Uncontrolled Spread: Why Covid-19 Crushed Us and How We Can Defeat the Next Pandemic

by Scott Gottlieb MD, Fred Sanders (Read by)

Overview

Physician and former FDA commissioner Scott Gottlieb asks: Has America’s COVID-19 catastrophe taught us anything?

In Uncontrolled Spread, he shows how the coronavirus and its variants were able to trounce America’s pandemic preparations, and he outlines the steps that must be taken to protect against the next outbreak. As the pandemic unfolded, Gottlieb was in regular contact with all the key players in Congress, the Trump administration, and the drug and diagnostic industries. He provides an inside account of how level after level of American government crumbled as the COVID-19 crisis advanced.

A system-wide failure across government institutions left the nation blind to the threat, and unable to mount an effective response. We’d prepared for the wrong virus. We failed to identify the contagion early enough and became overly reliant on costly and sometimes divisive tactics that couldn’t fully slow the spread. We never considered asymptomatic transmission and we assumed people would follow public health guidance. Key bureaucracies like the CDC were hidebound and outmatched. Weak political leadership aggravated these woes. We didn’t view a public health disaster as a threat to our national security.

Many of the woes sprung from the CDC, which has very little real-time reporting capability to inform us of Covid’s twists and turns or assess our defenses. The agency lacked an operational capacity and mindset to mobilize the kind of national response that was needed. To guard against future pandemic risks, we must remake the CDC and properly equip it to better confront crises. We must also get our intelligence services more engaged in the global public health mission, to gather information and uncover emerging risks before they hit our shores so we can head them off. For this role, our clandestine agencies have tools and capabilities that the CDC lacks.

Uncontrolled Spread argues we must fix our systems and prepare for a deadlier coronavirus variant, a flu pandemic, or whatever else nature — or those wishing us harm — may threaten us with. Gottlieb outlines policies and investments that are essential to prepare the United States and the world for future threats.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781665100205
Publisher:	HarperCollins Publishers
Publication date:	09/21/2021
Product dimensions:	5.28(w) x 6.69(h) x 0.63(d)

About the Author

Translated by Jeremy Tiang. Jeremy Tiang is a novelist, playwright, and translator. His translations include novels by Yeng Pway Ngon, Su Wei-Chen, Yan Ge, Zhang Yueran, Lo Yi-Chin, Chan Ho-Kei and Li Er. His plays include Salesman, A Dream of Red Pavilions, and translations of scripts by Chen Si’an, Wei Yu-Chia, Quah Sy Ren and others. His novel State of Emergency won the Singapore Literature Prize in 2018. He lives in Flushing, Queens, and is a member of the translation collective Cedilla & Co.

Editorial Reviews

02/01/2021

At the Food and Drugs Administration (FDA) in the early 2000s, Gottlieb was instrumental in developing a Pandemic Influenza Plan and was dismayed to discover that the plan was not in use when he returned to the FDA in 2017. Here he explains why we were so underprepared for COVID-19. With a 40,000-copy first printing.

Library Journal