The New Yorker Radio Hour - Lawrence Wright on How the Pandemic Response Went So Wrong

Episode Date: December 28, 2020

The first doses of the COVID-19 vaccine mark what we hope will be the beginning of the end of the global pandemic. The speed of vaccine development has been truly unprecedented, but this breakthrough is taking place at a moment when the U.S. death toll has also reached a new peak—over three thousand per day. How was the response to such a clear danger mismanaged so tragically? The New Yorker staff writer Lawrence Wright—who has reported on Al Qaeda and the Church of Scientology—has followed the story of the pandemic unfolding in the United States since the first lockdowns in March. Wright walks David Remnick through key moments of decision-making in the Trump White House: from the response to the first reports of a virus to botched mask mandates and testing rollouts, up through the emergency-use authorization of the vaccine. The Trump Administration bears much responsibility for the bungled response to the coronavirus pandemic, but Wright also finds ample evidence of larger, systemic breakdown. “The magnitude of our failure,” he tells David Remnick, “is unparalleled.”  New Yorker Radio Hour listeners, we want to hear from you.  We have a few questions about the show and how you listen to it. The survey takes about twenty minutes, and your feedback will help us make our podcast better.  Take the survey here.

Welcome to the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. 2020 will be remembered as the year of the pandemic, the catastrophe of COVID-19. There were overwhelmed hospitals, shuttered businesses, upended livelihoods, millions of sick people, and a staggering death toll. And though vaccines have arrived with incredible speed, we still have a very long way to go before this ends. It's an agonizing question to ask, while we are still in the midst of this, But we have to ask it, could this year have been different? How many lives could have been saved had the federal government, starting with the president of the United States, acted with greater dispatch, efficiency, and transparency? The New Yorker's Lawrence Wright set everything aside from the start of the pandemic to follow its course and write a definitive account.

He spent seven months talking to government officials inside the White House and the public health bureaucracies. He spoke to frontline medical workers who have fought tired. tirelessly through the pandemic, and to scientists whose breakthroughs against the virus can only be described as a kind of miracle. His 30,000-word-long article, The Plague Year, was just published at New Yorker.com, and it offers an expansive portrait of how the pandemic has changed every aspect of our lives and what mistakes were made along the way. Larry, hi, how are you? It's a pleasure to talk to you, David. So much has been written and said about the pandemic, and there'll be much more to come inevitably.

But what did you set out to do? From the beginning, David, I had this idea that this pandemic is not just about illness. It's not just about health. It's about our society and how it's changed in the face of this onslaught. And, you know, it's touched on race relations, the economy, our politics, and, of course, science. And I wanted to find a way to throw. thread a needle through all of those aspects of our society and see how we've changed as a country. So as a few days ago, the United States was experiencing 200,000 new cases of COVID per day.

The virus has already killed over 300,000 people. If one's going to start assigning blame for this enormous disaster, where would you start? Well, it's a political failing to start with. I mean, public health, you know, there was a global preparedness index that was prepared that came out in October of 2019, looking at countries all over the world to determine how well prepared are they for a pandemic. And the answer was they were not very well prepared, but the country that was most prepared in the whole world was the United States. So what the hell happened? If we were the most prepared of any country in the world, it turns out we've had the, we have to be somewhere at the of the reality.

We are. You know, the magnitude of our failure is unparalleled in the whole world. So what happened? There were several things, and there's fault to be thrown in different directions. And let me start with public health. There were assumptions in the public health world that turned out to be wrong. One is that travel bans don't work. Well, actually, you know, they can be very useful in slowing the transmission.

and countries that enforce travel bans early followed by quarantines, such as Taiwan or New Zealand, they actually did pretty well in this pandemic. We eventually had our own travel bans, and especially the first one against China, they probably did buy us some time, but we didn't use it very wisely. And masks.

There's another thing. In the public health world, You may well remember the tweet by our surgeon general, you know, seriously people don't buy masks. They don't work. You know, that was the message the public health contingent was giving out. And it turns out that masks are crucial. How could they have been so wrong about something so elemental?

