Episode 17: What if There Were a 9/11 Commission for Covid?

Actually, there basically is — led by the same guy. They have found that President Trump didn’t cause the botched response (although they label him a “comorbidity”). Neither did partisan politics (although there are some isolated exceptions). And if you think that’s surprising, wait till you hear how prepared we are (not) for the next pandemic.

Please note: Our show is produced for the ear and made to be heard. Transcripts are generated using a combination of speech recognition software and human transcribers, and may contain errors. Please check the audio before quoting in print.

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This show has been up and running for a while now. So I hope it's okay if I ask you to do something… a little unpleasant.

[ARCHIVAL SOUND OF AMBULANCE SIRENS]

I want you to cast your mind back to that very dark period during the COVID-19 pandemic. When hospitals were full and COVID cases were mounting…

[ARCHIVAL SOUND OF AMBULANCE SIRENS]

ARCHIVAL Newscaster: With each new patient delivered to the ER, the healthcare system spirals deeper into crisis.

When schools were empty and parents were struggling…

ARCHIVAL Mother 1: I'm a great mom and I'm good at momming, but I'm not good at educating.

ARCHIVAL Mother 2: I love my kids, but for fuck's sake, like we're together all of the time.

And it felt like the United States had torn itself in half. A moment when there seemed to be two countries, two fundamentally different plans to handle the same crisis, and two sides that couldn't stop screaming at each other. Screaming about whether measures like masks were going to help or hurt.

ARCHIVAL Man 1: Masking children is child abuse. You mask your child, you're a child abuser.

ARCHIVAL Woman 1: She's not wearing a mask, because she's ignorant!

ARCHIVAL Woman 2: I’ve got a medical exemption.

ARCHIVAL Woman 1: No, she doesn’t.

ARCHIVAL Woman 2: Leave me alone.

ARCHIVAL Woman 1: Then finally, fuck off.

ARCHIVAL Woman 3: That mask is killing people. It literally is killing people.

ARCHIVAL Newscaster: The man walks away, but then turns around, pulls down his own mask, and then this.

ARCHIVAL Man 2: Okay, I have COVID. [MAN SPITS] I have COVID. I’ve been tested positive. [MAN SPITS]

That last bit comes from a news video of a guy spitting at people because they weren't wearing masks outdoors. This was a moment when people were shouting at each other — and sometimes literally spitting — across a deep partisan divide. And one side saw itself locking down to save American lives. And the other side saw itself opening up to save American livelihoods.

ARCHIVAL Nurse: [SOBBING] And they're saying reopen with no testing. It's like they, they don't care about life. They don't care about the people around them, the people they love. I care about the people.

ARCHIVAL Talk Show Host: Isn't it amazing how the Democrats have completely allowed for actions that have destroyed the lives of the small business?

ARCHIVAL Pundit: It's crazy people. It's, it's spite.

ARCHIVAL Protestor: I had a good paying career. Now I'm subject to trying to find a job for $20 an hour because I will not be able to get my job back.

ARCHIVAL Youtuber: I don't understand these people. Half of 'em still don't even believe the virus is real. What the fuck is going on?

I've spent my career reporting on national security from a U.S. perspective. And here was an invader — a virus — arriving in the United States and killing more Americans than every U.S. war going back to the American Revolution. This was in fact probably the biggest national security crisis I'd ever seen. And if you were anything like me, one of the worst things about this crisis, this invasion, was the idea that the schism I kept hearing about: the country fracturing into two opposing toxic and mutually enraged camps.This seemed to be the main reason that the United States couldn't mount a decent defense.

[MUSIC SHIFTS]

But pretty recently, I had a conversation with somebody who said that if you believe the narrative that toxic politics caused our pandemic failures, you actually had it backwards. This person said toxic politics weren't the reason things went wrong. The real culprit might be even more disturbing. And the story he's got to tell about the pandemic has a lot more surprises where that came from.

Philip Zelikow: My name is Philip Zelikow. I'm a history professor at the University of Virginia. I am the director of the COVID Crisis Group.

