And now i am delighted to introduce tonight speakers philip is the white burkett miller, professor of history at university of virginia, where he has also served dean of the graduate school and director of the miller center. His scholarly work has on critical episodes in american and world history. He has been a member of the defense policy board for defense Ashton Carter and a member of the board of the bill and Melinda Gates foundation and 2020 he was elected a member of the American Academy of diplomacy joining him on our digital stage this evening. Our coauthors kendall hoyt and dr. Richard j. Hatcher. Kendall hoyt, an assistant professor at gisela school of medicine at. And a senior lecturer at the third school of engineering at dartmouth college, where she teaches courses on biosecurity Health Systems and technical technological innovation. She serves on the us Covid Commission planning group. Has served as a consultant for the coalition for epidemic preparedness innovations and the Nuclear Threat initiative. And is the author of longshot vaccines for national, published by Harvard University press in 2012. Dr. Richard j. Hatch it is chief executive officer of the for epidemic preparedness innovations, a Global Partnership that supports the Swift Development of and equitable to new vaccines, other defenses against diseases with epidemic and pandemic potential. Dr. Hatchett and his plan is for the world to neutralize those pandemic threats with passion and investment in research and development. Tonight our speakers will be discussing lessons from the covid war by the Covid Crisis Group led by Philip Zelikow lessons from the covid war plain spoken and clear sighted. It cuts through the enormous jumble of information. Make some sense of it all. And to answer what . Just to us and why. And how. Next time could we do better . Because there will be a next time. The covid war showed americans that their wondrous scientific knowledge had run far of their organized ability. Apply it in practice improvising to fight this. Many americans displayed ingenuity and dedication but they struggled with systems made success difficult and failure easier. This shows how americans can come together learn hard truths, build on what works, and prepare global emergencies to come. We are so pleased to be hosting this event tonight. The digital podium is. Philip campbell and dr. Well. Thank you natasha. Such a nice introduction. And thanks to harvard. Thanks to the Harvard Bookstore for giving us a chance to talk about this new book. By the way, that the book looks like this beautiful blue cover. If you go by the harvard and spot that scribe blue, you know what to buy. So this is an odd book really. Its got 34 coauthors and. Youre entitled to a little bit of an excellent as to how this thing came into existence. We were originally supposed to help plan a national Covid Commission, several foundations asked me to run an effort to prepare the way for a Huge National commission that would investigate and understand the. Biggest crisis to hit the United States since the second world war. If you measure it by life lost and money spent so we gathered this enormous group of 34 people, outstanding people, including and richard and 31 others. We interviewed. We held listening sessions, hundreds of people and task forces did a lot of work. And then we last year, you know what . Theres not going to be a National Effort commission for various in the congress and in the executive branch. And so we could either pack up all our insights and go home and we hope town meetings among the group to decide what do with members basically said well i think we now need to just tell people what we know and the result of deciding to just tell people what we out is this book so this is the i think the only available account right now that in plain english goes through all the key choices made in this crisis from origins to operation warp speed and everything in between. Its i think theres no way anyone would read this report without feeling like they can now make a better sense of what happened to them as well as to their country and indeed a lot of the world. There are a lot of one of the things that im often is okay, whats the big takeaway, this report . And the big takeaway, this report is not about follow the science. Its really about getting ready for a great emergency. Its about preparedness. What is preparedness mean in general . Knowing what to do in an emergency and, being ready to do it. If you want to see. What preparedness really meant in practice in this crisis, which doesnt neatly under red or blue label partizan labels. When you this book itll just be obvious to you what means. Itll be obvious you what it meant to be unready. But also youll see all sorts. Terrific. Improvizations that were done during the crisis. Some led actually by richard that inspire terrorists with a lot of low fruit. That could help us be much more prepared for the great emergency next time. So the first key theme is preparedness. A lot of people also. Well, you know what they present us with their standard narratives and theres a blame narrative on the republican side that, well, lets just blame china or lets just blame the Public Health experts for which tony fauci becomes poster child or on the democratic side, lets blame president trump. You know, the irony of blaming Public Health system. I was asked about this recently is that the Public Health and the Public Health leaders fail. Well, they were set up to fail. We came into a 21st Century National pandemic with a system designed the 19th century, a at the time this pandemic hit us, we were set up to fail. So should we then blame those leaders for the failure. That seems somewhat unfair. As