issue. 25 years ago, the United States produced 37 percent of the world's semiconductor manufacturing in the U.S. Today, that number has declined to just 12 percent. Doesn't sound good. Michael Lewis has written some of the most memorable books of a generation, introducing us to characters who help us rethink topics we think we understand. His latest, The Premonition, the hidden story of America's response to the COVID pandemic.

It's like a superhero story where the superheroes seem to lose in the end. The little wrinkle on the end of it is, you know they've learned things that are going to help us the next time around. I'm Leslie Stahl. I'm Bill Whitaker. I'm Anderson Cooper. I'm John Dickerson. I'm Nora O'Donnell. I'm Scott Pelley.

Those stories and more, tonight on 60 Minutes. In his first 100 days, President Biden focused on the coronavirus pandemic. But over the course of his term, the Biden presidency will be defined by how the United States competes with China. In a few years, China's economy is expected to surpass the U.S. as the world's biggest. To determine how the United States will deal with China's growing influence, Mr. Biden has chosen one of his closest aides as Secretary of State. It falls to Antony Blinken to rebuild a depleted and demoralized State Department, repair U.S. alliances, and champion what diplomats call the rules-based international order, the written and unwritten code that governs how nations deal with one another,

rules that he says are now threatened by China. It is the one country in the world that has the military, economic, diplomatic capacity to undermine or challenge the rules-based order that we care so much about and are determined to defend. But I want to be very clear about something, and this is important. Our purpose is not to contain China, to hold it back, to keep it down. It is to uphold this rules-based order that China is posing a challenge to. Anyone who poses a challenge to that order,

we're going to stand up and defend it. I know you say the goal is not to contain China, but have you ever seen China be so assertive or aggressive militarily? No, we haven't. I think what we've witnessed over the last several years is China acting more repressively at home and more aggressively abroad. That is a fact. What's China's goal? I think that over time, China believes that it can be and should be and will be the dominant country in the world.

Chinese fighter jets are increasingly visible in the skies above the Western Pacific, where the U.S. Navy also has a presence. This past week, China's President Xi unveiled three new warships to patrol the South China Sea. It already has the world's largest navy and could use it to invade Taiwan, a democratic island and long-standing U.S. ally. Do you think we're heading towards some sort of military confrontation with China? I think it's profoundly against the interests of both China and the United States to get to that point or even to head in that direction. Let's talk about human rights. Describe what you see is happening in Xinjiang that maybe the rest of the world doesn't.

We've made clear that we see a genocide having taken place against the Uyghurs in Xinjiang. More than a million people have been put into, choose your term, concentration camps, re-education camps, internment camps. When Beijing says, oh, there's a terrorism threat, which we don't see, it's not coming from a million people. Our administration... SIX WEEKS AGO IN ALASKA, SECRETARY BLINKEN CONFRONTED YANG JIECHI, CHINA'S TOP DIPLOMAT, ABOUT GENOCIDE IN XINZHANG AND CHINA'S MILITARY AGGRESSION.

We feel an obligation to raise these issues here today. The exchange became an international incident caught on camera and not lost in translation. The United States does not have the qualification to say that it wants to speak to China from a position of strength. If Xinjiang is in a red line with China, then what is? Look, we don't have the luxury of not dealing with China. There are real complexities to the relationship, whether it's the adversarial piece, whether it's the competitive piece,

whether it's the cooperative piece. Even before the meeting in Alaska, President Xi had warned about the dawn of a new Cold War. During President Trump's time in office, China found the U.S. less predictable than past administrations. And I just announced another 10 percent tariff. Mr. Trump imposed tariffs on hundreds of billions of dollars of Chinese products in response to what he called unfair trade practices and the theft of U.S. intellectual property. So far, the Biden administration has kept the tariffs in place. I also told President Xi that we'll maintain a strong military presence. China may be the only big issue of the day in Washington in which Democrats and Republicans find common cause. The Chinese have stolen hundreds of billions, if not trillions of dollars of trade secrets

and intellectual property from the United States. That sounds like the actions of an enemy. It certainly sounds like the actions of someone who's trying to compete unfairly and increasingly in adversarial ways. But we're much more effective and stronger when we're bringing like-minded and similarly aggrieved countries together to say to Beijing, this can't stand and it won't stand. So is that a message that President Biden has delivered to President Xi? Certainly in their first conversation, they covered a lot of ground.

