The Daily Beast Podcast - Please Don’t Listen to Jim Jordan For COVID Vaccine Advice

Episode Date: June 13, 2021

Former Biden Coronavirus advisor Andy Slavitt joins this week’s bonus episode guest on The New Abnormal to talk about the people who are vaccine-hesitant, but not exactly anti-vax, what Biden’s next steps are, and what we can do to make sure we don’t face global pandemic again. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hello and welcome to another bonus episode of the new abnormal, and we thank you so much for being here. Today we have an extremely special guest. We're going to air part two of our interview with Andy Slavitt, who is of course the senior advisor to the White House's pandemic response, who resigned this week, and he's going to talk to us about his new book, Preventable, the inside story of how leadership failures, politics, and selfishness doom the U.S. coronavirus response. There's a new way for members to get notified when exclusive episodes drop or when there's a live recording of the new abnormal. Head to the DailyBeast.com slash membership slash newsletters to sign up for email alerts. You know, one of the things that I think is amazing is that we've really seen the private

sector did not, you know, all of these times of the Trump administrations, and I say this as someone who's married to a venture capitalist. So I always, you know, I've always for so long heard that like business can do good, but business really did not do good. I want to move on because so now you're at a place where vaccinations have you got like more than 50% of America vaccinated, but certain people seem still very hesitant. Where do you go from here? Well, first let me make a comment in business piece, which you can keep it or not if you like. Right.

Why didn't business respond? Because the president basically told his team, this is not, this is going to end any day now. Right. This is not a crisis. So imagine you're working for a president who said that. can't then call some companies that can help you and say, hey, we have an issue. Can you help? Because you can't acknowledge the problem. So on my very first day on January 20th, I got called from loads of CEOs from companies saying, hey, we have not the ability to help. We want to help.

And the thing about a pandemic is if you really are any crisis, pulling people together and saying, we need your help, people feel when they feel that sense of purpose, then they don't actually sit and wallow and attack each other, et cetera. So our strategy was to actually ask everybody to do something. And many, many people, most people, corporations, non-profits, individuals, most people really wanted to do something to help. Trump just refused to ask. Yeah. Oh, that's fascinating. How do you move forward?

First of all, you know, there's a set of people, you and I among them, to whom getting a vaccine was no braider in requiring homework. We knew we were going to do it. All three of my kids now are fully vaccinated, too. Great. So they're in that category. There's another set of people to whom it is a more considered decision. They want to know more things. They want to maybe see how it works for a while.

And, you know, my first comment is we have to respect that because there's no right or wrong way to think about it. And as soon as we start saying, oh, well, if you haven't taken the vaccine, you're anti-vax, boy, you're really not going to have much success in talking to people if you're not listening to them. So for some subset of people, they've had the rest of their vaccines, right? They're not anti-vaccine. They just look at this and say,

boy, I have questions that I want answers to. And what we have to do is make sure that those questions get answered by reliable, trustworthy people, not some guy on Facebook. Because some guy on Facebook is going to show you a picture of a giant

rash or a big needle or something that is going to play into your fear. So the first thing is, I think we just have to respect the fact that some people are going to take a little bit of a longer time, and that's okay. There's another set of people, most of these, and look, people over 40, more than 70% of people over 40 have gotten at least their first shot. So it's really actually largely people under 40, and there is an education split. People who are more educated are more likely to be vaccinated across every category.

So for people under 40, the challenge is a little bit different. It's just not that higher priority for them. And it's not that they're against it. But it's like, it's like, you know, I'm 54. Okay. I'm supposed to get my shingles vaccine when I'm 55, right? Will I get it the day I turn 55? Will I get it when I'm 56?

Will I get it when I'm 55? It's not that higher priority for me. It just isn't. Now, even though I'm told I should do it. And I think if you're 23, And someone says, hey, get your COVID vaccine. You're kind of like, you know, if you walked up to me and it was convenient and had a shot at the ready and said, here it is, maybe I'd, no problem. But if you said, you know, go prioritize this, then I think it's just not happening because it's just not that important to many, many people.

And so that's where things like these incentives and other things come into play because they're used to try to make it very, very easy and to create a little bit more attention. What do you think, though, about people, like, for example, I think Ohio is a really interesting example, right? You have Governor DeWine. I'm no fan of Governor DeWine because of his terrible anti-choice policies, but he's been very good about COVID, right? I mean, you can't argue that, right? He's a Republican, but he's been very good about COVID. And he's offering incentives for the vaccine, and they're really thoughtful, like, you know, free college in Ohio, if you're under a certain age. I mean, they're really thoughtful and make a lot of sense. And then you have someone like Jim Jordan, an Ohio congressman who is saying you won't take the vaccine and really trying to sort of stymie DeWine's efforts. What do you do in a situation like that? There's some conversations between myself and Governor DeWine in the book. And it really is a demonstration that at its core, there's nothing political about being attacked by a pathogen, right? There's nothing in a core about trying to keep people from dying being attacked by a

passageion. Now, again, if they were a different president, if Mitt Romney were president, there'd be policies to them you might not like, or you might like, depending on what you believe. But there's no question that if Mitt Romney were president, he would have run a very competent pandemic response, just like Mike DeWine did. and I had great conversations with DeWine. There's no explaining Jim Jordan other than to say that, first of all, people in this country can believe whatever they want to believe, and there are some very small percentage of people

who believe that Jim Jordan believes. And there are certain people who just love the theater of being controversial. I don't know which category Jim Jordan's in. I find him not helpful. I find him not constructive. I find that, to me said that people listen to him, I would remind them, don't listen to him, Don't listen to me. Don't listen to DeWine. Listen to a doctor. Right.