Philip Zelikow oversaw what will probably go down as the most authoritative, nonpartisan investigation of American policy successes and failures during the fight against COVID-19. The findings were recently released in a book called Lessons from the COVID War. The book grew out of the combined effort of 34 doctors, public health, and policy experts from all over the United States. Starting their work in early 2021, this group conducted listening sessions with hundreds of people who'd been affected by the pandemic or had played some role in responding to it.

They came to some conclusions that depressed the hell out of me, and some other conclusions that opened my eyes, and some that did both at the same time… like, for example, the conclusion about whether the U.S. came out of this pandemic better prepared for the next one:

Philip Zelikow: Have we learned our lessons and we're ready now? No. Let me just be really clear about it: No.

Coming up, a conversation with the historian who put those surprising conclusions on paper.

You'll hear about how so much of the suffering from school closures wasn't really necessary, how the CDC — the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention — was never designed to actually control disease, why the Operation Warp Speed vaccine rollout wasn't really about scientific research on vaccines… And, most sobering of all, how the botched U.S. response to the pandemic may have caused around half a million unnecessary American deaths.

I'm Peter Bergen. And this is In the Room.

[THEME MUSIC SURGES, THEN FADES]

In a sense, Philip Zelikow has been preparing his whole professional life to lead something like the COVID commission. He co-wrote a definitive account of the Cuban missile crisis. He was executive director of the 9/11 Commission, whose report set the gold standard for distilling lessons from a disaster. And he served as a senior official in the U.S. State Department as the Iraq War turned into a bloody mess. For much of his career he's had a front row seat to huge, government catastrophes.

Philip Zelikow: So here we are, um, on COVID It was really helpful both to have the background as a historian, but also have the background as a policymaker who's actually had to work through a lot of difficult problems in a crisis. And so you can empathize with the people who are in that position and you can offer practical ideas or insights that are realistic.

Peter Bergen: Empathy is an interesting word in this context, because empathy doesn't imply sympathy obviously, but it does suggest being able to put yourself in, uh, somebody else's shoes. When you were doing the report, how did you empathize with the people involved, many of whom were making terrible decisions?

Philip Zelikow: Well, it's hard really at the start to identify people as, necessarily good or bad, because the pandemic — the alien enemy, the virus — is unequivocally bad. It hurts people. So anyone who's trying to deal with it is better. And so, you want them to succeed. Which is not always the case with some of the people you've written about. [ZELIKOW LAUGHS]

In case you're wondering, I've written several books about terrorists.

Philip Zelikow: We did not actually start out this project with a preconceived notion about heroes and villains. The 34 members of our group come from a variety of political backgrounds, have a lot of political views. We started with a clean slate and we asked ourselves what did people know and what tools were available to them. We saw our mission in this report is not really to tell people what they already know about a crisis they lived through. There's no comparative advantage in just telling them relatable stories about suffering in the crisis. The comparative advantage then is only if you can cut through the jumble and zero in analytically on what were the key choices and how were those choices made and why things turned out the way they did.

But it's very important to do that without no being too burdened by the hindsight of what happened. There's a line in the 9/11 commission report, where we said that contrary to the common axiom, hindsight is not 2020. In fact, hindsight blinds. It blinds because the path of what happened is so brightly lit that all the other possible paths are cast even more deeply into shadow. So you actually have to consciously work against the bias of hindsight as you reconstruct the story.

The politics around COVID got so toxic that In 2022, a bipartisan proposal to set up a national COVID Commission never even made it to the floor for a vote in the U S Congress. So, unlike the 9/ 11 Commission, the COVID Commission had to be self-appointed. It emerged from an initiative led by former Google CEO Eric Schmidt with the backing of foundations like the Rockefeller Foundation. It lacked the subpoena power of the 9/11 commission. And It also contended with another challenge, which was the public believing it already knew the story.

Philip Zelikow: People have settled on comfortable narratives to help them explain and point fingers of blame. So for very partisan Republicans, they now had their narrative blaming China or blaming Tony Fauci. For very partisan Democrats they had their narrative blaming Trump. ‘We're good. We have a story that makes sense to us for this crisis.’ A lot of people want to put it behind them and don't want to hear anymore about it. But I think there is still an appetite, like if someone could explain the puzzles, and accessibly, I think people would take the time to read that — something that promised to cut through the jumble of confusing information that they'd been surfeited with throughout this pandemic.

