00:00The thing that we pay a lot of attention to is what is the impact of the variant,
00:05which is now in more than 22 states in the United States, as well as in other places
00:09throughout the world. It's the UK that's done it. I don't want to say the UK variant. The reason is
00:15because we've really got to get away from it because there tends to be some stigma associated
00:19with that. It's not the UK's fault. It just happens to be prevalent there, same way with
00:25the Republic of South Africa. It's got about 24 names. I can call it from COVID to China virus.
00:50I can call it the plague. I call it the China plague. And with four more years, we'll defeat
00:56the China virus. We had a situation where instead of concentrating from the top on the science
01:11and realizing that we must make decisions based on data and based on evidence, there was a
01:17considerable amount of mixed messaging about what needed to be done from the top down. That really
01:23cost us dearly. The other thing that may involve things that are going on in other countries,
01:32but certainly intensively going on in the United States, it makes it extremely problematic
01:38to adequately address a public health crisis when you're in the middle of a profound degree
01:44of divisiveness in the country. When public health issues become politically charged,
01:51like wearing a mask or not becomes a political statement, you cannot imagine how destructive
01:59that is to any unified public health message. The other thing that we learned is that some of
02:06the things about the United States specifically, that under different circumstances work well,
02:13namely the federalist approach where you have 50 states and territories, each of which are given a
02:20degree of flexibility of doing things their own way. The federal government doesn't want to tell
02:28the states what to do. So we had a situation where the states were sort of left on their own.
02:35So we had a disparate, inconsistent response from one state to the other, which is antithetical
02:43to the fact that the virus is the same. It doesn't know the difference between New York
02:48and Pennsylvania, between Louisiana and Mississippi. It's all the same. Yet there
02:54was such a very, very strong differences the way different states handle it. So the lesson
03:00we learned there was we needed to have a good cooperation between the federal government
03:07and the individual locals, which we did not have.
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