Preventable: The Inside Story of How Leadership Failures, Politics, and Selfishness Doomed the U.S. Coronavirus Response

In this informative and often enraging account of “missed opportunit[ies]” in the U.S. government’s handling of the Covid-19 pandemic, Slavitt, who oversaw Medicare and Medicaid for the Obama administration, interweaves testimony from public health officials and scientific researchers with his own efforts to educate the public and mobilize supplies. Slavitt delves into the suspension of the NBA season in March 2020 and the slow-moving response that put New York state at 100,000 cases by early April, and tracks missteps by White House coronavirus task force members including Health and Human Services secretary Alex Azar and Dr. Deborah Birx, who “inhaled the groupthink of the White House” in the early months of the pandemic. Some heroes emerge, including epidemiologist Blythe Adamson, who created an accurate model of the virus’s spread, while other infectious disease experts prove remarkably prescient—on March 15, Dr. Michael Osterholm of the University of Minnesota forecast an “18-month war” against the virus complicated by public resistance to government mandates (“People will listen to you for about two weeks, but if they don’t see what you’re telling them, they will begin to rebel”). Slavitt’s frequent attacks on Trump give the book a partisan flavor, but he offers critical insights for mitigating the next public health crisis. Readers will learn much from this pointed assessment of where things went wrong. (June)