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And now, from the University of Chicago Institute of Politics and CNN Audio, the Axfiles with your host, David Axelrod.

So this is going to be a different kind of Axfiles.

Normally, I sit with my guests and we talk about their lives and their journeys as well as issues of the day.

But given the enormity of the corona virus story, I thought it would be good to bring back an old friend Dennis McDonough, who served as the White House Chief of Staff for the last four years of the Obama administration.

Before that, as a senior member of the National Security Council there, to talk about how these kinds of crises were handled in that White House and about how it's being handled now and what we should expect or hope for in the future.

Here's that conversation.

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Dennis McDonough, it's great to see you again, you know, at times of emergency and stress you want to run to, and I say this as a Jew, you kind of want to run to the parish priest, right?

And you're the closest thing I know to one having come from a family of 11, devout Catholic family of 11.

I think you've got several of them in your family.

Yes.

So you'll have to do for now.

But the other reason I wanted to talk to you is that you have a lot of experience in dealing with these kinds of, I mean we haven't quite faced one like this, but pandemics, the threat of pandemics.

You saw it from the Senate side, you've seen it at the NSC when you were working there.

NS White House Chief of Staff, so I thought you'd be the perfect guy to sort of give us some perspective on where we are, why we're here, what's gone wrong and as importantly what we do now, but just by way of background.

You worked with Senator Obama, not just President Obama, but you came after he began working on this.

I remember I got a call from him in maybe 2005 when he was a freshman senator and he had just read a piece in the New Yorker about the avian flu.

Yeah.

And he was really alarmed that there wasn't enough work being done on finding a vaccine for it and other aspects of it.

This was an interest of his, even before he became president.

Yeah. It's one of the places that he did a lot of work with the then chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, Senator Luger, much has been written about their work together on non-piliferation.

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