Is there any indication that if Trump is reelected, he would handle a subsequent public health crisis any better?
I hope he would have learned lessons, but nothing indicates to me that he would change. Each of us has our own fundamental personality. He’s 78. So I would be surprised if he did anything different.
As someone who is 83 and still sharp and energetic, how did you view the drama with President Biden?
People age differently. You can’t take a number and say, arbitrarily, when you reach this number, you are not capable of performing at the level that you used to perform. For some people, see, that’s 65. But some, it’s 75. For some, it’s 85. When I was in the White House for two years with President Biden, he was a little bit slower on his feet, but he was quite sharp, quite analytical. I have not had contact with him in 18 months.
So when you saw the debate, did you think, “That’s not the guy I served under?”
That wasn’t the Joe Biden I know. And it’s clear to me what an amazing thing he did by stepping down. What a show of strength, humility, and a desire to do what’s best for the country.
You don’t mention Vice President Kamala Harris much in the book. Tell me about your impressions.
Our interactions have been very positive. She would intermittently join [President Biden’s Covid Response Coordinator] Jeff Zients, the Surgeon General, the CDC director, and me in the Oval Office when we would brief President Biden. She asks very insightful questions, very attuned to what’s going on.
Let’s talk about where we are with Covid. When we first talked in 2020, everyone, including you, assumed that we wouldn’t be dealing with high infection rates four years later. But we are, despite our desire to put it behind us. What happened?
Covid continually fooled us month after month, and year after year, because of its uniqueness. It’s a highly transmissible respiratory virus, so you would expect it would peak and then go away. And that would be it. That didn’t happen with Covid. Not only did it not go away with the season, but it continued to evolve new variants. Even today, in July of 2024, there’s a major outbreak that’s going on with Covid. Two weeks ago, I got it. The president got it last week.
I had it a month ago.
That’s the sobering news. The good news is there’s been enough experience with the virus from either being prior infected, which you and I were, or being vaccinated and boosted multiple times. So even though 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 few months to 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’s possible, but less and less likely. This virus evolves multiple variants. We had Alpha, Beta, Gamma, Delta, and then in November of 2021, we developed the first Omicron variant. Since then, we’ve had many, many, many variants but all within the subcategory of Omicron, which means they were not very different from one another. So if we stay in that realm, where it changes a bit, but not enough to give a real divergence from protection, this is just going to be a virus that’s going to be with us for an indefinite period of time. In order to protect ourselves optimally, we have to get boosters, like the new ones that are coming out this fall.