It was reportedly a two-hour phone call. It was. Yeah, I was there. And so did President Biden tell President Xi to cut it out? President Biden made clear that in a number of areas we have real concerns about the actions that China's taken, and that includes in the economic area, and that includes the theft of intellectual property. China's gross domestic product is expected to surpass the United States as early as 2028. Well, it's a large country. It's got a lot of people. If China becomes the wealthiest country in the world, doesn't that also make it the most powerful?

A lot depends on how it uses that wealth. It has an aging population. It has significant environmental problems, and so on. But here's the way I think about it, Nora, writ large. If we're talking about what really makes the wealth of a nation, fundamentally, it's its human resources and the ability of any one country to maximize their potential. That's the challenge for us. It's the challenge for us. It's the challenge for China. I think we're in a much

better place to maximize that human potential than any country on earth, if we're smart about it. China thinks long-term, strategically, decades in advance. Is America just caught up on the latest fires here and there, and we're not thinking long-term strategically. And as a result, China will surpass us. What I found looking at our own history is that when we've confronted a significant challenge, significant competition, significant adversity, we've managed to come together and actually do the long-term thinking,

the long-term investment. And that is really the moment we're in now. And that's the test that I think we're facing. Are we actually going to rise to it? President Biden believes we are. Antony Blinken occupies a suite of offices on the seventh floor of the State Department. But he first worked for Joe Biden at the Senate Foreign Relations Committee nearly 20 years ago and has barely left his side since.

In the Obama White House, Secretary Blinken held concurrent roles as an assistant to the president and the national security advisor for Vice President Biden. It's been the most consequential professional relationship and also in many ways personal relationship that I've had. How often do you speak? It's pretty close to daily. You speak to him every day? In one way or another. You know, we're pretty good at meetings. So there are a few of those. When I thought about the relationship that you have had

with President Biden over the years in the Senate and then when he was vice president, the only relationship that I could come up with, though I'm not a historian, was, of course Secretary Baker and President George H.W. Bush. I'd be flattered by any comparison to Secretary Baker. I actually, I spoke to him on the phone a few months ago, and we talked about the importance

of ideally a Secretary of State having a close relationship with the President. He was extraordinarily effective for all sorts of reasons, but that was, I think, a source of his effectiveness. Secretary of State James Baker helped President George H.W. Bush end the Cold War with the Soviet Union. The current secretary is in the midst of winding down America's longest war in Afghanistan. Are you prepared for a worst-case scenario in Afghanistan where the U.S.-backed government fails and the Taliban takes over? We have to be prepared for every scenario, and there are a range of them. And we're looking at this in a very clear-eyed way. But, Nora, we've been engaged in Afghanistan for 20 years, and we sometimes forget why we went there in the first place.

And that was to deal with the people who attacked us on 9-11. And we did. Just because our troops are coming home doesn't mean we're leaving. We're not. Our embassy's staying. The support that we're giving to Afghanistan when it comes to economic support, development, humanitarian, that remains. And not only from us, from partners and allies.

Somewhat related, will the Biden administration close Guantanamo Bay? We believe that it should be. That's certainly a goal, but it's something that we'll bring some focus to in the months ahead. In this past Wednesday's address to Congress, President Biden spoke about his plans for immigration reform. For more than 30 years, politicians have talked about immigration reform, and we've done nothing about it. It's time to fix it. It's a subject not usually central to the State Department's mission,

but we asked Secretary Blinken about it because of the refugee crisis on America's southern border. Border crossings for undocumented immigrants have skyrocketed. In March, more than 170,000 people were taken into custody. That's the highest in 20 years. Are the policies of the Biden administration to blame? No. What we're seeing is indeed a surge of people to the border. We've seen that in the past. But we inherited a totally broken system, broken intentionally. And it takes time to fix it. And by the way, our message is very clear. Don't come. The border is not open. You won't get in. But we have to understand what is motivating so many people to do this.

