Gates Package — page 911

poorly. I'm calling out the United States here because I know its situation well, and because it should have done so much better than it did, but by no means is it the only country that made a lot of mistakes. The White House's response in 2020 was disastrous. The president and his senior aides downplayed the pandemic and gave the public terrible advice. Incredibly, federal agencies refused to share data with each other. It certainly didn't help that the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is a political appointee subject to political pressure, and some of the CDC's public guidance was clearly influenced by politics. Even worse, the person running the CDC in 2020 wasn't trained as an epidemiologist. The former CDC directors who are still remembered today for their amazing work--people like Bill Foege and Tom Frieden--were experts who had spent their careers in the organization. Imagine a general who has never even been through a battle simulation suddenly having to run a war. The worst failure, though, is that the United States never got testing right: Not nearly enough people were tested, and results took far too long to come back. If you're carrying the virus but don't know it for another seven days, you've just spent a week potentially infecting other people. To me, the most mind-boggling problem--because it would have been so easy to avoid--is that the U.S. government never fully scaled up the capacity for testing people or created a website to identify those who should be first in line for get quick results and record the outcomes of all tests. In the early months of 2020, anyone in America who was worried they might have COVID should have been able to go to a government website, answer a few questions about their symptoms and risk factors (such as age and location), and find out where they could get tested.