for president trump, anyone, this book will conclude, as we did, that he was at the least a a comorbidity a preexisting condition that increases the risk of death or serious illness. And no one reading this book would come away it believing that trump should be anywhere near the instruments government anytime soon. But if you think that the crisis and what happened in our country was all about president trump, he actually a lot of what actually in the crisis and a lot of the reasons we failed a crucial conclusion of the book is the polarization and toxic politics were fed by lack of preparedness. Very quickly it became obvious a lot of people ready to take guidance on what to do. And we didnt have really good guidance to give them. We didnt have were flying blind in tracking the progress, the pandemic. We didnt have good tool to fight it. And into that void of, not knowing what to do and the flailing the floundering into that void, toxic politics could then just in and that started happening all through 2020 and just kept getting and worse and then you see that story unfold through the report with all kinds insights in which lots of people were trying to do the best they could and. A system that made success hard and failure easy. So what wed like to do now is having just introduced a little bit of what we were up to and what this report was about, i want to turn to kendall first to answer couple of questions and then turn the conversation to richard and the two things that i want kendall to take is how you handle, the private sector, growing a giant emergency of the Public Sector obviously didnt have the capabilities to respond at scale in this situation. You had that, therefore, from some of partnership with the private sector. So and kendall, in particular looked at this Public Private nexus and id like to hear again some of her insights about this. And then secondly, id like you to reflect a little bit about whether or not we to get ready for Health Security in the ways we sometimes get for problems of National Security. So, kendall, over to you you. Youve never been one for easy questions. I think an important point when it comes to working the private sector to realize is that this is a team effort that government cant do without industry. Industry cant do this without government. And i think important as richard will tell us, no country can do this without. Other countries, and thats huge part of it, which i talk about a little too. But when it comes to working with industry, i mean that thats form of preparedness to. So preparedness is really about what are we doing right now . And if we are not sitting at the company at the table, companies in, this moment of relative calm to figure out how are going to develop the next generation of medical countermeasures for covid or for Something Else then weve failed to understand the lesson of this pandemic. Right. And we need preexisting partnerships to move quickly. And i mean, this is the lesson of cepi. This is the of richard and what hes done at cepi. They were able to initiate cepi, by the way, is the acronym cspi, the coalition for epidemic preparedness, innovation and everyone get a quiz on whether they can say that thats something that is that they can say quickly. So. I think cepi is. One of doing incredible work, really remarkable visionary organization. Im going to blame richard for, their portion of that. But they were able to initiate it and redirect contracts just 13 days after a chinese scientist posted the sequence, sarscov2 and we should talk little bit about how they do that, because different from how we do it in us there, they have a very proactive and strategic stance, whereas we tend to be little bit more transactional and reactive and it does not put us in a position to move as as cepi was able to. So i think that was thats very important. Your second question was about nationals treating this as a security issue. You know, and i think i think its a very one of the reasons we say that one of the reasons we call it a National Security issue is because we need to its a useful analogy, especially when youre talking about development and procurement, and we need to be able to procure in parallel with multiple preexisting in order to have the speed, the scale that we need in an emergency. But, you know, unlike like in a traditional war, you know, we really in a fast pandemic, id say were really in a race against time and not against each other. So its a collective security problem in that regard. And so some of the best Solutions Available to us are collective as well. And one, there are many different ways of thinking about this where its not a zero sum game necessarily or it doesnt have to be a zero sum game. So, you know, think about we procure vaccines public funders have more leverage to shape the market for public goods such as vaccines when they Work Together and when you can build the mechanisms, the tools that allow you to do that. A you have a bigger of money so you can inspire more innovation, have more diversity, reduce risk, but you can also determine the terms which you distribute that good. So you can distribute on the basis of need. You can deliver the vaccines where its most likely to end transmission. And you know, you can do it as opposed to having it go to the highest bidder, which is what happens when you just nations competing high income nations competing. And when it goes to the highest bidder it drives up the cost and reduces access and everyone loses. So to the extent that we can search for collective solutions, think that would be you know, use the security where it helps you and then depart from where it doesnt would be my answer to. So in the last part of your answer and your comments kendall