.@ScottGottliebMD has done tremendous work educating us and so this is quite a remarkable take. He is an FDA expert. I listened to whole interview as I thought the tweet might be misleading; "when history looks back," I do not think that the takeaway is the WH was failed. 1/
https://twitter.com/FaceTheNation/status/1305173111747284993
No one had any concept of the extent of the spread of the virus, but that was because so few governors, mayors, local public health officials (the homeland) were paying attention because the WH wasn't pushing a testing (it rejected WHO's offer), surveillance or other systems. 2/
Let's be clear here: our pandemic planning, which was shelved by the WH, has monitoring and surveillance as the primary responsbilityof a WH and federal government. The minute Trump heard of #COVID19, that system should have been up to help local efforts. 3/
By late January, non-medical experts like me were well aware of what was likely to happen, even if pace unknown. I love the doctors, but at some stage this wasn't rocket science. In addition, this kind of revisionism gives the WH the benefit of the doubt that they would 4/
have done something if told how bad it was (again, this take excuses the WH from its responsibility to monitor the spread). The WH wasn't "failed"; it didn't lead. (Merkel had same intel. She led.) I don't normally do this; Gottlieb has been such a strong voice and 4/
he'll be so important to help us through vaccine and distribution discussions which is his expertise, but this sounds like partisan revisionism ("I think") denying everything we know about WH, everything said between Jan-March 2020, and I hope it can be addressed by him. 5/
There will be an accounting. In crisis management and military, an after action report. Maybe this is one contributing narrative, but we don't know yet. So we should be careful with who was failed. Let's let history be written when this is history, god willing. #nearly200K
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