Recently Departed Biden COVID-19 Adviser Suggests Americans Didn’t ‘Sacrifice’ Enough To Stop Pandemic Early
Andy Slavitt, who stepped down from his role on President Joe Biden’s COVID-19 response team last week, suggested to CBS News during a Monday interview that Americans did not “sacrifice” enough to stop the pandemic early on.
“But I also think we all need to look at one another and ask ourselves, ‘what do we need to do better next time?'” Slavitt continued. “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 it’s going to be essential. And that’s something that I think we could all have done a little bit better on.”
Slavitt’s remarks generated a fair amount of backlash online, including:
TRANSCRIPT:
CBS HOST: The book is called ‘Preventable.’ How much of this pandemic was preventable and how?
ANDY SLAVITT, BIDEN CORONAVIRUS ADVISER: Well of course, we would have had a pandemic here in the U.S. no matter what. 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, were just plainly political leadership mistakes. There was a lot, we denied the virus for too long out of the Trump White House, there was too much squashing of dissent and playing on divisions. But I also think we all 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 it’s going to be essential. And that’s something that I think we could all have done a little bit better on.
CBS HOST: So when we look in the mirror and evaluate our own role in all this, the public, how we could have sacrificed more, as you say, and we think about the possibility of a difficult fall or winter or a difficult variant. What more needs to be done now to prepare ourselves as a public, putting aside the government and the scientific part of this, for us as the public, what’s the message?
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