And it is usually desperation. But that's not new. I want to talk about the policies of the Biden administration, because President Biden did use his executive authority to curb deportations, to allow more asylum seekers to enter the United States. So are these new policies by the administration contributing to this surge? We're focused when it comes to people coming into making sure that children, unaccompanied minors, are treated humanely and according to the law. Is it problematic to tell migrants, well, no, you can't come here, and then at the same time create a different situation on the ground

that does allow them to come? But the point is they're not. And one of the challenges that we've had is that traffickers and others are trying to tell them that the border is open. It's not. But children are being allowed in. Children are the one exception because we will not.

It is the right thing to do. We are not going to abide the notion that children are kept in a precarious, dangerous situation. That is unacceptable. Blinken himself is a father of two young children and hails from a family that only a few generations ago were themselves refugees. His paternal great-grandfather Meyer Blinken emigrated to New York City from Ukraine, fleeing Russian oppression in 1904. This coming week, the Secretary of State will visit Ukraine to show support for the country currently in the throes of more recent Russian aggression. President Putin has amassed a very large force at the border with Ukraine, more than 100,000 troops.

What is Putin up to? You're right. There are more forces amassed on the border with Ukraine than at any time since 2014, when Russia actually invaded. I can't tell you that we know Mr. Putin's intentions. There are any number of things that he could do or choose not to do. What we have seen in the last few days is apparently a decision to pull back some of those forces. And we've seen some of them, in fact, start to pull back.

That's been verified that they are pulling back? Starting now. We're watching that very, very carefully. lineup. Pick any two breakfast items for $4. New four-piece French toast sticks, bacon or sausage wrap, biscuit or English muffin sandwiches, small hot coffee, and more. Limited time only at participating Wendy's Taxes Extra. Sometimes historic events suck. But what shouldn't suck is learning about history. I do that through storytelling. History That Doesn't Suck is a chart-topping history-telling podcast chronicling the epic story of America, decade by decade. Right now, I'm digging into the history of incredible infrastructure projects of the 1930s,

including the Hoover Dam, the Empire State Building, the Golden Gate Bridge, and more. The promise is in the title, History That Doesn't Suck. Available on the free Odyssey app or wherever you get your podcasts. Car companies across the globe have had to idle production and workers because of a shortage of semiconductors, often referred to as microchips or just chips. They're the tiny operating brains inside just about any modern device, like smartphones, hospital ventilators, or fighter jets. The pandemic has sent chip demand soaring unexpectedly as we bought computers and electronics to work, study, and play from home.

But while more and more chips are needed in the U.S., fewer and fewer are manufactured here. Intel is the biggest American chip maker. Its most advanced fabrication plant, or FAB for short, is located outside Phoenix, Arizona. New CEO Pat Gelsinger invited us on a tour to see how incredibly complex the manufacturing process is. First, we had to suit up to avoid contaminating the fab. Head cover on. Perfect. Bunny suit zipped. Goggles. Okay.

Gloves. Good. Ready to go. I'm Christine. Ready. Everything in this environment is controlled. Together, we stepped into a place with some of the most sophisticated new technology on Earth.

I need to ask you why we're all yellow. Yellow filters remove light rays that are harmful to the process. Overhead, a computerized highway transports materials from one machine to the next. The process involves thousands of steps, where layer upon layer of microscopic circuitry is etched onto these silicon plates that are then chopped up into chips that will end up in, say, your computer. Making just one can take six months. You see, each one of these is a chip. I'm surprised. I thought chips were minute. Well, each one of these is a chip. I'm surprised. I thought chips were minute. Well, each one of these chips has maybe a billion transistors on it.

Oh, my goodness. So there's a billion little circuits inside of it that are all on one of these chips, and then one wafer could have a hundred or a thousand chips on it. Intel's goal is to keep shrinking the transistor's size so you can pile more of them on a chip to make it more powerful and work faster. You know, every one of these is laying down circuits that are so much smaller than anything,

your hair, you know, any other part of human existence. You know, a COVID particle is way bigger than one of the lines that we're creating here. How much does this fab cost? $10 billion. Billion? Ten billion dollars because each one of these pieces of equipment is maybe five million dollars. That's a lot of millions of dollars. Chips differ in size and sophistication depending on their end use. Intel doesn't presently make many chips for the auto sector, but because of the shortage,

it's planning to reconfigure some of its fabs to start churning them out. I'm wondering if we're going to continue to have shortages, not just in cars, but in our phones and for our computers, for everything. I think we have a couple of years until we catch up to the surging demand across every aspect of the business. COVID showed that the global supply chain of chips is fragile and unable to react quickly to changes in demand. One reason? Fabs are wildly expensive to build, furbish, and maintain. It used to be that there were 25 companies in the world that made the high-end, cutting-edge chips. And now there are only three. And in the United States, you.

