Coronavirus Report: The Hill’s Steve Clemons interviews Ron Klain

The Hill’s Steve Clemons interviews Ron Klain, who served under former President Obama as the White House Ebola response coordinator.

Read excerpts from the interview below.

Clemons: What are we not doing today that you put in place when we were dealing with Ebola?

{mosads}Klain: Doctors, nurses and scientists beat diseases; but policy and planning and public health beat pandemics. Fighting a pandemic is a giant logistical challenge. And we’ve seen the failure of, kind of, the Trump administration’s management of that over the last four months. First, ignoring and denying the threat, refusing to centralize management of it in the White House, kind of leaving it at HHS, and then having a series of chaotic structures in the White House. You know, all these things have led to the problems you talked about in your introduction. The fact that we lag most of the world on testing when we could have tested earlier, like Korea did. The fact that we lag most of the world on getting our hospitals ready to go. The fact that we’ve lagged the world on social distancing measures. All these things are the product of inconsistent and erratic coordination out of the White House. A lot of politics instead of scientific guidance to the process, and just generally a kind of bungled response.

Clemons: Looking at it today, where do you think the government is performing well and where is it not?

Klain: Well, I think it sounds like there’s a good effort underway to really accelerate the vaccine. And, you know, I have a lot of confidence in that because Dr. Fauci, he’s the head of the National Institute of Allergies and Infectious Disease, he’s really overseeing that project in a very direct way.

Clemons: Not to interrupt, you worked with him on Ebola right?

Klain: I did, every day, Tony and I talked every day. He’s a great national treasure, he’s served six presidents, has never had a problem with the president until now. He was highly trusted by Ronald Reagan and Barack Obama, George Bush and Bill Clinton. I mean, the idea that Donald Trump somehow tries to sideline him is just ridiculous. Likewise, Dr. Nancy Messonnier who is the deputy director of the CDC in charge of respiratory illnesses. That’s what we’re dealing with here. She’s also largely tried to be pushed out of the picture by the Trumpers because of her early warnings about the risk of this pandemic. But she’s also, i know, playing a critical role behind the scenes on this vaccine. So, I think progress on the vaccine seems like it’s moving along very well. I think President Trump maybe has been over optimistic in his public statements about it. Hyping it as always, but I think it’s coming along. Look, I think on the fundamentals of the public health response, we’re still way behind where we need to be. Still too hard, too difficult and too rare for people to get tests. We don’t have a regular system of testing people before they go back to work or testing your colleagues or whatever. We don’t really have contact tracing up in most parts of the country. So, we test someone we’re really not following up outside of a few places aggressively on figuring out who that person was in contact with. That’s what isolates chains of transmissions. That’s what snuffs out epidemics. We’re not really doing a good job of telling people how to reopen safely, what kind of gear workers need to wear, what kind of rules and procedures, we’ve kind of basically left everyone on their own. I mean, it is the most kind of laggard, disjointed response you can imagine. I think when I talk to business leaders, a lot of them say, basically, “I’ll kind of do whatever I can to make my workers safe, or I’ll do whatever I can to make my business safe, but I just don’t really know who’s in charge, and who’s telling me what I should do.”

Clemons: How do you get the equilibrium right between tech solutions that may help us beat this thing and those that could be considered surveillance to be cautious of?

Klain: Well, let’s be clear. I think technology does have a role to play here, Steve, but contact tracing requires contact tracers. The data is only useful if there’s someone who is analyzing the data and really turning it into kind of a real pattern of what we see. And so, I think our biggest gap right now is a real lack of contact tracers. Vice President Biden, who I support as you mentioned at the outset, announced yesterday an eight-point plan for how to reopen safely and one of the biggest elements there was a proposal to create a contact tracing corps of 100,000 people. We need jobs in this country anyway. We create good paying jobs of people manning contact tracing, of people really tracking it down. I think on these technology issues again, I think tech can be helpful. I do think privacy issues are very, very important. I think all this technology has to be consented to. I think in America people should have the right to accept or reject use of these tools. But ultimately, even if you consent Steve, it says that your iPhone was near my iPhone. We need human contact tracers to understand what kind of contact we had, do I need to be isolated? Do you need to be isolated? And that’s really the thing we’re lacking. Public health isn’t, you know, advanced technology. It’s a lot of well-proven, established techniques. And I think that’s the craziest thing about this conversation we’re having as a country right now about masks, for example. A lot of resistance, a lot of upset, a lot of anxiety about the mask thing. But there’s just data after data after data that shows it’s a simple, effective way to slow transmission of the disease. And so, I think if we went to more mask wearing, we went to better testing, more contact tracing, we would bend this curve of the disease downward more quickly.

