-In late March, 2020, as COVID-19 took hold in the US,
conservative media began to promote an antimalarial drug
as a possible remedy.
-So, in a lot of ways, hydroxychloroquine
is the ideal medicine.
If it turns out to be an effective treatment
against coronavirus,
things will change fast in this country and for the better.
-I feel good about it.
That's all it is -- just a feeling.
You know, I'm a smart guy.
I feel good about it.
-The president's top scientists were more cautious.
-Is there any evidence to suggest that, as with malaria,
it might be used as a prophylaxis against COVID-19?
-The answer is no, and the evidence
that you're talking about, John, is anecdotal evidence.
-But unlike his predecessors,
Trump was skeptical of the science.
-There's reason to believe that it could be successful here.
Now, the reason I disagree with you --
and I think Tony would disagree with me --
but the reason I disagree with you is that we have a pandemic.
We have people dying now.
-He has been unwilling often to listen to the experts
in his own administration.
He has contradicted them.
He has belittled them.
He has, at times, pushed them off to the side.
-Can you continue to do your job
when the president of the United States
is publicly questioning your credibility in this way?
-You know, George, I don't know how to address that.
I'm just going to certainly continue doing my job.
-Studies would show hydroxychloroquine
was not effective in treating COVID-19,
but it was still pushed as a miracle cure
in the dark corners of the Internet,
and the president never stopped believing.
-I happen to think it works in the early stages.
I think frontline medical people believe that, too -- some, many.
And so we'll take a look at it.
-That's not the kind of thing
you have seen in past presidents.
They have been willing to rely on experts.
They've been willing to trust the science
on some of these things.
One of the guiding principles of Obama's approach
to these kinds of issues was that there's expertise
that should be tapped and expertise
that should be listened to.
-If we're guided by the science, the facts, not fear,
then I'm absolutely confident that we can prevent
a serious outbreak here in the United States,
and we can continue to lead the world in this urgent effort.
-The signs were everywhere, but now it's official.
We are in a recession.
-As President Barack Obama took office,
the US economy was crashing.
Pandemic preparation was, once again, set aside.
-I was distressed when Obama moved into the White House
that they abolished the Office of Health and Security
that they inherited from the Bush Administration.
-We will need to stabilize, repair,
and reform our banking system
and get credit flowing again to families and businesses.
We will need to end the culture where we ignore problems
until they become full-blown crises.
-It seemed like health was the kind of issue
that a progressive Democrat would embrace pretty readily.
And they just abolished it.
-But in 2009, the new president was soon confronted
with his first health crisis.
-Death toll rises in Mexico's capital city.
The worried line up for testing, their faces covered with masks.
-President Barack Obama faced with early reports
of a potentially pandemic virus,
first detected in a laboratory in San Diego,
but emerging out of Mexico.
We first detected this in the first week of April.
By the end of April, there was already enough recognition
within the scientific community
that we were dealing with an unprecedented event.
-The CDC now confirms that a 23-month-old
from Texas has died, the first death from this virus
that has been reported outside of Mexico.
-The Bush team had left Obama a playbook he could fall back on.
-We built a good plan.
Gratefully, we never had to use it.
But within a year, the H1N1 influenza
began to move around the world, and the plan was activated.
And I thought they did a creditable job of exercising
the plan the way it was designed.
They improved it.
H1N1 was a deadly swine flu that spread rapidly
to more than 200 countries, and scientists estimate
it killed nearly 300,000 people worldwide.
-The Department of Health and Human Services has declared
a public health emergency as a precautionary tool
to ensure that we have the resources
we need at our disposal
to respond quickly and effectively.
-This is almost two months before the World
Health Organization declared this a pandemic.
He was forward-leaning, evidence-based,
and very clear that the US
was going to take the steps that needed to be taken.
But one thing is clear.
Our capacity to deal with a public health challenge
of this sort rests heavily on the work
of our scientific and medical community.
And this one more example of why
we can't allow our nation to fall behind.
