My Amazon Review of Scott Gottlieb's "Uncontrolled Spread"

 

Continuing Ineptitude

 

Former F.D.A. commissioner Scott Gottlieb, MD was one of the few people who served in the Trump Administration and left with an enhanced reputation, no mean feat. Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic Dr. Gottlieb was the go-to source for accurate information which he made available through op-eds and numerous television appearances. He helped us cut through the fog of misleading information that was coming, not only from the Trump Administration, but a host of other sources.

 

To Gottlieb the “villain” of the piece was the Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) The CDC royally messed up in developing test kits and prevented the commercial laboratories and medical device manufacturers from developing their own testing protocols and testing kits. That allowed the pandemic to silently spread throughout the population. Further when the time came to scale up production, the CDC’s facilities were hopelessly inadequate and along the way the CDC gave conflicting advice about the use of masks.

 

Simply put the CDC is a slow-moving risk averse academic agency. In peacetime that is the way it should be, but in the wartime of a pandemic that culture can be devastating. As I learned along time ago it is better to be approximately right early than exactly right late. In contrast the private sector response to developing vaccine in record time was absolutely extraordinary and where Gottlieb’s old F.D.A. moved with unprecedented alacrity.

 

Of course, the stunning incompetence of the Trump Administration played a leading role. The administration went from denial to grudging acceptance and President Trump refused to wear a mask, setting a very poor example. The testing procedures in the White House were woefully inadequate and that led to a super-spreader event in the form of the Amy Comey Barrett Supreme Court announcement, where Trump himself came down with COVID.

 

Gottlieb discusses the perfidy of China in withholding information on the spread of disease there. To this day we do not really know how COVID originated there. Gottlieb believes it was an accident or a lab leak at their Wuhan Labs. The one person in the White House who was blowing the whistle on China was NSC staffer Matt Pottinger.

 

Gottlieb’s policy recommendations for the future include, enhanced surveillance systems, the paying of firms to carry excess capacity in protective equipment, testing equipment and chemical reagents. So instead of stockpiling these items which tend to go stale, excess capacity would be build into the system. He also recommends an international commission similar to the International Atomic Energy Agency to regulate advanced virology labs.

 

Dr. Gottlieb’s offers up an education on viruses, governmental processes, and the public health response to a crisis. At times he gets bogged down in too much detail, but his book is well worth the read.

 

Note: I received this book as a gift.

For the full Amazon URL see: Continuing Ineptitude (amazon.com)