Clemons: Given your experience with Ebola and other big challenges to the country, are you angry that we didn’t do more to prepare for this pandemic?

Klain: Of course I am. I mean, I think every American should be angry. I mean, look, President George W. Bush warned that something like this would come. President Obama gave a speech in December of 2014 where he said something like this would come. We in the Obama administration, after the Ebola response, set up a permanent office of pandemic preparedness and response in the National Security Council. We brought in a team to prepare for this. President Trump kept it the first year, but when John Bolton took over the NSC, he wiped it out, sent the key members of the team over to other agencies. We left a pandemic playbook, 69 pages of what to do in the early days of a pandemic. The Trump administration ignored it. So, the warnings were there. The bipartisan warnings were there. The bipartisan work had been done to lay the infrastructure to respond to this. Now, look, let’s be clear. Even with all that, would COVID have been a difficult challenge for any administration? Of course, it would have been. Of course it would have been. But by getting rid of the office that was prepared for it, by shutting down 38 of our 48 global monitoring spots to find something like this, by refusing to fill the position that the U.S. government had negotiated for inside the Chinese disease control agency to get intelligence on this, by slathering praise on the Chinese government officials in the early days of this, instead of asking hard questions, the Trump administration left this country much worse off than it had to be. That is why all over the world this disease is being extinguished. And on the other hand, it’s going to be one of the top three causes of death in America this month. So how could you not be angry about that?

Clemons: Jared Kushner seems to be playing a role that you played in previous administrations, at least behind the scenes, coordinating various aspects of this. What would be a roster of things that Kushner should put in place?

Klain: Well, I think there are two things that have gone badly wrong here. The first is it’s not clear who is in charge of the White House and this problem. After all, the president of the United States stood up and said that Mike Pence was in charge and was running the response and in the meantime, Jared Kushner had his own task force, and we know, from talking to senior government officials in the states that those two task forces kind of warred with one another and made this testing problem much worse. So, while the Pence task force was busy trying to get state testing going, particularly in March and early April, that Kushner task force was working on private testing labs and the test equipment and chemical manufacturers didn’t know which system they were supposed to ship chemicals to. I talked to governor’s offices all over the country, who told me “We can’t get chemicals for a state testing labs because the Kushner task force has said to send them to the private testing lab.” So, the first thing after this is have clear lines of authority, clear lines of accountability. We haven’t seen that. And the second thing, Steve, is you have to have confidence in the government and the government employees and the government experts. The hallmark of Kushner’s work on all these problems has been to say, basically, he thinks everyone in the government’s dumb and he wants to hire a bunch of people from outside consulting firms to kind of run circles around these people, and I have great respect for the people in the outside consulting firms. But I will tell you that some 28-year-old hired out of Boston Consulting Group, or McKinsey, cannot match the expertise of the career people in these agencies who have devoted their lives and their expertise to understanding how to manage these crises. And the consistent approach here has been to downplay, degrade, distrust that expertise and instead fetishize the expertise of outside consultants and outside private consulting firms. And I think we have paid the price for that in this COVID response.

Clemons: What does the breaking down of global relationships do to the health of the scientific ecosystem, both in dealing with the current pandemic but also thinking about the next pandemic that may come our way?

Klain: I think there’s a simple example to think about in this regard. We are hopefully going to have a COVID vaccine soon, soonish, probably later this year. And it will probably take more than one vaccine to beat COVID, maybe different populations will need different vaccines. What we don’t know is will that vaccine be discovered and made in the U.S. or discovered and made some place else. And even if this one is discovered and made in the U.S., the vaccine for the next big crisis may be discovered and made some place else. We just don’t know. Without global coordination on this, we’re putting Americans at risk. I mean, if this vaccine is discovered and made in Europe, and our relationships with our European allies are frayed, we have ostensibly pulled out of the WHO or are defunding the WHO. You know, what kind of access will Americans have to those drugs, to those treatments, to those vaccines? And so, this is a global challenge. We have global resources to fight it. We need to work with our partners, particularly in Europe, to develop the science, to develop the medicines, to develop the vaccines, to develop the distribution systems so that we protect the American people. This isn’t globalism, for goodness’s sake or for humanitarian’s sake, though humanitarianism is very important. It’s globalism because it’s in our interest to have access to the best medicines, the best vaccines, from the best labs, wherever they’re found.