Is there any indication that Trump, if re-elected, would handle a subsequent public health crisis better?
I hope he has learned his lesson, but there is no indication that he will change. Each of us has his own fundamental personality. He is 78 years old, so I would be surprised if he did anything different.
As someone who is 83 years old and still alert and energetic, how did you view the drama with President Biden?
People age differently. You can’t just take a number and say, arbitrarily, that when you get to that number you’re no longer able to perform at the same level as before. For some people, that’s 65, but for others it’s 75, and for others it’s 85. When I was in the White House for two years with President Biden, he was a little bit slower, but he was quite sharp, quite analytical. I haven’t had any contact with him in 18 months.
So when you watched the debate, did you think, “That’s not the guy I served under”?
That was not the Joe Biden I know. And it is clear to me how incredible his resignation was. What a show of strength, humility and desire to do what is best for the country.
There is not much mention of Vice President Kamala Harris in the book. Tell me your impressions.
Our interactions have been very positive. She would occasionally join Jeff Zients (President Biden’s COVID response coordinator), the CDC director, the CDC director, and me in the Oval Office when we were briefing President Biden. She asks very insightful questions and is very in tune with what’s going on.
Let’s talk about the current situation regarding COVID-19. When we first spoke in 2020, we all, including you, assumed that we wouldn’t have to deal with high infection rates four years later. But we are, despite our desire to put it behind us. What happened?
Covid has continually fooled us month after month and year after year because of its uniqueness. It is a highly transmissible respiratory virus, so you would expect it to peak and then go away. And that was it. That did not happen with Covid. Not only did it not go away with the season, but it kept developing new variants. Even today, in July 2024, there is a major outbreak of Covid. Two weeks ago, I got infected. The president got infected last week.
I had it a month ago.
That’s the sobering news. The good news is that you’ve had enough experience with the virus, either from having been infected previously, as you and I were, or from having received several booster doses of the vaccine. So even if you’re not very well protected against infection, you’re pretty well protected against severe disease. We’re not seeing anywhere near the level of hospitalizations and deaths that we saw in the first months and a year of the outbreak.
But aren’t we just one variant away from absolute disaster?
It would have to be a very, very different variant, something terrible. That is possible, but increasingly unlikely. This virus develops multiple variants. We had Alpha, Beta, Gamma, Delta, and then in November 2021, we developed the first Omicron variant. Since then, we have had many, many, many variants, but all within the Omicron subcategory, meaning they were not very different from each other. So if we stay in that realm, where it changes a little bit, but not enough to give any real divergence of protection, this is just going to be a virus that is going to be with us for an indefinite period of time. To protect ourselves optimally, we have to get boosters, like the new ones that are available. Coming out this fall.