Elias Zerhouni (Photo by Vincent Isore/IP3/Getty Images)

Elias Zer­houni dis­cuss­es ‘am­a­teur hour’ in DC, the de­struc­tion of in­fec­tious dis­ease R&D and how we need to prep for the next time

Elias Zer­houni fa­vors blunt talk, and in a re­cent dis­cus­sion with NPR, the ex-Sanofi R&D and ex-NIH chief had some tough points to make re­gard­ing the pan­dem­ic re­sponse.

Rather than in­ter­pret them, I thought it would be best to pro­vide snip­pets straight from the in­ter­view.

On the Trump ad­min­is­tra­tion re­sponse:

It was ba­si­cal­ly am­a­teur hour. There is no cen­tral con­cept of op­er­a­tions for pre­pared­ness, for pan­demics, pe­ri­od. This ad­min­is­tra­tion doesn’t want to or has no con­cept of what it takes to pro­tect the Amer­i­can peo­ple and the world be­cause it is code­pen­dent. You can’t close your bor­ders and say, “OK, we’re go­ing to be safe.” You’re not go­ing to be able to do that in this world. So it’s a lack of vi­sion, ba­si­cal­ly just a lack of un­der­stand­ing, of what it takes to pro­tect the Amer­i­can peo­ple.

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