october12–25, 2020 | newyork 39
Why are we ineffective? First, we have to be
unified to mount a defense, and we’re more
divided than ever before.
Second, you have to have a competent
government that is highly efficient and
highly effective, and our government has
atrophied for decades. We just haven’t used
the muscle, and the muscle has atrophied.
It just shows a larger problem that we have
as a nation.
And as a world. The WHO has been, in
certain ways, a disaster.
You’re right, the world. But just from our
selfish, parochial point of view, from the
nation’s point of view, the WorldHealth
Organization, they missed it. And by the
way, if you look at the CDC and NIH, they
have the same job description as the World
Health Organization. They were supposed
to be watching the global pandemic.
The virus was in China in December.
They knew it. How they assumed that it
was going to stay there, I have no idea. But
it went to Europe in January, February,
March. They missed it. It was coming here
from Europe. They missed it. No health
screening at airports; flights landing at
JFK, Newark. We had tens of thousands of
infections before anyone ever knew.
Reading your book,^5 I was thinking of
RFK’s book Thirteen Days, about the
Cuban Missile Crisis. Your book could
have been called Nineteen Days. You’ve
been criticized in retrospect formoving
too slowly, but you actually got to a shut-
down pretty quickly.
In 19 days.^6 And these are New Yorkers,
right? We had heard about cases in China,
heard about cases in California and Seattle,
but New Yorkers, there is a certain parochi-
alism for New Yorkers—it’s not real until it
happens here. Right? Well, there are cases
in Seattle, I know, but that’s far away.
March 1, we have our first case. That’s
when it starts to get real. In 19 days, you
have to bring the public to a point where
they will accept the most dramatic gov-
ernment policies maybe ever enacted. You
find the last time government said, “Close
your business. Close your school. Stay
home. Wear a mask. Don’t hug your par-
ents.” Government has never done that.
They had to accept that, and they had to
believe that it was credible, because if
they disregarded the policy, it would have
all been over. I couldn’t enforce any of
those policies. How do you enforce
“Everybody must stay in their house”?
You don’t have the governmental ability
to do it. So all you had was the chance that
you could actually convince people that it
was necessary.
In the book, you refer to Errol Morris’s
documentary about Robert McNamara,
The Fog of War, and you talk about the fog
of COVID. One thing it seems clear you
wish you had known was that the disease
was coming from Europe. What other
things do you wish you had known?
To spread the virus, they said, you have
to be symptomatic. Sneezing and cough-
ing—that’s how it spreads. Wrong, wrong,
wrong. They missed asymptomatic spread.
What’s amazing about that mistake is that
you had European doctors and Chinese
doctors say in The New England Journal of
Medicine that people were spreading it
without showing symptoms.
But I wonder what different policy
approach you would build on that knowl-
edge. Even today, knowing that asympto-
matics contribute so significantly to the
spread of the disease, we’re still basically
testing only symptomatic people.
Well, part of it is what you told people
was untrue. And I believe they would have
been more cautious if they knew that. If
the person was asymptomatic, you were
totally comfortable giving thema good-
night kiss—that was a mistake. Second,
we do test asymptomatics now. It totally
changed our testing protocol when we
heard that. Our testing protocol has noth-
ing to do with symptoms.
But you’re still depending onpeople
coming to the test site. We’re not doing
surveillance-scale testing, where we’re
requiring everyone to take a test to get
into schools or go to the supermarket. It’s
still people volunteering for a test, so it’s
going to disproportionately reflect symp-
tomatics, who may be responsiblefor only
about half of transmission.
Yeah, but there’s a gray there. We’ve never
gotten a court order to have somebody
tested. But colleges, it’s mandatory testing.
Nursing homes, it’s mandatorytesting.
We’ve never had a case where the college
student says “I refuse,” and the college says
“Well, then I’m going to expel you.” But we
do blanket testing of categories now.
Why not include high schools and ele-
mentary schools in that?
I’ve recommended it to the local school
districts. I’ve recommended they do as
aggressive testing as they can. I don’t
know that still, as a nation, we have
enough tests to do ... Just take New York
City schoolchildren. It’s like a million,
right? You could never do a million
schoolchildren every day. You have
140,000 nursing-home workers. You
could never do 140,000 nursing-home
workers every day. But we have 20 million
people in the state. So you still are nowhere
near what you would like to do, right? You
don’t have the physical capacity to do that
volume every day. But that would be ideal.
Rapid testing would be ideal.
Going back to the spring and what we
could have done differently, I assume you
wish also that we had been earlier to
understand the preventative role that
masks would play as well. Right?
The big three mistakes: You missed it
when it came; you were slow in closing it
down; you did no health screening at the
airports. Second, you were wrong on
asymptomatic spread. Third, you were
wrong on masks. Fourth, you were opera-
tionally incompetent. You couldn’t mobi-
lize the testing. You couldn’t provide the
PPE. You provided no federal controls.
The premise of delegating to 50 states in
a national pandemic made no sense.
covid is not a New York, New Jersey,
Connecticut issue. It’s a national issue.
Especially given the much greater
capacity the federal government has to
mobilize capital and resources. Sending
states into a marketplace to bidagainst
one another,^7 instead—
They had the Defense Production Act to
do just that. You call up a clothing manufac-
turer and say, “I need you to make masks.
I need you to make gowns. And youmust do
it.” They did the exact opposite. They made
every state compete to find masks and then
subject yourself to all sorts of fraudand bid
up the price tenfold. Reliant on the owner of
the New England Patriots footballteam to
fly a private jet to China.^8
- Washington State had the 5. 6. 7.
nation’s first confirmed case
on January 21 and closed
restaurants, bars, and gyms
53 days later, on March 15.
California had its first case
on Janu ed a
shelter- 52
days lat. New
York had its first case on
March 1 and announced its
shutdown on March 20.
In March, as it becameclearthat
the federal governmentdidnot
have enough medicalequipment
and protective gear togo around,
President Trump instructed
governors to procureventilators,
gloves, and respiratormaskson
their own. A frenzyensued in
which each state government
scrambled tosnapupasmuchas
it could, competingagainstone
another for dwindlingstores.
New York City
mayor Bill de
Blasio called for a
shutdown in the
city three days
earlier, but
PHOTOGRAPHS: SHUTTERSTOCK (PAUL); GRAEME JENNINGS/WASHINGTON EXAMINER/BLOOMBERG VIA GETTY IMAGES (FAUCI); MADDIE MEYER/GETTY IMAGES (PATRIOTS)
- In early April, the Massachusetts
governor asked Robert Kraft to
send the Patriots’ team jet to
China to fetch 1.2 million N95
masks that
otherwise
would have
taken weeks to
arrive.