you opened up the issue of thinking about this as a global war, because these Health Emergencies kinds of 21st century problems for global and all of us very practical about the pressure from governments and national citizens. None of us think were living in utopia were all working in the real world. But richard really was because he was running this organization that was kind of the global vaccine finder, kind of unusual Nonprofit Organization based in europe. And then when this pandemic broke so he had the job of being the global vaccine finder for this pandemic and testing whether his organization was ready. So richard, i want you to comment on two things i want you to comment. First of all, what is how should we understand the meaning of a global war . How should this is a global struggle thats important about, as you know, strategic. And second, then, is. All right. And then what are some of your insight into what it me would mean for prepared ness. This theme of preparedness first to try to be prepared global over to you right first let me thank natasha and the Harvard Bookstore for having us. Its Harvard Bookstore is one of my favorite stores, bookstores in the u. S. So its really an honor to join this evening. And philip and kindle thank you for the kind remarks about cepi is you know its an output of the people cepi and i just have the privilege leading it. So just a little bit of background for, for those of you who may not be familiar with cepi, its a relatively new organization which is hopefully why so many had heard of it when the pandemic started, but it was set up in 2017 as a result of the ebola epidemic in west was probably the major sort of policy innovation coming out of the ebola epidemic in west africa and that the idea behind setting it up was that ultimately a vaccine was deployed into west africa at the very tail end of the epidemic after. It had been brought under control with traditional Public Health interventions, but after 27,000 infections and 11 more than 11,000 deaths and an estimated. 3 billion of impact on the Global Economy and i think global Health Leaders were shocked and dismayed that a vaccine that was ultimately shown to be hundred percent effective was not to be deployed when it was needed and it had languished in laboratories making. Slow progress for well over decade. And so cepi was created to address neglected epidemic diseases and to accelerate Vaccine Development in and of covid happened after we had been operating for a little less three years and they thinking about the the covid problem. I mean i mean a pandemic is in a global issue. These pandemics, diseases dont respect boundaries. They move very, very they seed around the world. Then they tend to almost simultaneously regions of the world in many, many countries, the world. And so thinking about, i mean, a pandemic is an inherently transnational problem. And the ideal circumstance would be to contain an incipient pandemic at source. But to do that, most countries dont have the capability do that by themselves. They will need. So there are significant disincentives for countries to report outbreaks because they are of the consequences of reporting outbreaks in terms of travel and border closures and being off from from trade and travel. And i think that we now recognize that there were delays in, communications out of china about the seriousness of the in wuhan and even some delays. And we talk about that in the book in terms of releasing information about the nature of the pathogen and. Those delays provided time, the virus to spread and for its geographic diffusion to the point at which by the time china geared up with the dramatic interventions in the middle of january 2020, the opportunity containment globally probably had been lost. China using incredible, you know, an incredible set of interventions able to contain it within china. But the genie was out of the bottle and we saw the rapid escalation of the epidemic around world Different Countries responded using different to early cases. And i think its important for american audiences to to really understand the ways in which the american Public Health system and the american response let the country down because other countries like south korea, other large countries south korea, japan, singapore is a small country, but singapore is one. Australia responded differently. The us, the most. Most of the countries emphasized early Rapid Deployment of diagnostics with aggressive testing and tracing campaigns. Thats what happened in south korea and in japan. Implementation of nonpharmaceutical, but not necessarily mandatory closures. The widespread use of masks in japan. Japan is you know, it has oldest population in the world and the lowest death among countries of the g7. I think the death rate in japan is somewhere, you know, a third or less than that of the and in the uk. So there is a lot to at looking at the Different National experiences the virus particularly early in the pandemic in the way populations responded in terms of insights for preparedness and that kind of leads into the insights for preparedness. I do think its imperative review of the way Different Countries responded and particularly the behavioral response of populations in Different Countries will be really important to understanding the differential that weve seen. One of the things that im seeing sitting in an International Organization talking to Different Countries, different regions that are thinking preparedness now, one big important lesson is that because of the inequities of access to medical countermeasures, the regions that suffered from lack of access, particularly in africa but also in other parts of the global south south america, parts south asia,