One of the most striking ways the commission cut through the jumble was to set the record straight on the idea that there had ever been a distinctly Republican — red state — or distinctly Democratic — blue state — way to fight the virus.

Philip Zelikow: There was a kind of a blue state rhetoric that we’re all about science and safety, and there was a red state rhetoric that we’re all about reopening and freedom. But the reality was that everybody locked down for a while.

Indeed, despite all the partisan rhetoric around COVID, it turns out that many blue states and red states issued very similar lockdown directives in the early months of the pandemic. Between March and April 2020, all 24 Democratic governors issued stay-at-home orders while 19 of the 26 Republican governors also issued similar orders. And even the seven states that didn’t issue stay-at-home orders mandated schools to be closed.

Philip Zelikow: Everybody then tried to reopen. Everybody realized lockdowns were not sustainable on a wide scale. Depending on their politics, they'd portray this in different lights. But substantively, all the states were doing very similar things. And then all the states began doing what we call in the report the hammer and dance, which is when you try to reopen as much as you could. Then if the infection surged and the emergency rooms were getting crowded, you try to limit things again. You'd bring down the hammer, until the things eased a little bit and you could dance some more. And most states, regardless of how they were governed, found themselves into these same desperate trade-offs, despite the appearance of the rhetoric.

And what we also found is that partisan polarization did get much worse as 2020 went on, but that often it was the policy failures that fed the polarization rather than polarization causing the policy failures.

Peter Bergen: Can you explain that?

[SOMBER MUSIC]

Philip Zelikow: Yeah, you start with a political climate that is somewhat polarized as everyone knows. But then you come into a situation where at the first part of the pandemic, a lot of people are just anxious and they want to see that their government is competently giving advice and guidance to manage an emergency. There's a lot of receptivity to, “tell us what you think we need to do to be safe.”

In the period of lockdowns, that was a solution of a kind, a blunt instrument in a period of fear, but that was unsustainable. The authorities really had no idea what to do next. We talked to public health authorities who told us that they had thought the lockdowns were only gonna last for a few weeks. They thought the school closures at first were only gonna go on for a few weeks. A few weeks go by, pandemic doesn't go away.They don't have any good answers.

So as the government is visibly flailing and, There is this moment in which, then, toxic politics can really flow in: ‘you don't know what to do. Well, maybe I know what to do.’ Uh different kind of statements of faith, follow the science. If only we would follow the science. Or well, maybe this is not gonna be so bad after all, let's just open it or up and let ‘er rip. And that just gets worse and worse as the summer goes on because the toolkits are not really emerging. The school closures don't appear to be easing and people are losing their confidence that the government knows what it's doing. President Trump, in effect, goes to war against his own government.

Peter Bergen: How?

[LIGHTLY PULSING MUSIC]

Philip Zelikow: In April and May of 2020, federal crisis management collapsed and actually then was abandoned. There was a deliberate decision at the top of the government to just simply kick this over to the state and local governments to figure out what to do and pull the federal government out of what would be unpopular decisions. By late April and May, President Trump is actually denouncing his own officials. They're attacking Fauci, they're attacking their own officials who are trying to lead the response so he, we argue, abdicated his responsibility to provide leadership to unify the country.

Zelikow describes this choice in stark language, saying essentially that a wartime, federal administration simply abandoned the field of battle. Leaving the fight to ad hoc state militias to ward off a foreign invader. The COVID commission marks the moment in March 2020 when Jared Kushner — Trump's son-in-law, and at this point, working as a shadow White House chief of staff — called a meeting with a group of CEOs in the White House Situation Room, and told them, ‘the federal government isn't going to lead this response. It's up to the states to decide what to do.’

Philip Zelikow: And that just made matters much worse. But our point is that the lack of preparedness opened the door to much greater polarization. It created an ideal environment, a petri dish, for misinformation and the growth of toxic politics

Underlining that toxic politics: by July 2020, more than 80 percent of Democrats and independents thought that the coronavirus was a major threat to Americans’ health, while almost half of Republicans said that it was only a minor threat, according to Pew polling. It was like Democrats and Republicans were living through different pandemics, although COVID itself never bothered to check people’s party affiliations.