-The president was very much involved
and unlike anybody I've ever met.
I mean, you started laying something out to him,
and he could connect all the dots,
and he would just get it.
-Because the vaccine now has FDA approval,
it meets government quality standards and is made properly.
Last week, it was announced that people getting
the swine flu vaccine will need only one dose.
The administration scrambled to respond to it.
I think, overall, did a fairly good job.
But obviously, lives were lost, more than 10,000 people died,
and I think that it was another wake-up call
about the risks and threats we face.
-But my fear, frankly, is, when this is over,
we'll decide we don't need to worry about a pandemic
for the next 30 years.
Nothing could be more dangerous.
-What H1N1 showed us was that sooner or later,
a very lethal pandemic flu or virus or flu-like outbreak
was going to come to America, and we had to get ready for it.
-Five years later, in 2014,
there were fears that moment had arrived,
with the emergence of Ebola.
A fast-acting and often fatal virus,
Ebola spread quickly from a small village in Guinea
to neighboring Sierra Leone, and then to Liberia.
-Dying of Ebola is a brutal process,
and for this man, a lonely one,
as fearful onlookers keep their distance
and ambulances refuse to pick him up until he is dead.
-But in October or late September,
I should say, the inevitable happened.
Someone from West Africa came to the US with Ebola.
They arrived in Dallas.
They were misdiagnosed.
They ultimately were properly diagnosed, but too late.
-We've been told now by the hospital
that Thomas Eric Duncan has passed away.
-Thomas Eric Duncan died in Dallas from Ebola,
and in the course of his treatment,
two nurses involved in his treatment also got Ebola.
There was a lot of anxiety about that,
a lot of confusion, a lot of uncertainty.
-But that was in early warning signal
that the procedures in place for an American hospital
to be able to have the sophisticated
personal protective gear,
the PPE, to deal with Ebola were not robust enough,
because we had medical workers getting sick.
So, we knew right then that we had to do
a lot more on the home front.
-Patients can beat this disease.
And we can beat this disease.
But we have to stay vigilant.
We have to work together at every level --
federal, state, and local.
-So, President Obama had launched
what we call the Whole of Government response.
He had said to 14 federal agencies,
"You're supposed to do whatever you can to help fight
this disease overseas and at home."
And when you're talking about all these different agencies,
the only real place where you can coordinate them
all is at the White House.
-It may be appropriate for me to appoint an additional person,
not because the three of these folks
have not been doing an outstanding job --
I should mention Susan Rice, my national security advisor.
It's not that they haven't been doing an outstanding job,
really working hard on this issue,
but they also are responsible
for a whole bunch of other stuff.
-To handle the Ebola crisis, Obama chose Ron Klain,
the vice president's chief of staff.
-And he is the right person to make sure
that we are integrating the interagency response.
-He wasn't looking for someone to second-guess Tony Fauci
or second-guess Nikkie Lurie or second-guess Tom Frieden.
He was looking for someone to take their medical
and scientific expertise
and do the hard work of turning that into a reality.
I've said before that doctors, nurses, researchers,
they beat diseases, but logistics beat pandemics.
-I think we're nearing a pivot point in this,
where the number of new cases overall in West Africa
is somewhat stabilized,
but this won't be done until we get all the way to zero.
It's like a forest fire.
A few embers burning,
and the thing can reignite at any time.
-Everybody knew that Ron Klain
had the direct connection with the president
and with Susan Rice, the national security advisor.
They knew that if he asked them to do something,
it was as if the president was speaking.
It made all the difference.
-As the virus raged, Obama faced pressure from Republican leaders
to impose a travel ban.
-I believe it is the right policy
to ban air travel from countries
that have been hit hardest by the Ebola outbreak.
-There were tremendous political pressures on President Obama
at the time of Ebola,
and I recall very vividly one day --
It was a beautiful day on a weekend,
where he had to make decisions on boarder closures
around Ebola,
and I knew that there was one option
that was scientifically sound
and one that was more politically sensitive.
