Hello and welcome to another bonus episode of the new abnormal and we thank you so much for being here today

We have an extra special guest with Andy Slavitt the former Biden White House senior advisor for COVID response and

Past head of Medicare Medicaid for the Obama Biden presidency and author of preventable the inside story of how leadership failures politics and

Selfishness doomed the US coronavirus response

Welcome back to the new abnormal Andy Slavitt. Well your show title has never been more

appropriate sounding than it is right now

What's going on? Well, I've entered that at a few levels

I mean, but I think it's useful to always start with kind of where the ground hasn't shifted from underneath us because it's so many places it has

I mean the things that are most important to do are still the most important things to do

Vaccinate this country as quickly as possible particularly the pockets where there's a lot of unvaccinated people vaccinate the globe and then

Probably there's there's sort of two others that that are gonna be important in game changers one of them

Is to develop an antiviral and the other is that we should be really focusing on solutions to people with long-term symptoms

From COVID-19 those things are the same no matter what but the landscape is so changed over the last few months

The globe is really on fire with COVID the countries that have had the good fortune of not having a lot of COVID in 2020 and

Particularly those that don't have enough vaccine are really hurting in 2021

I mean we're not seeing overrun hospitals forcing collapsing health care systems in places like Bangladesh

India and all directions

Indonesia and then here in the US we are seeing a rise in this wave that

Has India stopped and I think we all are kind of getting the feeling that this isn't gonna be the last wave

So welcome to the new abnormal one of the things I wanted to talk about first and this is a little bit niche

But I think it's important is that

Is that

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