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Why Even Well Prepared Countries Failed the Pandemic Test
Bad Politics Can Undermine Good Public Health
In May 2018, U.S. leaders met at a Washington hotel to discuss their response to a crisis: a malign actor had released a newly engineered virus—a bioterror agent known as “Clade X…
- Christopher T. Lee and Tom Frieden
- Foreign Affairs
The United States faced its first global pandemic in a century, and political leaders had to make tough calls while awaiting the development of a vaccine.
The exercise was just a simulation among high-level government leaders, but it yielded a clear message: the world was not prepared for a pandemic.
Tragically, a comparable scenario played out in real life with COVID-19, and…