Posted on 09/19/21
| News Source: Newsmax
Former Food and Drug Administration Commissioner Dr. Scott Gottlieb on Sunday said the United States “prepared for the wrong threat” ahead of the COVID-19 pandemic.
In an interview on CBS News’ “Face The Nation,” Gottlieb said “we had this sort of illusion that we had prepared for a pandemic.”
“But they were ill-suited to the crisis we faced,” he said of those preparations. “And even the ones that were sort of appropriately measured to what we were facing weren’t ready…..I think we didn’t really have the foresight to understand that a virus could threaten us in this way. We had planned for a pandemic flu.”
“We prepared for the wrong threat,” he asserted. “But even if we had prepared for the right threat, the preparations still weren’t adequate.”
Gottlieb lamented Americans seem to have lost faith in public health officials.
“I think that there’s a lot of people around the country who feel that the advice they got from public health officials wasn’t precise, changed, wasn’t formulated in a way where it was sort of immutable, wasn’t carefully explained, wasn’t propagated in a way that it could be assimilated into people’s lives,” he said.
“And things changed,” he added, “so people were confused by it and lost confidence in it. And I think that there’s going to be part of the dialogue we have around how do we prepare better for the next pandemic.”