Yeah. One. One. Today, 75% of semiconductor manufacturing is in Asia. 25 years ago, the United States produced 37% of the world's semiconductor manufacturing in the U.S. Today, that number has declined to just 12%. Doesn't sound good. It doesn't sound good. And anybody who looks at supply chain says, that's a problem.

A problem because relying on one region, especially one as unpredictable as Asia, is highly risky. Intel has been lobbying the U.S. government to help revive chip manufacturing at home with incentives, subsidies, and or tax breaks the way the governments of Taiwan, Singapore, and Israel have done. The White House is responding, proposing $50 billion for the semiconductor industry in the U.S. as part of President Biden's infrastructure plan. This is infrastructure. Your business is extremely lucrative. In terms of revenue, you made $78 billion last year.

Why should the government come in to a company, a business that's doing so well overall. This is a big, critical industry, and we want more of it on American soil. The jobs that we want in America, the control of our long-term technology future, and, as we've also said, the disruptions in the supply chain. You have spent much more in stock buybacks than you have in research and development. A lot more. We will not be anywhere near as focused on buybacks going forward as we have in the past. And that's been reviewed as part of my coming into the company,

agreed upon with the board of directors. Why shouldn't private industry fund this instead of the government? The industries that rely on these chips? Apple, Microsoft, the companies that are rolling in money? Well, they're pretty happy to buy from some of the Asian suppliers. Actually, they don't always have a choice. For chips with the tiniest transistors, there's no made-in-the-U.S. option. Intel currently doesn't have the know-how to manufacture the most advanced chips that Apple and the others need. The decline in this industry,

it's kind of devastating, isn't it? The fact that this industry was created by American innovation. The whole Silicon Valley idea started with Intel. Yeah. The company stumbled. It was still a big company. We had some product stumbles, some manufacturing and process stumbles. Perhaps the biggest stumble was in the early 2000s

when Steve Jobs of Apple needed chips for a new idea, the iPhone. Intel wasn't interested, and Apple went to Asia, eventually finding TSMC, the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, today the world's most advanced chip manufacturer, producing chips that are 30% faster and more powerful than Intel's.

They're ahead of you on the manufacturing side. Yeah. Considerably ahead of you. We believe it's going to take us a couple of years, and we will be caught up. Gelsinger is making big bets, breaking ground on two new giant fabs in Arizona, costing $20 billion,

Intel's largest investment ever. And he'll announce this week a $3.5 billion upgrade of this fab in New Mexico. But TSMC is a manufacturing juggernaut worth over half a trillion dollars. Collaborating with clients to produce their chip designs, it's been sought out by Apple, Amazon, contractors for the U.S. military, and even Intel, which uses TSMC to produce their cutting-edge designs they're not advanced enough to make themselves. How and why did Intel fall behind? It is surprising for us, too.

We spoke remotely with TSMC chairman Mark Liu at the company headquarters in Hsinchu, Taiwan. His company is a leading supplier of the chips that go into American cars. In March 2020, as COVID paralyzed the U.S., car sales tumbled, leading automakers to cancel their chip orders. So TSMC stopped making them. That's why when car sales unexpectedly bounced back late last year, there was a shortage of chips, leaving cars with no power parked in carmakers' lots, costing them billions. We heard about this shortage in December time frame and in January we tried to squeeze as more chips as possible to the car company. Today we think we are two months ahead that we can catch up the minimum requirement of our customers before the end of June. Are you

saying that the shortage in chips for cars will end in two months? No, there's a time lag. In car chips particularly, the supply chain is long and complex. This supply takes about seven to eight months. Should Americans be concerned that most chips are being manufactured in Asia today? I understand their concern, first of all. But this is not about Asia or not Asia. I mean, the shortage will happen no matter where the production is located,

because it's due to the COVID. But Pat Gelsinger at Intel talks about a need to rebalance the supply chain issue, because so much, so many of the chips in the world now are made in Asia. I think U.S. ought to pursue to run faster, to invest in R&D, to produce more PhD, master, bachelor students to get into this manufacturing field instead of trying to move the supply chain, which is very costly and really non-productive. That will slow down the innovation because people are trying to hold on their technology to their own

and forsake the global collaboration. Within the world of global collaboration, there's intense competition. Days after Intel announced spending $20 billion on two new fabs, TSMC announced it would spend $100 billion over three years on R&D, upgrades, and a new fab in Phoenix, Arizona, Intel's backyard, where the Taiwanese company will produce the chips Apple needs, but the Americans can't make. That was a big investment.

