How to Prepare for (or How to Avoid) the Next Pandemic: A Conversation with Dr. Scott Gottlieb

(CNN) – During the pandemic, Dr. Scott Gottlieb – like a handful of public health experts – became a household name and his face became familiar on television news programs.
Gottlieb, who was chief of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) from 2017 to 2019, says he tried to avoid the global health emergency by sounding the alarms early on at his former colleagues at the Trump’s White House and in Congress.

Today, you have another message.

“I don’t think pandemics have to happen. I think emerging viruses will happen, but I don’t think they have to become pandemics,” Gottlieb told Dr. Sanjay Gupta, CNN’s chief medical correspondent, on his “Chasing Life” podcast.

“Maybe the pandemics that happened in the past, where we couldn’t do anything to detect and contain them in time, or thwart them quickly with vaccines and therapies, we now have the tools to prevent them from turning into pandemics. And I think that one should. be our goal. I think it’s achievable. “

In this week’s episode, Gottlieb tells Gupta what went wrong in the early days of the nascent global health crisis and how disaster can be avoided next time.

And without a doubt, there will be a next time.

Gottlieb, a physician of internal medicine, a member of the board of directors of the vaccine manufacturer Pfizer, as well as a resident fellow of the conservative think tank American Enterprise Institute and businessman, published a new book, “Uncontrolled Spread: Why covid-19 crushed us and how we can defeat the next pandemic “, in which he explains everything.

Here are some excerpts from the conversation between Gupta and Gottlieb, edited for clarity.

Dr. Sanjay Gupta: You are one of the voices that I have constantly heard, I think the country has also done it. Obviously, there are clear messages in the headlines: Wear a mask, get vaccinated … things like that. But understanding the “why” behind the “what”, that you do so well, is, I think, so important when it comes to making people feel like they have power … So thank you.

Congratulations on the book. What made you decide to write it?

Dr. Scott Gottlieb: I was involved in some aspects of the (Trump’s) administration’s response. I had been interacting with the White House quite a bit and looked at some of the books that were being developed. Many of them were focused on the immediate response and I think they captured the political narrative in great detail.

It didn’t seem to me that something was being worked on that was attempting to step back and examine the more fundamental systemic deficiencies that really plagued our response and … left us unprepared for this. And how can we fix that in the future? How do we change our pandemic preparedness posture so that this does not happen again? And that should be our goal. We cannot say that we are going to invest all this money and participate in all this activity to make sure that next time it is not so bad. We have to … better prepare with the mindset that we can prevent this from happening again. I think we can.

Gupta: That’s right? I mean, are pandemics inevitable? Because it seems that everyone says that we are entering the era of pandemics … You are saying that pandemics are likely to occur, but that they do not have to affect us as much.

Gottlieb: Yes, I don’t think pandemics have to happen. I think emerging viruses will happen, but I don’t think they have to become pandemics … There were many opportunities, even with the covid, of having detected this outbreak much earlier. The Chinese government could have detected it earlier and taken certain measures, but we could have done it too, if we had the right position and had the right resources. Information was available in mid-December, which could have been obtained and would have given us a month’s head start on this at least. And, you know, in the hands of a competent political response, a month is a long time.

Gupta: I think you make a fundamental point, Scott, which is that it is not necessarily the ability to do things, sometimes it is the will to do them … I guess the question is whether we are willing to do those things. Are we willing to spend the money, dedicate the resources and plan, now, I’m talking about the future, for something that may or may not happen?

Gottlieb: Look, we’re going to be willing to do it in the short term. We are going to end up investing a lot of money in a new position, in new agencies, new capacities, here in the country.

I think the bigger question is: will we stick with it? Because the next pandemic may not occur next year, or in the next five years, or even in the next ten. But it will happen at some point. There will be a pathogen that emerges that, at least, threatens us in that way and that can lead to the next pandemic. And the question is: has the position in which we invested have atrophied? And that’s what happened this time.