Listen to someone who knows something about this. Don't listen to an ex- Wrestling coach who likes getting clips on YouTube. Listen to a clinician. Listen to a scientist. Ask your questions. There are plenty of reasonable questions to ask that are worth asking. Don't let someone who has no expertise in this provide the answer. Now, I'm just going to ask one more question because I have to ask this. Rand Paul is a doctor, though. Of sorts. So now you're leaving the White House, and America is really in a pretty good place, all things considered. What are you worried about? Well, number one, we have a president who is not a thing job is done by just focusing on our country. That's another difference between Joe Biden.

Yes. And it's not just for the obvious reason that the pandemic can continue spreading when it spreads around the world. It's because Joe Biden, in his long history, use are. country as a leader. Right. And I think he plans to help lead the world out of the pandemic. And there was no way to do that until we vaccinated our country first. But he absolutely does not consider job done until that happens.

There are plenty of things to worry about. And we still have parts of the country, mostly in the South and also in rural communities, where there's a low percentage of the country that, i.e., the South, that with a pandemic and the epidemic lingered for another 20, 30 years. not were eradicated. So there's parts of the country where there's more of a distrust of science when there's a different, whatever drives

it, and not just the people to vote for him. Not for nothing, this is a man of serious empathy for not just there are people to whom everything is hard for, people's communities. They know that their lives are tough enough to begin with. And so they want,

and so I will tell you that there's, obviously people are very happy that we've made progress. But working for this president, you know, as long as there are people suffering, they're going to be focusing on the Let's talk about getting vaccines out there because this is something that is good for the country. It's good for America's soft power. It's good. I mean, just from a purely kind of calculated move, but it's also like a thing we must do as humans.

And it's also the only way, you know, it's good for humanity. And it's also the only way we're ever going to really be safe. How do you do that? because, like, these Pfizer vaccines, you're not going to be able to send the Pfizer vaccine to sub-Saharan Africa. Like, that's not going to make any sense. Like, I mean, the J&J, like,

how do you even, like, get the motions moving here on this? So, first of all, it is not easy. But, you know what, there are a lot of things that weren't easy. It is definitely several. It's going to take a lot of work and a lot of collaboration. It's definitely a lot of money. But we need to produce something like $11 billion, vaccines. On a typical year, we produce 4 billion vaccines. So the first thing we need to do is we need to

completely expand manufacturing capacity. It's actually quite a good opportunity for the country because we can grow jobs. We can be exporters. We can either way, as you very rightly put it, in this humanitarian and strategic effort. So we have already begun the process. We've committed 80 million doses to overseas. That's five times more than any other. country has done so far. We're donating those doses. And you know, you can imagine we are at work to create manufacturing testing. The week we're doing this interview, in fact, right at the moment, the G7 is together in English. And wealthy countries around the world are going to have to come together, I believe they will, and pledge get done for the developing world. So we need

11 billion doses, you know, that you can assume that when all is said and done, I've seen different figures, but let's just assume that this will cost tens of billions of dollars. Yeah, well. This is going to have to be done by the rich countries. And, you know, that money will support the kind of infrastructure, distribution, et cetera, needed for the Pfizer-M-Dirna and MRNA vaccines or the Johnson Johnson or other vaccines. You guys and Ron Clayne is really, I think was really at the forefront of this, but also you. And I know that it was a different disease Ebola, but, you know, we have had pandemics before that did not take over like this.

Now, I know that this was a different pandemic and there were, you know, carriers who didn't, asymptomatic carriers, there were different elements. But part of the failing here and why this, why this, why. things got so out of hand so quickly, is the Trump administration no question, but it's also the WHO and China. What can we do as a planet to be more on the lookout for pandemics and stop them before they kill hundreds of thousands of millions of people? The name of the game, of course, is to contain it before it's out of control. If you got a small fire in your kitchen underneath the ban, it's going to be a hell of a lot easier to put it down then than when when once the curtains get caught up fire and are in flames,

and then it spreads to other parts of the house. So you have to be able to move fast, contain things, and get them early, or you're going to be dealing with a far, far different mess. So you have to be living in a world wherever it's happened, whether it comes out of China, whether it comes out of any part of the world, we can trust to one another

at the earliest possible moment, give everybody the complete information that we need. There's no question China didn't do that here. There's no question that other institutions failed. It doesn't mean those institutions are bad and should be discarded. It means they should be reformed. It means we should look at them very hard and say, hey, we've got to do this a lot better. Now, the Trump administration defunded our intelligence capabilities in China from the CDC. He funded a lot of our capabilities to create stockpiles and things we needed back home didn't take this seriously. He's not the only one.

Uh-oh. There are lessons to be learned here. And, you know, in the book, I go through, and I finished the book by putting in place something I call Exhibit N. And what Exhibit N stands for is Exhibit N is a list of things that we could do and should do. It's a list of recommendations. The reason we call Exhibit N is because there's no effing way it will ever happen unless we actually do something even simpler, which is actually focus on becoming a better country,

focus on caring for one another. Again, they require us to do things like making sure that people have financial support that pandemic. They require us to invest in things that we can't see like science with the understanding that they will pay off. They are all things that we know that we can very easily do. You and I can come up that list, but we would also look at that list and say, these are things a good country will do.

Let's take this opportunity to become a better country. Right. This is a G7 issue as much as it's an America issue. It's a G7 issue. Ideally, it's a G20 issue. Yeah. Oh, thank you. Thank you.

Thank you. Andy, you are the greatest. I can't wait to talk to you again. I just always learn so much from talking to you. It's mutual. Really appreciate it. On that note, we'll wrap this episode of the new abnormal from The Daily Beast. In future episodes, we'll be talking to smart,

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