‘Preventable’ Lays Bare Disasters of Early Federal Covid Response

KQED's Forum

Former Obama Administration official Andy Slavitt was one of the few outside health experts regularly talking to the Trump White House during the pandemic's first year, bearing witness to what he calls "missed opportunities, willful neglect, and indifference and denial from our president." During that time, as Covid-19 deaths skyrocketed, Slavitt began publicly documenting what he saw, and those observations form the basis of his new book "Preventable: The Inside Story of How Leadership Failures, Politics, and Selfishness Doomed the U.S. Coronavirus Response." We'll talk to Slavitt about what could and should have been done to prevent such massive loss of life, and what governments still need to do to effectively contain the coronavirus.