Hello and welcome to this day in esoteric political history from Radiotopia.

My name is Jody Avergan.

This day, August 13, 2014, not that long ago, the World Health Organization reported that the death toll from Ebola in four West African nations, Guinea, Sierra Leone, Liberia, and Nigeria had passed 1,000.

The Ebola outbreak would capture the world's attention,

as many of you remember, including here in the United States,

two and a half years later, the outbreak ended with more than 28,000 cases and

more than 11,000 deaths but let's talk about the early-ish stages of the 2014

outbreak with as always Nicole Hem of Columbia. Hello Nicky.

Hey Jody.

And our special guest for this episode,

someone who has been very helpful in guiding us

through this current pandemic,

former acting administrator of the Centers for Medicare

and Medicaid Services and host of the

excellent podcast in the bubble, Andy Slavit. Andy thank you for doing this.

You're welcome. Hey Jody, hey Nicole. So Andy I guess I'll start actually with sort of a big question first which is how much does looking back at former outbreaks like this provide lessons for today and how much do we have to realize that every pandemic is different in its own way?

Well this is different and this is harder, but there are a lot of lessons, I think a lot of things that were

done well and things that are sometimes not done well that you need to focus on.

I think the principal, two things about that outbreak that we can learn and how it was handled is one,

when you're handling public health crisis you have to make it the single

most important thing you can't make it co-equal with your kids getting back to

school and the economy and all of these other things at the same time because if you don't make the public health

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