The Pandemic Blog

I don’t get time to read full books anymore, but I devour book reviews. Thus I immediately jumped on a review of “ Uncontrolled Spread ” by Scott Gottlieb in the Wall Street Journal a week ago. Dr. Gottlieb, until 2019 head of the FDA under Trump , had one of the clearest views of the pandemic of anyone. I’ll discuss that review in my next post. I know most of you won’t be able to read the article, unless you’re WSJ subscribers. I won’t try to summarize the article, but here is the most important passage in it: If there’s one overarching theme of “Uncontrolled Spread,” it’s that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention failed utterly. It’s now well known that the CDC didn’t follow standard operating procedures in its own labs, resulting in contamination and a complete botch of its original SARS-CoV-2 test. The agency’s failure put us weeks behind and took the South Korea option of suppressing the virus off the table. But the blunder was much deeper and more systematic than...

I don’t get time to read full books anymore, but I devour book reviews. Thus I immediately jumped on a review of “ Uncontrolled Spread ” by Scott Gottlieb in the Wall Street Journal a week ago. Dr. Gottlieb, until 2019 head of the FDA under Trump , had one of the clearest views of the pandemic of anyone. I’ll discuss that review in my next post. However, I just reread his Jan. 28, 2020 article in the WSJ (titled “Act now to prevent an American epidemic”), and wanted to cry. Just read what he said the US should do – and then imagine what might have happened if somebody in the White House had cared enough about the country to make sure these things did actually happen: First, the most important public-health tool for containment is the identification and isolation of cases to break the chain of spread. Public-health authorities and health-care systems are on high alert for potential cases. But authorities can’t act quickly without a test that can diagnose the condition rapidly. *...