They were basing their whole presumption on flu. Flu, you know, you can wear a mask if you have the flu. and it might keep people away around you from getting it. But essentially, it's not seen as a real barrier against the transmission of disease. And SARS-1, you know, it only transmitted when people were actually sick. So it just wasn't seen as being that important. But to tell you the truth, David, you know, masks have been a question mark in public health. And now I think that question mark has been removed.

The President of the United States famously mocked the use of masks. He did seemingly everything he could to discourage the wearing of masks, including at White House ceremonies that became super spreader events. This is a terrible question to have to ask. But do you lay at the feet of the President of the United States many, many deaths? It seems inevitable. Oh, I do. I think you can't help but look at them. You know, let's give them credit where it belongs.

I think that Operation Warp Speed may turn out to be, you know, the best thing that the Trump administration was able to do to bring these vaccines online much quicker than they have been in the past. Aside from that. But what did the administration actually do in terms of warp speed? What was its action other than to call for having a vaccine as quickly as possible? What was the nature of the White House's action there? The big change, David, was that they offered to pay for the vaccines even if they failed so that Big Pharma would have an incentive to get in and start developing these vaccines right away.

And also they partnered. And, you know, it's been a tremendously successful so far development of a vaccine. world record breaking time, but these companies knew they weren't going to lose money. Pfizer did not buy into the warp speed, but they had a guarantee from the government to buy millions of doses. And Moderna did buy into it, and so Johnson and Johnson and several others. It has accelerated the process of vaccine development enormously. Four years was the previous record for a vaccine to go from development into the arms of Americans. If that's the case, and it certainly seems to be the case, why was the President of the United

States so cynical about, dismissive of masks and so much else? Well, you know, it's a psychological problem, as far as I can tell David, honestly. He agreed that this might be useful. He said that some people think it's useful. And if might be. But then he went on to say, but I'm not going to wear it. It's voluntary and I'm not going to wear it. And in that case, he became a kind of saboteur. He undermined the policy of public health that his advisors were pushing. And he commands the attention of millions and millions of Americans. There's one of the thing that I would lay at his feet is, you know, our response never had had a national plan. There was a telephone call that the president had with the governors,

and he said, we're behind you. But, to clarify that, as for PPE and that sort of stuff, you get it yourself. You're on your own. Yeah, you're on. And they had no idea this was going to happen to them. And nor were they prepared. I mean, Gretchen Whitmer, the governor of Michigan, and told me that they only had enough PPE for one more shift. I mean, they don't have a national stockpile. And, you know, the president had complained that the stockpile was empty when his administration came into office, which it was depleted. It had been depleted by the previous pandemic in 2009.

But in three and a half years, the Trump administration had done nothing to augment that supply. So, you know, we were low on supplies nationally, but then when the governors go out on the market to try to find masks, gloves, gowns, all, you know, thermometers, everything that they need to fight in this pandemic, they find themselves bidding against each other. And then finally, they find themselves bidding against the United States, the federal government, which in many cases would seize the shipments that the states had ordered and confiscate it for federal. use. You know, Charlie Baker, the governor of Massachusetts, ordered a couple of million, maybe it was 10 million masks from China. And it came into the port of New York, and FEMA seized it and paid a little bit more for them. And the next time he ordered masks, he did it secretly. He got the owner of the New England Patriots to send the team plane to China. And then they flew it into Logan airport and loaded it into trucks with a National Guard and hid it from the government.

And that was the case of many governors around our country. Now, Peter Hessler, our correspondent in China, painted a portrait of a country that did a much better job of containing the virus once it was out and about and doing its damage. But what could China have done to stop this much earlier? What responsibility is on the Chinese government for its lack of transparency about what was happening in Wuhan? China's behavior, David, is really sinister, in my opinion. You know, in 2003, there was the SARS outbreak. And in that case, the Chinese government actually hid the infected patients from the World Health Organization authorities.

