Is there any evidence that if Trump is re-elected, he would handle the next public health crisis better?
I hope he’s learned his lesson, but there’s no sign of him changing. We all have our own basic personality. He’s 78. So I’d be surprised if he did anything different.
As an 83-year-old who is still pointed and full of energy, how did you view the drama surrounding President Biden?
People age differently. You can’t take a number and say, arbitrarily, that when you get to that number, you’re not going to be able to perform at the same level that you were. For some people, you see, it’s 65. But for some people, it’s 75. For some people, it’s 85. When I was in the White House for two years with President Biden, he was a little slower on his feet, but he was pretty pointed, pretty analytical. I haven’t heard from him in 18 months.
So when you watched the debate, did you think, “This is not the guy I served under”?
This was not the Joe Biden I knew. And it is clear to me what an incredible thing he did by resigning. What a show of strength, humility, and a desire to do what is best for the country.
You don’t mention Vice President Kamala Harris much in the book. Tell me about your impressions.
Our interactions were very positive. She occasionally joined [President Biden’s Covid Response Coordinator] Jeff Zients, the Surgeon General, the director of the CDC, and I in the Oval Office when we briefed President Biden. He asks very insightful questions, very attuned to what’s going on.
Let’s talk about where we are with Covid. When we first spoke in 2020, everyone, including you, assumed 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 has consistently fooled us month after month and year after year because of its uniqueness. It is a highly contagious respiratory virus, so you would expect it to peak and then disappear. And that would be it. That did not happen with Covid. Not only did it not disappear with the season, it continued to develop fresh variants. Even today, in July 2024, there is a grave outbreak of Covid. I got infected two weeks ago. The president got infected last week.
I had it a month ago.
This is sobering news. The good news is that we have enough experience with the virus, either having been previously infected, as you and I have, or having been vaccinated and vaccinated multiple times. So even if you are not very well protected from infection, you are pretty well protected from severe disease. We are 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 on the verge of total disaster?
It would have to be a very, very different variant, something terrible. It’s possible, but it’s becoming less and less likely. This virus evolves into many variants. We had Alpha, Beta, Gamma, Delta, and then in November 2021 we developed the first Omicron variant. Since then we’ve had many, many, many variants, but all in the Omicron subcategory, meaning they haven’t been very different from each other. So if we stay in this area where it changes a little bit, but not enough to really give us any real deviation from protection, then this is just going to be a virus that’s going to be with us for an indefinite period of time. To protect ourselves optimally, we need to get booster doses, like the fresh ones that are coming out this fall.