Andy Slavitt: Inside the Doomed U.S. Coronavirus Response

Health-care expert Andy Slavitt has spent his career advocating for the American people through affordable and accessible health care. In 2015, he was nominated by President Barack Obama to run the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. In early 2020, when COVID-19 infections began to appear across the United States, Slavitt was one of the first critics of President Donald Trump’s lack of response to the oncoming pandemic. His new book, Preventable: The Inside Story of How Leadership Failures, Politics, and Selfishness Doomed the U.S. Coronavirus Response, provides a definitive inside account of the United States' failed response to the pandemic.

Slavitt describes the fateful decisions that were made in an attempt to curb the spread of the coronavirus and the failures of political leaders to keep Americans healthy. The story he tells is one of a country where bad leadership, political and cultural fractures, and an unwillingness to sustain sacrifice created a complex problem that proved near-impossible to resolve.

Join us as leading health-care advisor Andy Slavitt describes what went wrong in America’s response to the coronavirus pandemic and puts forth the solutions that will prevent us from repeating the situation.

SPEAKERS

Andy Slavitt

Former White House Senior Advisor for COVID Response; Host, “In the Bubble” Podcast; Author, Preventable: The Inside Story of How Leadership Failures, Politics, and Selfishness Doomed the U.S. Coronavirus Response; Twitter @ASlavitt

In Conversation with Dr. Atul Gawande

Endocrine Surgeon, Brigham and Women’s Hospital; Professor, Harvard Medical School and the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health; Twitter @Atul_Gawande

In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, we are currently hosting all of our live programming via YouTube live stream. This program was recorded via video conference on June 22nd, 2021 by the Commonwealth Club of California.

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