They put them in ambulances and checked them into hotels until the authorities were gone. And they tried to keep this information secret, even as SARS was spreading around all over the world. This time, in late December, Chinese scientists began to realize that there was an unknown pneumonia circulating and that people were dying of it. And immediately, they became worried that it might be SARS. doctors figured this out. They actually had patients tested and they came back as a SARS-like virus, and that information was suppressed. And eventually the Chinese government posted the genome of the new virus online, January 10th. To this day, as far as I understand, they haven't given any patient samples. You need to have a sample of the actual virus in order to validate the efficacy of the test.

and we didn't get a sample of virus until we had the first official case in Washington State on January 20th. And that delayed the development of the test. I mean, there are many other examples I could give you, but Chinese behavior in this in terms of caring for what's happening in the rest of the world outside of their own country has been disgraceful, in my opinion. I'm talking with Lawrence Wright, more in a moment. extent was the federal response in the United States by the book, as they say, and how much of it was ad-libbed? Well, you know, when the Obama administration turned over documents to the incoming Trump

administration, among them was this playbook for a pandemic. And it lays out very clearly, you know, what should be done in the case of an outbreak like this? And, you know, federal plan, for instance, you know, what would that look like? And if, you know, if you have to, if it's a terrorism, who do you call? If, you know, there's a whole list of all the government agencies for a brand new administration that's not used to the scope of the federal government, who do you call and what will they do for you? And the Trump administration just jettisoned that. And they created their own, they had a crimson contagion exercise that went on for part of a year. And they learned quite a lot about how would they behave in case of such a pandemic.

And the answer was it would be chaotic. Government agencies wouldn't know which one was in charge. There was not enough PPE available. And all of the things that actually did happen were forecast in the Trump administration's own exercise. Were they distracted by the impeachment drama early on in the pandemic? I think one could say that the president was distracted. But on the other hand, other people weren't. involved in this in the administration, there should have been a stronger response. I think that

if you go back in January, when the impeachment trials began, it's I think on January 23rd that the first mention of the coronavirus is uttered in the Congress. Mitch McConnell says that there'll be a briefing the next day about the new virus. And about 20 senators showed up. And the public health authorities, including Redfield and Fauci, were pretty casual about it. There were no, you know, there was no incidence of transmission in the United States so far. It always seemed to be over the horizon. And there was a sense, I think, of denial, even in our public health agencies, that was communicated to administration officials. Some people were aware. You know, I mean, we, you know, you should point out that there were people that knew that this was going to be a

real problem. Well, one of the people that you describe in great detail, and he's kind of a profile within the bigger story, is a national security official named Matt Pottinger, former journalist from the Wall Street Journal whose specialty was China. And the portrait you create of him, that you paint of him, is of somebody who knows damn well what's going on and who's trying his best, but is existing in a, I don't know what to call it, a White House fun house of, it's like a bad dream. And he can't get anywhere. Describe his interactions with the president.

Well, you know, first of all, I have to say Matt is a former reporter. And it turns out that that's a really valuable background to have when you. You're not wed to any of these orthodoxies of public health, for instance. You know, you're not stuck in some sort of policy world. You're just looking at the problem. And, you know, when the outbreak first arose, he remembered his experience in China during the SARS outbreak. And so he started calling his sources in China and Hong Kong and Taiwan and speaking to some of the doctors that he had spoken to before. And they gave him a totally different picture than the one the Chinese.

government was propagating. And he got really worried. And so he began what became the coronavirus task force. He summoned people from different agencies. He's the deputy national security advisor. So they would, they all have representatives, but he'd often bring in cabinet members and try to spur them into taking this seriously. And eventually, the first action that drew Trump into it was that Matt believed that we had to stop flights from China. There were direct flights coming in every day, even from Wuhan, directly into thousands and thousands of Chinese tourists and Americans who had been in China were coming into the United States every week. And it occurred to Matt, we should stop this. And, you know, this is one of the things

that public health people were resistant to because the idea in public health had always been, well, you need to be able to move doctors and equipment around. Probably the disease has already gotten here, so travel bans are ineffective. It stigmatizes the country where the

disease is. There were a lot of reasons. But the other thing that weighed against that was, look, we're bringing in thousands of potentially infected people into our country. And you know, we need to slow that. and Matt advocated very strongly for that and then took that to the president.

