Hello and welcome to the 538 Politics Podcast. I'm Gaelin Drug.

On March 10th, 2020, I started our late-night coverage of the Michigan primary by telling

podcast listeners that we were recording from our homes to test our remote capabilities

in case the coronavirus forced us out of the office for a time. It was just meant to

be a test and we have not recorded a podcast in our studio since. It's been a long year

and a half with alternating periods of optimism and pessimism. As of today, about 700,000

Americans have died from COVID. The CDC estimates that 120 million Americans have been infected

and more than 6 million have been hospitalized. Everyone's life, of course, has been affected

in some way. There is now cautious optimism among public health experts that after the

current Delta wave and with increases in vaccination rates, we will sometime soon reach a point

when COVID is more of a background if lingering concern as opposed to our principal crisis.

As we take stock of what happened, former Food and Drug Administration Commissioner Scott Gottlieb

argues in a new book that our experience with this pandemic didn't have to be so bad

and that we should be preparing for the next one now. His book is called Uncontrolled Spread,

White COVID-19 Crushed Us, and How We Can Defeat The Next Pandemic. He was FDA Commissioner

from 2017 to 2019. He's also a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and is on

the Board of Pfizer, which of course has a financial stake in the success of the COVID vaccine.

Welcome to the podcast, Scott. Thanks a lot. Thanks for having me.

Also here with me to speak with Scott, our editor-in-chief Nate Silver and senior science writer

Maggie Kyrth, good to have you both here to chat with Scott today.

Thank you. Thanks for having me on. So before we talk about the ways that things could have been

different, let's talk about how they actually were, what happened, how well did the United States

...