Slavitt on COVID Pandemic: ‘We Could All Have Done Better’ Sacrificing for One Another

Former White House coronavirus task force adviser Andy Slavitt on Monday discussed the coronavirus pandemic and the United States’ response to the outbreak.

Slavitt, who just came out with a book entitled, “Preventable: The Inside Story of How Leadership Failures, Politics, and Selfishness Doomed the U.S. Coronavirus Response,” told CBS’s “This Morning” that all Americans could have done a better job sacrificing for each other to prevent the spread of the virus.

“Well, of course, we would have had a pandemic here in the U.S. no matter what,” Slavitt said. “But look, we can count the mistakes, and I think it’s important that we do if for nothing else so we don’t repeat them. We obviously had a set of technical mistakes with the testing and the PPE that we know about. But if we’re honest, we also had two other types of mistakes that caused a lot of loss of life. One was just plainly political leadership mistakes. … We denied the virus for too long under the Trump White House. There was too much squashing of dissent and playing on divisions.”

“But I also think we need to look at one another and ask ourselves what do we need to do better next time? And in many respects, being able to sacrifice a little bit for one another to get through this and to save more lives … is going to be essential,” he added. “That’s something that I think we could all have done better on.”

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