He eventually had support from the public health people, that Fauci and others, to stop travel from China. But Puttinger must have been incredibly frustrated by Trump's behavior overall, no? Yeah, I think he talks to me at the end about leadership. And, you know, he thinks that there are things that the people. president got right, like the travel ban, that he's seldom given credit for, and I think warp speed. On the other hand, Matt was the first person to wear a mask in the White House. And he said, it was like wearing a clown nose. People couldn't believe he was doing it. And the president said, are you sick? And he said, no, I just don't want to go down on the history

books. It's the guy that knocked off the president with COVID. And, you know, he then thought, you know, I'll give mask to everybody in the National Security Council, but it turned out the White House didn't really have any mask. So he, and it was very difficult to find them at that point. So he put in a call to Taiwan, and Taiwan was at that point making 11 million masks every day for their 23 million citizens. And they donated several million masks and Matt appropriated some masks for the White House. If Donald Trump had had the right attitude about masks, if he had worn, one, if he had modeled it, as it were, you live in Texas. Do you think mask wearing in Texas would have been greater? Do you think it would have been greater in Florida, in North Dakota,

in places that had become just overwhelmed by COVID and largely because of behavioral issues? I had to think there's no question that his example was pernicious. And it had a terrible effect, not just in red states, all over the country. You see it on the streets of New York. It's hardly limited to red states. Americans aren't used to wearing masks. And, you know, I think in Asian countries, they were trained by SARS to realize that you can protect yourself with a mask. And, you know, that message hadn't really penetrated in the U.S. You know, Matt looked at the fact that in Hong Kong, a city he was very familiar with, the densest city in the world, there was no community spread. And why was that? It was because 90% of the people in Hong Kong were wearing masks. And regardless of what public health orthodoxy says, regardless of cultural appropriateness, masks were going to be key in stopping the spread of this epidemic. And unfortunately, we got onto it very late and we had a president who was working against it. Both Anthony Fauci and Deborah Birx are portrayed in this piece at some length. Anthony Fauci is often portrayed in almost saintly terms. I mean, he's become a kind of cult figure,

but his determinations were not always perfect. Deborah Berks' reputation was much more mixed, and yet we get a picture of her that's quite interesting here. How did you come away from your reporting, analyzing Anthony Fauci and Berks? You know, I admire that. I admire the them both. You know, and Dr. Fauci, you know, as you know, as you point out, has been kind of canonized, but he was also a representative of certain public health orthodoxies that he had to change. And one thing that, you know, this experience has taught us, science is a process of learning from your mistakes. And there were certain mistakes built into the public health world that had to be undone. And also the assumption that this was going to be just like the flu and that, you know,

the asymptomatic carriers was something that really threw a curveball into the public health world. And it was hard for people like Dr. Fauci to go back and undo ambivalent statements at the beginning of this outbreak and come down so firmly, for instance, on the subject of masks. But that's what science is. He's a true scientist, and when new data comes in that contradicts what he thought, he changes his opinion. Burks, it's interesting, early on when I was doing my reporting, I was getting a lot of derogatory comments about her from people in public health. And part of it was they couldn't stand the fact that she seemed to be coutowing to Donald Trump. and yet, you know, she was able to stay in the White House and be influential by at least, you know, accommodating what he said in public and then talking differently in private. It wasn't until this Dr. Scott Atlas came on board, a radiologist who was a fox commentator, and he caught Trump's ear.

and he was advocating herd immunity and totally contrary ideas to what responsible people in public health were saying. Advocating herd immunity is essentially throwing up your hands and saying, well, let's let everybody get it until it burns itself out. But in the meantime, hundreds of thousands more people would have died. Exactly.

Well, his idea was let's let them get infected. That's how you create her. herd immunity. But it didn't seem to matter so much that there'd be hundreds of thousands of more casualties than there would be if we actually fought against the disease as other responsible societies had accomplished. I'm sorry, Larry, but at that point, at that point, how do you now throw up your hands and think the government is not only making mistakes, but is in the hands of people who are giving insane advice? Well, you know, it's, they're There were influential people involved in this government that really, really did a lot of damage.