Vaccinations also became politicized. By the summer of 2022, 90% of Democrats reported being vaccinated to some level, compared to less than 70% of Republicans. That’s still a big majority of Republicans, despite all the polarized rhetoric. But for the anti-vax die-hards on the right, it turns out that your politics, in this case, could literally kill you. During the Delta wave of COVID in 2021 and the Omicron wave of 2022, “the vast majority of hospitalized patients were unvaccinated,” according to the COVID commission.

[MUSIC SHIFTS]

Peter Bergen: You mentioned school closures. And there was something in the report that was really striking to me, which was this UN figures that France closed for an average of two weeks and in Spain for 15 weeks, in the United States: an average of 77 weeks. And yet, outcomes in terms of health were even worse in the United States than they were in France and Spain on average. So, why did that happen and how could it have been ameliorated?

Philip Zelikow: You're right. And that's a really important section of one of our chapters on school closure issues. Clearly these other countries figured out toolkits and trade-offs.

Peter Bergen: When you say toolkits, meaning what?

Philip Zelikow: So a toolkit basically says, look, we can't make everything perfectly safe. What are tools we can adopt that will make teachers and parents and students at least feel safe enough that we can reopen schools? And then there's like a menu of possible tools: better ventilation of classrooms, smaller size classrooms. Can you open windows? Can you then provide quality masks in some situations? Can you, for example, use rapid tests so that if someone comes to school and they're sick, you can just send them home and then wait ‘til they get better. But then you don't have to close down the whole school.

The point of all of this is not, it's not a magic cure all, but the point is so that people see that, well, going to school is about as safe as doing anything else that we could do. And it doesn't make community spread much worse. And you have to accept a certain degree of risk, but you accept a degree of risk because you have to weigh that against the value of the educational benefits and psychological benefits and social benefits and the benefits for working parents. So all these other countries did all that. The United States did not.

Why? ‘Cause our decision making for it at the school level is incredibly decentralized. But then the people in charge of providing the guidance were incredibly disconnected from the practical task of devising these toolkits and trade-offs. So the goal, of course, for everyone was to reopen schools, but CDC could say, well, if you wanna make this perfectly safe, here are the 18 things you could do. And they're unwieldy and unworkable. They give very risk averse guidance that's unworkable in practice and doesn't make the trade-offs. That's going to then thousands of school districts who are having to make these decisions without really good guidance and the result is paralysis.

The CDC is not a national public health agency. It was forced into that role in, in the crisis, but it was a role for which it was never built and never readied. The CDC has no ability to make trade-offs between educational, economic, social benefits of schooling and the health risks.

Peter Bergen: One striking thing about the report that I didn't understand is CDC which is the…. Tell us what CDC stands for.

Philip Zelikow: The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Peter Bergen: Right. Which implies that they're gonna like, control and prevent disease. But when I read your report, I realized it's more like a university of some kind that sort of analyzes things after it happens and really doesn't have any operational capacity.

Philip Zelikow: This was a case where a system designed in the late 19th century is encountering a 21st century pandemic.This was a system designed in the age of cholera and typhoid of dirty water and mosquito borne diseases, basically to do hygiene and cleanup at the state and local level, and also do vaccination programs, which were often unpopular. Cleaning up tenements, doing vaccinations. So in America, all the operational authority was state and local.

That was the way it was designed circa 1890. That's the fundamental design today. So the CDC, which was created in 1946, was created as a research arm to provide research support for all these many state and local entities —thousands In total. There are about 64 state and territorial entities, but in many states, the state authority is relatively weak and the authority is really devolves to county and city levels, for the key decisions.

So the CDC was kind of the general research arm. It was situated in Atlanta because malaria was more prominent in the South. And it has grown into a university with a number of departments, research departments, disciplinary departments, including occupational health and other things, including infectious disease. And it began to think of itself as having the role of a national public health agency, but even that self-image was illusory because it didn't really have the executive capacity to make decisions or implement them anywhere in America.