But there's a looming shadow over TSMC, which supplies chips for our cars, iPhones, and the supercomputer managing our nuclear stockpile. China's President Xi Jinping, who has intensified his longtime threat to seize Taiwan. China's attempts to develop its own advanced chip industry have failed, and so it's been forced to import chips. But last year, Washington imposed restrictions on chipmakers from exporting certain semiconductors to China. Both Liu and Gelsinger fear the escalating trade war with China may backfire, and an Intel's case could hurt business. Are they your biggest customer? China is one of our largest markets

today. You know, over 25 percent of our revenue is to Chinese customers. You know, we expect that this will remain an area of tension and one that needs to be navigated carefully. Because if there's any points that people can't keep running their countries or running their businesses because of supply of one critical component like semiconductors, boy, that leads them to take very extreme postures on things because they have to. The most extreme would be China invading Taiwan and in the process gaining control of TSMC. That could force the U.S. to defend Taiwan as we did Kuwait from the Iraqis 30 years ago. Then it was oil. Now it's chips. The chip industry in Taiwan has been called

the Silicon Shield. Yes. What does that mean? That means the world all needs Taiwan's high-tech industry support. So they will not let the war happen in this region because it goes against interest of every country in the world. Do you think that in any way your industry is keeping Taiwan safe? I cannot comment on the safety. I mean, this is a changing world. Nobody wants these things to happen, and I hope not too, either. Meet Tim's new Oreo Mocha Ice Caps with Oreo in every sip. Perfect for listening to the A-side, or B-side, or Bull-side.

Order yours on the Tim's app today at participating restaurants in Canada for a limited time. What's better than a well-marbled ribeye sizzling on the barbecue? Participating restaurants in Canada for a limited time. your summer calls for, Instacart has you covered. Download the Instacart app and enjoy $0 delivery fees on your first three orders. Service fees, exclusions, and terms apply. Instacart, groceries that over-deliver. Michael Lewis has written 14 books, most of them about people who saw things coming. Crashes on Wall Street, the next great idea in Major League Baseball,

the value of a left Tackle in Football. His new book, called The Premonition, follows a group of doctors and scientists who saw the pandemic coming and raced to sound the alarm. But this is not just a book about the past. The book itself is a premonition. When Michael Lewis began work on his book about America's failed response to the pandemic, he had a beginning but no middle or end. When you were writing this book, it was still

unfolding. Have you ever done that before? I did something a little unusual with this book. Into my lap landed, I think, three of the best characters I've ever had. And I thought, let's just write the people and worry about how the story plays out, when the story plays out. I got the richest narrative I think I've ever had. What you describe in the book is a need for people who have the risk-taking muscle, who are going to take risks when the information is bad

because they know if you wait for the information to be good, you'll be going to a lot of funerals. Is that where the premonition, the title of the book comes from? That's exactly where the title of the book comes from. In this case, I came to appreciate the power of intuition. And it isn't just random intuition. It's trained intuition. You have to be able to look around the corner. You have to be able to see a little further than is really visible.

You've done this in a lot of your books, though. You find the person who knows actually what's going on, but who nobody's listening to. There's something about the way institutions work, that the voice that knows what's going on is in the wilderness. There are times in working on this that remind me a bit of the Big Short, where the world has collapsed. And you find these people who were actually not just predicting collapse, but actually describing exactly how it was going to collapse because they actually

understood it. And they aren't the people you'd expect. Lewis writes that at the beginning of the pandemic, one of those people was Dr. Charity Dean, a disease control expert and the assistant director of California's Department of Public Health. In January of 2020, Dean was alarmed when she saw images circulating on social media that appeared to show Chinese authorities welding apartment doors shut to keep residents indoors. And watching those videos on Twitter, because I had no other source of information, I thought, they know something we don't, and this is real. Dean's hunch was that international travel into California's major airports meant the virus was already circulating in her state. She guessed there might be 100 undetected cases of COVID-19.