We were all on pins and needles waiting to see
which way the president would go.
-Trying to seal off an entire region of the world,
if that were even possible,
could actually make the situation worse.
It would make it harder to move health care workers
and supplies back and forth.
Experience shows that it could also cause people
in the affected region to change their travel to evade screening
and make the disease even harder to track.
-And he chose the scientifically sound option,
even at political cost.
And I remember that I was very moved by that day,
thinking about what an amazing government we have,
where the science decisions
trumped the political considerations.
-And throughout, we are going to be guided by the science.
Not by speculation, not by fear, not by rumor, not by panic.
By science. -So, you looked and you said,
"Here is all the air travel coming out of West Africa.
Let's go ahead and funnel it through a couple of airports,
for example, and let's screen everybody when they come in,
and then we can keep the boarders open,
because keeping the boarders open
is essential to the economy of all of these countries."
-Conservative backlash was fierce.
Among Obama's harshest critics was the man
who would one day replace him.
-This concern about Ebola has served as a kind of wake-up
call to hospitals,
health departments across this country determined
not to repeat any of the mistakes we saw made in Dallas.
Obama's team worked to ensure that hospitals were prepared.
-Our hospitals were not ready for something like this,
and so one thing we did very quickly in the Fall of 2014
was to create a system of three tiers of medical centers.
We wound up with 100 hospitals at all three tiers,
ready to go, ready to do intake, ready to protect our country.
Part of this is treating people who are sick,
but another part of this is making sure
those people don't get other people sick.
-We don't know where the next cases are going to show up
or the next kinds of travelers are gonna show up,
and we need to be prepared not only for today,
but for the next decade and for the next century.
-In West Africa, Ebola killed more than 11,000 people,
but in the US, there were only 11 confirmed cases
and two deaths.
-We dodged the bullet on Ebola in the United States.
It could have been a real problem.
We got on top of it.
-And as a result, perhaps it made it look
just too simple to people.
Maybe it looked like, "Look, this wasn't a big deal,
not a problem.
All the warnings were overstated."
I think there was a little bit of a sense,
particularly on Capitol Hill after the fact,
that maybe we didn't need to put all this money to work on it.
-I cannot think of a better example of an area
where we should all agree
than passing this emergency funding to fight Ebola
and to set up some of the public health infrastructure
that we need to deal
with potential outbreaks in the future.
How do you argue with that?
That is not a partisan issue.
That is a basic, common sense issue
that all Americans can agree on.
-The battle between the Obama Administration
and the Republican congress was just enormous.
And the Tea Party had risen.
The Tea Party had elected a lot of people in 2010.
The Tea Party members came to congress not to do thing
but to stop things,
and one of the things they were trying to stop was spending.
-The Republican-led congress would agree to $5.
4 billion in emergency funding for Ebola,
but it rejected efforts by the Obama Administration
to replenish the national stockpile.
-The report that we wrote after Ebola did call
for much greater attention to PPE,
because we learned in Ebola that PPE --
We had real shortfalls with PPE, both in West Africa and at home,
so we knew that in a more stressing scenario,
PPE would be a weak point.
-After Ebola, Obama created a new office
on the National Security Council,
similar to the one he had disbanded in 2009,
tasked with preparing for future pandemics.
-And the idea was that rather than trying to ramp things up
the next time a crisis happened,
we should really have a permanent team
inside the White House
looking out for these kinds of crises
and getting ready to respond to them as early as possible.
-And before he left office,
Obama's team drew up a playbook for the next administration.
-And the world needs to use this lesson
to build a more effective global effort
to prevent the spread of future pandemics.
-We put together a 70-page book of, basically,
this is what you do -- step one, step two,
step three -- when the alarm bells go off.
-By the time we left,
there was a pretty detailed plan at the White House
that everybody knew, how to work together,
and how to get all this stuff done.
How it all fell apart afterwards?
You'll have to ask somebody else.