Warnings to the White House
The FRONTLINE Dispatch
GBH
4.5 • 1.1K Ratings
🗓️ 9 April 2020
⏱️ 27 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Inside the Trump administration’s coronavirus response — and missed opportunities to contain COVID-19 before it was too late. Correspondent Martin Smith speaks with global health experts about warnings to the White House that went unheeded, including a health policy expert who said his 2019 study pointing to the threat of a pandemic was met with silence.
As he investigates how the crisis unfolded in the U.S., Smith finds: “There's a lot of unknowns as to who dropped the ball and when. It's clear that at the top, and I mean by that the president, the wrong messages were being given.”
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | The Frontline Dispatch is made possible by the Abrams Foundation, |
| 0:03.6 | committed to excellence in journalism, |
| 0:05.6 | and by the Frontline Journalism Fund, with major support from John and Joanne Hagler. |
| 0:10.8 | Support for Frontline Dispatch comes from the Massachusetts General Hospital Cancer Service. and When you hear the word cancer their team is ready learn more at mass general |
| 0:24.6 | ororg slash cancer you've spent a lot of time thinking about the possibility |
| 0:31.0 | the inevitability really of some kind of pandemic hitting us all. |
| 0:36.5 | What was going through your mind when you saw the news out of Wuhan? |
| 0:41.3 | Well my first reaction was that this looked like the option that |
| 0:50.1 | we feared the most. A fast that we had never seen before, a fast-moving respiratory pathogen that we had never seen before |
| 1:00.8 | that was moderately lethal. |
| 1:03.0 | And then as we began to learn more about its transmissibility, |
| 1:08.0 | I began to realize that this was a truly extraordinary threat that we faced. |
| 1:15.0 | That's Stephen Morrison, author of a study that warned last year of a pandemic like |
| 1:20.0 | the coronavirus spreading to the US. He's talking with frontline correspondent and producer Martin Smith. |
| 1:27.4 | As you watch the numbers rise, the number of cases, the number of deaths, and you see these horrendous scenes of front line hospital |
| 1:35.8 | workers giving their lives, shortages of equipment. |
| 1:39.1 | How do you feel? |
| 1:40.1 | I feel like everyone else, I feeluished there will be thousands upon thousands of |
| 1:46.1 | people in America who will die needlessly they will experience preventable deaths |
| 1:51.5 | and there will be thousands of health workers |
| 1:54.8 | whose lives will be imperiled and many of them will become sick and some of them will |
| 2:00.2 | die because of our lack of preparedness. |
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