Peter Bergen: So it was sort of providing advice.

Philip Zelikow: Yes, but then because it was unused to playing this executive role, it didn't have any of the features and capabilities that executive authorities have, to like, how do we engage stakeholders? How do we talk to businesses? How do we make compromise decisions and trade offs and take the implementation issues into account? Well they don't face any of those issues in their usual work, and they compile information for studies that are often published about things that happened years earlier.

In a finding that I found kind of mind-blowing, Zelikow and his co-authors found that when it came to tracking COVID cases in the United States, researchers at The Atlantic magazine did a better job in real-time than the CDC did.

[SOMBER MUSIC RETURNS]

Peter Bergen: One of the striking things you say in the report is that Trump was a “comorbidity” with COVID. What does that mean and how did it reveal itself, and what effect did it have on how this all unfolded?

Philip Zelikow: People know, sadly they've come to learn what comorbidity means. It's a preexisting condition that enhances your risk of illness and death.

Peter Bergen: So diabetes would be a comorbidity if you suddenly had cancer…

Philip Zelikow: You could say in a way that Trump was a way in which the United States government was immunocompromised. And it's true.

ARCHIVAL Donald Trump: This is gonna go away without a vaccine. It's gonna go away and it's, uh, we're not gonna see it again.

ARCHIVAL Newscaster: President Trump unveiled new recommendations from the Centers for Disease Control, urging Americans to wear cloth or fabric face masks in public. But he made clear he won't be following them.

ARCHIVAL Donald Trump: The risk to the American people remains very low.

Philip Zelikow: We don't, in the report, deny the significance of Trump as a factor.But we don't really spend a ton of time calling that out. We just need to dispassionately describe the role he played and where, when he played it. But in most of our chapters, Trump's not a significant figure. He's just not, he's not the reason we don't have a national public health agency in America. He's not the reason we didn't have good warning of this disease. He's not the reason we were flying blind. He's not the reason we didn't have preparedness to do testing.

Just one example, South Korea was way better prepared for the pandemic and was running tens of thousands of tests daily by mid-February 2020. By contrast during the same period the U.S. — with a population more than six times larger than South Korea — had only done less than 4,000 tests since the beginning of the pandemic.

Lessons from the COVID War argues that failures like America's lack of testing infrastructure and the scramble for protective equipment point to a problem that runs a lot deeper than just Trump, or the federal government’s lack of a public health agency.

This deeper problem is why the group’s report concludes that given its resources and wealth, no country's pandemic performance was more disappointing than the United States. And the book concludes that this deeper problem may have needlessly caused the deaths of as many as half a million Americans.

Philip Zelikow: And by the way, millions of hospitalizations that may have been unnecessary and millions of long COVID cases.

Peter Bergen: And you came to that conclusion how.

Philip Zelikow: In advanced countries with good data, we have pretty good numbers on mortality. And we have pretty good estimates for what's called excess mortality, where you see unusual spikes. We come to the conclusion that when you compare the United States, say against a set of two dozen European countries that have a comparable population, not quite as affluent as us, they did way better than we did in excess mortality in this period. Like 40% better than we did. And, if we were at that level, a half a million fewer Americans die.

Peter Bergen: Quoting from the report, no country's performance was worse than the United States.

Philip Zelikow: No comparably, affluent… Peru had worse.

Peter Bergen: Okay.

Philip Zelikow: Peru and Russia were worse [ZELIKOW LAUGHS]

Peter Bergen: Obviously we had this great scientific establishment and yet somehow it failed.

Philip Zelikow: Yes.

Peter Bergen: What's the overall theory of the case? What does it say about our system? Leaving even the question of COVID aside — you know, the question of can the United States do big things? You know, have we lost that ability? Are we just less capable?

Philip Zelikow: Because we haven't respected competence our culture hasn't demanded it in our national civilian governance, and this has shown up in things like the botches in Iraq and Afghanistan. Especially at the national level, a lot of policy, so-called policy and so-called strategy is performative. You announce you care about things, you have a program, you appropriate money, but the culture rewards performative symbolism rather than competence.

