From the newsroom of the Washington Post, Washington Post is Colby.

Hi, Stephanie McCrements from the Washington Post.

This is Post Reports.

I'm routine powers.

It's Monday, June 28th.

Today, new revelations about what was going on inside the government during the height

of the coronavirus outbreak.

In retrospect, it's kind of striking because the U.S. was ranked the best prepared country

for a pandemic.

Yes, mean Abu Talib is a health policy reporter at the post.

The people responsible in the health agencies across the government knew that there were

always going to be challenges and something like this.

This was certainly a problem that was appreciated by several administrations.

George W. Bush had read The Great Influenza and then demanded a number of briefings on pandemic

preparedness.

Bill Clinton talked about this, Barack Obama talked about this.

But I don't think any of those plans or discussions or infusions of money that might have

come here and there appreciated the scale of what we endured here.

For the last few months, yes, mean and economics editor Damian Paleta have been looking back

to the early days of the pandemic in the U.S.

It was as they put it a nightmare scenario.

There was talk of what if there is a pandemic flu or a pandemic respiratory virus, but

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