As with all things, it looks very different in retrospect than how it felt as it was happening.

In the early days of the pandemic, I could see what was going on both here in the US and

in Europe and started talking openly about how we were far behind.

We had been caught flat-footed, that we had missed a window of opportunity to really get

this virus under control.

If that voice sounds familiar, it's probably because you've heard it before, starting

in the early spring of 2020 and basically ever since.

My name is Ashish Jha and I'm the COVID-19 Response Coordinator for the White House.

Dr. Ashish Jha didn't intend to become a household name.

When the pandemic began, he was head of the Harvard Global Health Institute.

But as a public health expert who'd spent a long time researching pandemic preparedness,

he was in high demand as the novel coronavirus hit and kept on hitting.

Oh, the first few months, March through June was just crazy.

I probably was getting about two to three hundred media requests a day.

And basically it was started 6 a.m. and go to 11 p.m., initially seven days a week, until

I just realized I can't keep going.

So I started taking Saturdays off, which was good.

Ashish was on TV, on the radio, on Twitter, basically everywhere you looked or listened.

He was feeling a void that in his view never should have existed.

I really thought the primary source of information, good information would be coming from CDC on

a daily basis.

Some ways that just never happened.

...