This was not our reputation not that long ago. We were regarded by the world as, kind of, the can-do country that was incredibly practical, knew how to fix cars, knew how to create Marshall Plans, run Berlin airlifts, do D-Days. And in a relatively practical, non-ideological way, that was our reputation and we had earned that reputation.

And the remarkable thing is, we lost it because at the national level, we began valuing symbolism over substance. Performative politics over competence. And actually in many, in local politics, this is often not the case. In local politics if you didn't buy snowplows before the blizzard, there's a good chance you're not gonna be reelected as the mayor. We need to kind of bring that same mindset now back to national politics and insist on a culture of competence surrounding national governance. Boy, if you can't use this crisis as a teachable moment — a crisis every single person in America knows about and can relate to — then there are no teachable moments.

[SUBTLE MUSIC PICKS UP]

Peter Bergen: You remember the book, Amusing Ourselves to Death by Neil Postman. He wrote it at least 20 years ago and basically the idea that everything had become a branch of entertainment, whether it was politics or religion or whatever in this country. Is that part of the issue?

Philip Zelikow: It is. Absolutely. I mean, at the point where, you elect people because they channel your resentments and your anxieties, and then it's all about, how well they do that. And I think a lot of people view politics as a way of channeling or focusing resentments.

One of the few bright spots in America's response to COVID was the effort to develop workable vaccines at a pace that lived up to the project's name, “Operation Warp Speed.” The operation succeeded in large part because top officials expedited the years-long, laborious approval process for drugs, invoked the Defense Production Act to manufacture doses when they became available, and released a previously unthinkable $26 billion to fund the project.

Operation Warp Speed was also led by a Pentagon general and a Big Pharma executive, with political top cover provided by the president's son-in-law, Jared Kushner.

Philip Zelikow: Someone could read the book and say, ‘Well, you say federal crisis management collapsed and they abandoned the federal lead. Well, how, then, do you explain their creation of Operation Warp Speed?’ And then you have to explain, I think we have the best account available right now of how Warp Speed came into creation. The people who decided to abandon federal crisis management didn't come up with the idea for an Operation Warp Speed, other people did.

There's actually this, uh, amusing conversation we recount where actually Trump's chief staff at the time, actually, Mark Meadows, has a conversation with the Secretary of HHS, Alex Azar. You know, Azar had been, had pitched this idea, uh, after he in turn had been pitched by lower level people to do this and outsiders. Meadows says to Azar, ‘Well, you know that if this thing succeeds, we'll take the credit and if this thing fails, you'll take the blame.’ And Azar says, ‘I can live with that.’

But you're right that, um, Trump's son-in-law, Jared Kushner, played an important role in selling the idea to Trump, and then sheltering this program from the cronyism and chaos that beset so much of the Trump administration. Another thing that sheltered the program from the chaos and cronyism was that much of it was lodged in the Department of Defense and the Secretary of Defense at the time, Mark Esper, and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs at the time, Mark Milley, did their job in sheltering the program too.

And so it stands out in the story is a program that was sheltered and well run and did a good job on manufacturing and distribution of the vaccines. And, you're right then that even though we criticized Kushner on some other things and criticized Trump — well, we just, we just show what Trump did on other things, and you can fill in your judgment for yourself — that on this question, Kushner did buy it. Kushner did shelter it. Kushner did sell it to the president, and the president went along, although he would occasionally grouse about how much money was being spent.

So Warp Speed, by the way, people know it's a success, but they don't really understand it. Warp Speed was not mainly a research and development program. Actually, Pfizer didn't participate in the research and development part of Warp Speed at all. Warp Speed was mainly a program that succeeded because it helped manufacture at scale and distribute at scale in partnership with America's lead drugstore chains.

The COVID Crisis Group’s report uses the language of warfare to describe the fight against the virus. And so maybe it's not an accident that it also concluded that a model for how to have something like Operation Warp Speed ready at all times already exists. In the system that the Pentagon employs for building complex weapons, like the ships that fight America’s wars.

Philip Zelikow: I should be careful to say that I'm not recommending the bloat and inefficiency and politicization of the defense industry to all of the biopharma industry.

Peter Bergen: Right.

