Review of Nightmare Scenario by Abutaleb and Paletta

Nightmare Scenario opens with Anthony Fauci stripped to his skivvies and wondering whether the white powder he has just been exposed to in his NIH office is anthrax, ricin, or a hoax. The first and last he can survive, ricin is a death sentence. A security team douses him with chemicals and moves him to another office where a portable shower has been deployed. Fauci showers, calls his wife, and waits for the test results.

Nightmare Scenario is the best of the recent books on the pandemic (I earlier reviewed Lewis’s The Premonition and Slavitt’s Preventable). Based on hundreds of interviews it’s a true inside account. It doesn’t contain much in the way of analysis but that’s a strength in a journalistic history. Rather than a strict review, I will note a couple of things that jumped out to me.

An astounding amount of time was spent at the highest level of government on what do do about the Americans stuck on the Diamond Princess and other cruise ships. I was almost screaming at the book at this point “there’s just 437 Americans on the cruise ship! Pay attention to the 328 million Americans at home!” It’s ridiculous that 437 Americans should occupy the President’s time but that’s what happens when people think the President is their father (or mother) who needs to show them that he cares.

Governance by the 24 hour news cycle is by no means solely a Trump failing. Biden doesn’t need to know anything about the Miami tower collapse, for example. It’s a tragedy but a state and local matter. But the 24-hour news cycle means that politicians don’t think more than a step ahead, often to a bizarre extent. When the Dow dropped, Larry Kudlow rushed to get on the news to say the “virus is contained”. What was he thinking? If true, this would reveal itself in time and the Dow would rise. If false, he gains at best a couple of days of bump and then lose credibility. Similarly, what was Pence thinking when he wrote in a June of 2020 WSJ op-ed “There Isn’t a Coronavirus Second Wave.” You can’t confidence game a virus.

The CDC botched the initial test and when Joe Grogan at the Domestic Policy Council questioned Azar, Redfield and Fauci he was told “Everything is taken care of. The CDC is remedying the situation.” After repeated delays, the FDA sent an expert to investigate what was going on with the CDC test:

When Stenzel gained access to three key labs developing the test, he couldn’t believe what he saw. In two of the three labs, the agency wasn’t following standard operating procedure. And he discovered the CDC had put together the test in the same lab where it was running the test on live virus samples. That was a violation of the most basic manufacturing practices… “If you were a commercial entity, I would shut you down.” p.81

The CDC failing to use standard operating procedures wasn’t Trump’s fault. The rot is deep.

I was hoping to get more information from Abutaleb and Paletta about Pfizer’s peculiar change in study design. Pfizer released their trial design in mid-September. Articles in the Washington Post and the New York Times were clear that Pfizer planned to look at their data once 32 trial participants had been infected. President Trump, following Pfizer CEO Bourla, thus predicted that there would be vaccine news in October, before the election. Instead Pfizer announced their terrific results on Monday November 9, after the election. When the announcement came people were surprised that between mid-September and November the trial design had been changed. STAT News, for example, noted:

In their announcement of the results, Pfizer and BioNTech revealed a surprise. The companies said they had decided not to conduct the 32-case analysis “after a discussion with the FDA.” Instead, they planned to conduct the analysis after 62 cases.

Abutaleb and Paletta report that the Trump team was furious when they discovered that the good news had been delayed and then they say the following:

FDA officials, of course, had no control over when Pfizer reported its results, because the company could report them only after a certain number of people in the trial had contracted coronavirus.

This is blatantly false. FDA officials have only to signal what they want from a company and the company will comply. Moreover, it was precisely by changing the number of people who needed to have contracted coronavirus that control was exerted. What exactly was said in this “discussion with the FDA” that caused Pfizer to wait? Probably not coincidentally it was also in October that Nancy Pelosi began to worry that British immune systems were different than American immune systems.

Abutaleb and Paletta have nothing good to say about Jared Kushner (unlike Birx who was obviously a source) but if you read between the lines Kushner comes off surprisingly well. At the very least, he moves quickly and sometimes gets things done. Abutaleb and Paletta offer this critique:

Kushner was correct that the normal processes for procuring supplies were cumbersome and slow. But circumventing those processes risked wasting taxpayer money, buying faulty supplies, or running afoul of government contracting laws. There were protections in place to try to prevent the government from overpaying for products or supplies and to try to ensure that companies did not receive unfair advantages…” p. 258.

Oooh, overpaying for products. As if that never happens when the processes are followed. All of this makes it clear that there would have been big errors under other administrations but they would have been different errors like moving even slower so as not to run “afoul of government contracting laws.”

One thing which comes through in The Premonition, Preventable and Nightmare Scenario is that quite a few people understood the crisis early. On January 18, Scott Gottlieb texted Joe Grogan to warn him about the virus in Wuhan. Grogan takes it seriously (it may have been Grogan who was responsible for inviting Kremer and I to speak to the DPC on accelerating vaccines.) On January 28, deputy national security advisor Matthew Pottinger warned Trump that he could be facing the deadliest pandemic since the 1918 flu. But Gottlieb had already left the administration, Grogan would resign early, and when Pottinger started wearing a mask to work he was considered an alarmist and was frozen out of decision making. Many others had or would soon leave:

Who was left? A mix of family members, twentysomethings, hangers-on, fourth-stringers, former lobbyists, sycophants…That created tremendous pressure on the government officials who remained in their positions in 2020. Many of them were totally unprepared for what was coming. Many of them were so focused on their own survival that it never occurred to them to focus on anyone else’s. p.31.

Overall, Nightmare Scenario is an excellent read.

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