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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