Philip Zelikow: But, look, there are some things that they do well. They will provide long-term R&D commitments to develop systems and products for which there is no market demand, and that require years of development and experimentation to perfect. They have ways of doing that, in very expensive and difficult products — which biopharma products are — with very difficult supply chains. So there's a precedent for how to do that at the R&D stage. Then there are precedents for how to assure that you get production and scale and supply chains where you can hire people and maintain for years a capability to produce something that you usually don't need.

But often these may require advanced commitments and they often need to be multi-year commitments. If we told people we need, you know, a new warship, but we can only guarantee a one year appropriation to build it, it will never get built as these things don't get turned out like hotcakes. So you need to have that a kind of approach in biopharm as well. You wanna work out, how can we manufacture prototypes of these so that in a war, we may not need that exact version of the vaccine, but we've prototyped how to manufacture this at scale really fast for this particular virus family. This is all doable. You can make the investments. And it will take years, but we can build up remarkable capabilities with our modern technology. And the national security precedents show us how we can do this. And in biopharma we have, now, the technologies that could allow us to apply those concepts.

Peter Bergen: The 9/11 report actually was a great investigation of what happened and also had very clear policy suggestions, which then became real, like the National Counterterrorism Center. So was that an exception that proves the rule?

Philip Zelikow: Generally these, when you have these commissions, they tend, they fail more often than they succeed. It's hard to make them work well.

Peter Bergen: One thing I was struck by, there were seven investigations of Pearl Harbor during World War II, and people were held to account — and very quickly — in the middle of this giant crisis. So have we, the United States, lost that capacity?

Philip Zelikow: I think we can regain it. It's not magic, it's cultural. It has to do with a set of beliefs and expectations. That was a period in which people were routinely fired at senior levels of the Army and the Navy for perceived failures. Generals cashiered right and left. There was a lot of trial and error, but people developed habits of staff work and competence that were subjected to withering peer review. It was a very different staff culture back then. It didn't come out of academia and it didn't go back to academia. A lot of it came out of the business and engineering culture in that period of American history.

Peter Bergen: You spent your entire career as either a historian or a public official working in national security, and here we have a situation right now where more than 1.1 million Americans have died, which is more Americans than have died in every American war going back to the American Revolution. So it, if that isn't a national security problem, what is?

Philip Zelikow: The whole point of national security is to get beyond the narrowest definitions of military. That's why that term was invented in the 1940s. If the security of your people is threatened, the security of their jobs, of their daily existence and of their health and wellbeing is threatened, well then that's a national security issue.

Peter Bergen: I think George Kennan said, and I'm paraphrasing him, it's the ability to continue your normal life without being threatened by some kind of outside power. And he was referring to a foreign power, but obviously you can call terrorism, pandemics, cyber attacks, all these things can threaten us from the outside and interfere with our ability to have a normal life. But it’s interesting, you know, given the discussion we've just had, are we prepared for the next pandemic?

Philip Zelikow: Have we learned our lessons and we're ready now? No. Let me just be really clear about: No. The what to do part is not totally obvious unless you do a lot of work to figure out what happened and how to make it better. So we've done that work and I think now some things are clear, that aren't super obvious, but when you read our report, they become apparent. But here it is. And now there's really no excuse for not putting in place an agenda that will make us better prepared.

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If you want to know more about some of the issues we discussed in this episode we recommend: Lessons from the Covid War by the Covid Crisis Group and The Plague Year: America in the Time of COVID by Lawrence Wright.

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IN THE ROOM WITH PETER BERGEN is an Audible Original.
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Our Head of Production is Elena Bawiec.
Eliza Lambert is our Supervising Producer.
Maureen Traynor is our Head of Operations.
Our Production Manager is Herminio Ochoa.
Our Production Coordinator is Henry Koch.
And our Delivery Coordinator is Ana Paula Martinez.

Head of Audible Studios: Zola Mashariki
Chief Content Officer: Rachel Ghiazza
Head of Content Acquisition & Development and Partnerships: Pat Shah
Special thanks to Marlon Calbi, Allison Weber, and Vanessa Harris

Copyright 2023 by Audible Originals, LLC
Sound recording copyright 2023 by Audible Originals, LLC