Dean did what she called dirty math on her whiteboard, plotting what the virus might do to California in the coming weeks. So you're doing the dirty math on the whiteboard, and you step back, and you think what? I thought, oh my God, I don't believe this. It's 20 million in May. Her projection of 20 million cases meant half of California's population would be infected within four months unless officials intervene to slow the virus's path. What was the response when you told your bosses that?

Disbelief. Shock. And then irritation. Why irritation? Because I think it's just really hard for the human brain to grasp the exponential growth of an existential threat. They didn't even let you use the word pandemic when you wanted to, is that right? I was asked to not say the word pandemic because it might scare people. But I was scared.

And you thought people should be too. Absolutely. Charity, who thinks she's all alone, all alone in the world, aware in January that this pandemic is going to sweep through the United States and nobody's doing anything about it, including her state government. And nobody will listen to her. And all of a sudden, she's introduced to the Wolverines. When she finds these people, it's like, yeah, these are my people.

Who are the Wolverines? The Wolverines were a group it's like, yeah, these are my people. Who were the Wolverines? The Wolverines were a group of seven doctors, all of whom at one point or another had worked in the White House together and who stayed in contact and kind of helped the country navigate various previous disease outbreaks. But they weren't in the decision-making apparatus

in the U.S. government. Why are they called the Wolverines? They're called the Wolverines because a fellow White House employee dubbed them so and had some obscure reference to the film Red Dawn. Wolverines! Where these group of high school kids named the Wolverines go up

and try to defeat the invading Russians. In other words, the Wolverines had to take things into their own hands because there was nobody to stop the invading force. That's right, the Wolverines had to take things into their own hands because there was nobody to stop the invading force. That's right. They were a guerrilla disease fighting operation. Because the people actually who were supposed to be fighting the disease weren't doing it. Weren't doing it.

We have it under control. It's going to be just fine. In late January, as President Trump and the federal government publicly showed no urgency over the virus, Lewis writes that the Wolverines tried a workaround, getting the states to move. It's why the Wolverines recruited Charity Dean, hoping if she could push California to act, the federal response might quicken. She asked one of them, who's running the pandemic response?

And one of them says, nobody's running the pandemic response. But to the degree that anybody's sort of running the pandemic response. And one of them says, nobody's running the pandemic response. But to the degree that anybody's sort of running the pandemic response, we sort of are. This is fantastical, I think, to most Americans, which is they think there is something called the Centers for Disease Control. And there are big buildings in Washington that have health and human services. Why did the Wolverines have to do what there are huge institutions designed to do? That's a great question. It's a very good question, right?

In the first place, the Trump administration abdicated responsibility for running the federal government. He just walked away from that, right? He said, governors, you're on your own. The Wolverine whose analysis drove the group was Carter Mesher, an unassuming former ICU doctor who worked as a senior medical advisor for the VA in Atlanta. The frustration was when the pandemic virus emerges anywhere in the world is a threat to everyone everywhere. And the messages that we were hearing at the time when we're looking at the outbreak in China was that this was not a threat to the American public. During the Bush administration,

Mesher had helped write a detailed national pandemic response plan. Lewis reports that as the COVID threat grew in January 2020, Mesher spent his days burrowed with his home computer in suburban Atlanta from 5 in the morning until 11 at night, digging for data from open sources to make back-of-the-envelope calculations. He calls it redneck epidemiology. It really was meant to convey being resourceful, to use whatever data we could get our hands on to try to make sense, because really that's what we were trying to do. This is the big thing.

The big thing is he knows we need to get an answer fast. We need to get an answer before we know for sure, because by the time we know for sure, we'll be overrun. He starts to Google websites in Wuhan that are in Chinese, and he puts them in Google Translate to find body counts, to find how many people have died and when they died. And he finds that the Chinese are misreporting dates of deaths and numbers of deaths. Carter's able to figure out that this isn't just a bat infecting a person. These are people infecting other people at an incredible rate.

Six weeks before President Trump declared a national emergency, Mesher wrote in an email to the Wolverines on January 28th, any way you cut it, this is going to be bad. The projected size of the outbreak already seems hard to believe. Karamesh said, this thing is frightening. And I can show you why it's frightening. He wasn't just chicken little. He had a reason. He saw the sky falling. And he actually could explain how it was going to fall. In February, 700 people were infected on the Diamond Princess cruise ship while it was anchored in Tokyo Bay.