And, you know, there was Michael Caputo, for instance, who was the spokesperson for the Health and Human Services Department, which oversees, by the way, the CDC, the NIH, and FDA. So he's the chief spokesperson for all of this. And what kind of priorities did he have? Well, one thing was they were going to do a public service announcement using celebrities to promote the presidents. Early on, it was like, help the president help you. Sounded like a Jerry McGuire statement, but they wanted to get celebrities to advertise what a great job the president is doing. And to accomplish this, he took $300 million out of the CDC budget. This is a guy who is Roger Stone's best friend who had been in Russia working for gas prom,

and one of his tasks was to polish Vladimir Putin's image. How such people find their way into this administration is just a mystery to me, but they actually affect policy. They direct our policy. Larry, one of the most remarkable characters in your piece is a doctor named Ebony Hilton. Tell me about her. She is a terrific advocate for trying to balance the ethnic disparities in health outcomes.

And she's been a great spokesperson for that. But also she's been on the front line herself. You know, an anesthesiologist is more intimately involved with a patient when intubating them than almost any other force on the staff. and so she's at risk every single day. And I really admire the work that she and people like her have done, and she represents so many health care workers. But like many of them, you know, she's isolated.

She hasn't seen her family in 10 months. Like a lot of health care workers, you know, because so much discretionary surgery has been abandoned, she had to take a pay cut. She spent Thanksgiving alone with her. dogs. You know, these are things that happen to health care workers that maybe we don't appreciate the personal sacrifices that are made. One of the big questions that's going to face the Biden administration is how to roll out the vaccine and treatments to the communities that need them

the most. What's the current thinking about how to distribute the vaccine properly and the politics of that? Well, at the beginning, I think we've had an okay, you know, decision about who going to get the vaccine first. Frontline workers really deserve it. It may be true, as some statistics say, that they are not as jeopardized as some people in the population, elderly people. But they're on the front line, and fear is a lot of, you know, a big part of their job. And I think easing that anxiety is important. And elderly people, now people over 75, they account for by far the greatest burden on the hospitals and far more fatalities. So it's significant that those two groups are the first in line.

I think what we're facing now is a tremendous lobbying effort by every imaginable constituency to get next in line. And, you know, Uber drivers and, you know, trash collectors and restaurant workers and so on. Everybody wants to be next. And this is going to be a morally difficult decision to make. And I think it should be made on who's the most vulnerable. And work from that and work down, you know, essential workers. Yes, of course, you know, they should be taken into account.

But some of them are more vulnerable than others. So if you're just taking into, you know, putting in line a 20-year-old pizza delivery guy who's not likely to die of it. And a 75-year-old chef who is also exposed, then I think we have to make distinctions like that. It gets even more complicated. Atul Gawande, who's obviously a doctor and who writes for us, said in society, when have the bakers ever come before the bankers?

And in order to gain society's trust at a time when society's general trust in government and public health bureaucracies is at a real low, there's inevitably going to be some cheating, some privileged people trying to jump the line. Don't you worry about that? I do. I do. And of course, I want the shot, too.

But, you know, this is an opportunity for the Biden administration to create what we haven't had up to this point, which is a national plan. You know, it would be so helpful. If we had federal guidance, not just for the inoculations, we haven't finished with this disease yet. You know, it's still spreading and cresting, and it probably will be like that when the Biden administration comes into office. We'll be just finishing with the holidays. I foresee it being kind of a nightmare.

And we need to have a firm guiding principle at the top of this so that the states are united and not at war with each other over purchasing supplies, that we have a national mass mandate, for instance, in order to try to get this under control. These are things that the Trump administration has been reluctant to do. Larry, do you think the pandemic has fundamentally altered the political landscape in the country and in what way? Oh, I think that the political fallout for this is going to be enduring.

and part of it has to do with how does the government relate to people. I mean, I think this is, you know, I analyze this pandemic as being like an x-ray that allows us to see all the broken places in our society. One of the things that's broken is the trust between the government and the people. And, you know, this pandemic has laid bare how the lack of compassion, the lack of compassion, the lack of competence in our federal government. And those are things that have to be mended in order for people to regain the kind of trust

that a healthy society needs to have. The piece of writing, and it's a remarkable one, is called The Plague Year by the New Yorkers Lawrence Wright, and you can find it at new yorker.com. Larry, thank you so much. Thanks, David. I'm David Remnick. Thank you for listening. And here's to hoping that the new year

will bring us all good health. and some solace as well. Thank you.