Mesher determined the infection rate on the ship was 20%. And what happened when you plugged that into what a virus that operated that way would look like if it hit the U.S. health system? 300,000 dead is a rough approximation based on the Diamond Princess. Who should be the one with their hand on the bell saying, we got to move, this is bigger than we thought? CDC. And they weren't ringing the bell? We didn't hear them ringing the bell.

The CDC wasn't just slow to respond. It bungled the most important tool required in the fight, testing for the virus. UC San Francisco biochemist Joe DeRisi decided to build his own testing lab to help California. And he said, the Center for Disease Control doesn't know what it's doing. We can't control the virus unless we know where it is. We can't know where it is unless we test. So we're going to do the tests. To push for action, Charity Dean employed her whiteboard. Carter Mesher, his redneck epidemiology.

DeRisi employed fancier tools. He worked at something called the Biohub for the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative. Had you ever built clinical testing labs before? Absolutely not. And so we were actually going to have to build this plane, send it up in the air, partially built, and learn how to fly it while we're building it in the air. They built the lab in eight days.

COVID-19 to the order code. It could produce COVID test results in 24 hours, and they offered its services for free to county public health offices across California. Which is when DeRisi discovered how starved for resources public health offices were. We had a whole bunch of clinical results they were sending to a county, and we sent them by fax, because that's how they officially receive results. Did you even have a fax machine?

No, but we got curbside delivery at Best Buy and were able to buy a $300 fax machine. It was the first fax machine I'd seen in years. But the problem was, after we faxed these results, we got a call the next day saying, why did you only return half the results? We realized that their circa early 90s fax machine only had a page buffer that could hold about half the results we sent. So we literally went back to Best Buy, got another curbside delivery,

and drove up a new fax machine up to that county public health office because they didn't have the budget to buy their own new one. I chose my story, my characters, to dramatize those pockets of deficiency in our society so we could see them, because they saw them. I just followed the characters. There were pockets of success.

Charity Dean helped convince Governor Gavin Newsom to shut down California on March 19th. We need to bend the curve. The first state to do so. California has registered 3.7 million COVID cases to date, not the 20 million once feared. Dean credits Carter Mesher's vision with giving her the courage to push. So does fellow Wolverine Dr. Matt Hepburn, who ultimately led vaccine development for the Trump administration's Operation Warp Speed. But still, nearly 600,000 Americans have died. It's like a superhero story

where the superheroes seem to lose in the end. They're there to fight this pandemic and to save American lives. They don't appear to do it. But the little wrinkle on the end of it is you know they've learned things that are going to help us the next time around. The stories of each character's struggle to be heard highlight what Lewis says is a key point.

Public institutions are ill-equipped to move fast enough to handle a large-scale pandemic. His characters worry the country is still vulnerable. What connects them, the characters? They love life. They realize how important it is, and they want to save it. And so they all have this emotional component of when they hear 600,000 Americans died, it's not just a number. Michael writes that all of you are motivated

by your love of life. Do you agree with that characterization? My training was in critical care medicine, so I operated ICUs. And in ICU, what I got to see and what I got to witness was the final struggle for a lot of human beings. I got to see the last days, last weeks, last moments of a lot of people. And, you know, in sports, they they talk about you know, sorry, they talk about like you know players leaving it all on the field. And you know when I would see these patients in the ICU, I would watch them in that struggle and

they left everything on the field, everything. And you know my question for us is almost 600,000 people in this country have left everything on the field and the question is, have we? The COVID vaccination rollout has begun to slow down. Some states are now offering incentives for people to roll up their sleeves. West Virginia's Governor Jim Justice, like great-aunt Martha at graduation time, is offering $100 savings bonds for young people. Connecticut's Ned Lamont has enlisted restaurants to offer a free drink to the newly vaccinated. Good for the governors, if it works. But it gives one pause to think people avoid a shot that could save their lives until

offered a free margarita with Moderna, a gym fizz with Pfizer, or a shot of J&B to chase J&J. Then they get the point. I'm Leslie Stahl. We'll be back next week with another edition of 60 Minutes.