The main substance of his address last night.

I I think it's, you know, I think US travel bans our holy incoherent.

They were actually five different policies that apply to different parts of the world.

For example, you're banned from a highly functioning health system like, say, Switzerland.

But you can come in if you're from a low functioning health system like Russia or sub Saharan Africa.

But there's more than that.

This doesn't make Americans safe at all.

The epidemic here is just a cz bad, if not worse, than in most parts of Europe.

And so, by banning people have been to Europe, makes absolutely no sense.

It doesn't make Americans one jot safer.

Germs really just don't respect borders.

You know, this is not a trade war.

Um, this is, you know, not a political fight.

This is a microbe.

Um, and you just can't erect travel bans and expect that you're gonna be safe.

Self.

Evidently, America is not safe to your logic.

Then you would exclude the UK to because there are more cases there than there are in some parts of you that are now banned.

Yes, I mean, of course.

And their places all around the world that have the same kind of case counts that you have in some parts of Europe.

It's meaningless.

Once you start to pick and choose among countries, start to count cases very, very little rationality behind it.

I should say this.

Also, the decision that President Trump made goes expressly against the World Health Organization express recommendations and they violate the United States is treaty obligations under the international health regulations, both of which briefly say what, both of which briefly say no travel bans because the point this because they're pointless, they're absolutely pointed.

And as as W.

H.

O has just yesterday announced that they think that the world's on pandemic status, we're all moving from what's known as containment to mitigation.

And so containment means well, we could just stop this, you know, the way you know SARS doesn't exist anymore, or we stop murders or other kinds of novel diseases.

But H one n one you couldn't stop was influenza.

It actually still is here.

It's actually in our seasonal vaccine.

We don't even know it, but it's it's circulating all the time, this could be the same thing.

We could now be in a stage where we just wanted mitigated.

We want to slow it.

So things like social distancing, school closures, trying to postpone or cancel mass gatherings, political events, you know.

The other thing that really does upset and sadness is that President Trump doesn't become a good role model for this.

He's continued to have political rallies.

He's shaking hands with his supporters on DDE.

That doesn't just put the president at risk.

It puts the support is a risk.

But much worse.

His supporters will go out to their families, their communities to people who are vulnerable and elderly and past the infection there.

So what kind of a role model is that?

We need a strong science based policy and a trusted person to tell America what we know, what we don't know and what we're gonna try to find out what we don't know and to do it honestly and straightforwardly.

That's just not happening.

But given President Trump has surrounded by experts, if he chooses to fill them in and listen to them, why then did he make a travel ban the centerpiece of this announcement because I think he's, um he's sometimes listening to his public health task force and sometimes not.

What he's doing now is he's conflating his travel and border policy with at a public health fight against Cove it.

And so he thinks that you know what worked with immigration or trade closing borders is what you need to do against this microbe, and there's no a scientific body that recommends it.

CDC doesn't recommend it.

W h o doesn't recommend it.

This is coming straight from the White House.

I can assure you the travel bans just don't work.

What does work are some of the things that we haven't done well, like rolling out tests.

China, South Korea, Japan have done, you know, magnitudes of orders of Maur testing than in the United States.

We've defunded our public health agencies are CDCR state and local health officials.

President Trump.

One of the first things he didn't office was fire the global health security chief in the National Security Council, even though he had just been warned that a pandemic was looming on DSO.

It's just this.

It's a it's an utter lack of preparedness and regard.

You know job number one of any politician, whether it's Prime Minister Boris Johnson or President Trump or anyone is to keep the public healthy and safe.

There's nothing else.

Everything else is secondary.

And unfortunately, a TTE least in America.

And actually many other countries were not doing a very good job of it.

And why the mess with the testing, in your view, what happened on what needs to happen and why didn't he address it?

Well, you know, I think we're fixing it, but it might be too little, too late.

So I do think in the next few weeks we're going to see the rollout of millions of tests.

But the truth is, is that we needed those tests weeks ago because days and weeks matter crucially in an epidemic, and we're no longer probably in a phase where we can contain it, where testing really helps you identify cases, isolate them, contact trace.

Put them in quarantine.

We may have passed that.

And so, you know, we had that sweet spot and the window of opportunity may have closed.

What happened?

Why didn't we?

Why it didn't happen was it was it was a confluence of bad planning and a little bit of arrogance.

So the United States thought, Well, why should we buy test kits from Germany?

Why should we use W H O Approve trip task?

It's Let's just developed, um, our own.

And so we developed them, and our manufacturers had a quality assurance problem with them on.

There were too few tests, and we didn't have enough availability.

The FDA had hadn't approved many laboratories doing it.

CD sees testing.

Guidance was fought too narrow, and the White House was just sitting back.

You know, probably it, uh, a golf golfing or Mar a Lago and so didn't coordinate or planet.

As a result, we were fatally deficient in our testing capacity.

Did people like yourself one of the world's the world's leading expert in pandemic in pandemics and our governments respond to them?

Have you been brought in to advise the White House?

Have you?

You'd expect them to bring in people like you Absolutely would.

You know, I've been brought in by all of the major Democratic presidential candidates people in Congress, Um, and I h CDC, World Health Organization, But not the Trump administration.

No, not the White House Well, you know, they they The White House has long been, um, questioning of science, you know, Actually, it's not well known, but apart from climate change, which is well known and climate denial, um, the White House had advised the U.

S.

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention not to use the words evidence based or science based in its in its documents.

That's shocking.

Why wouldn't government want to know what works and what doesn't?

What?

There's what there's good evidence for and what there isn't.

So this is shocking disregard for science and evidence.

Now, I should say it does pain me to make these criticisms because this is a national and global crisis.

And I do believe we all need to come together on this.

Shouldn't be bought.

Party, political.

This shouldn't be ideological.

We should be all pulling together for the health of the American people and for the entire planet.

Because we are in a crisis and in a crisis, we have to look out for one another.

I urge people, you know, go see your elderly neighbor.

A knock on the door.

Don't ask what everybody owes you, but what do you owe to your community, thio your family, your neighbors to keep everybody safe and secure.

Um, and we need to recapture somehow that tradition of the common good President Trump would say that's exactly what he was attempting to do.

He did speak in those terms about people coming together and putting party politics to one side.

Do you think he achieved that?

Was he presidential?

In your view, you know, the problem with President Trump is is that he could say one thing one moment and say the other thing the next moment.

So he has politicized with China in the, you know, the the State Department and the White House have called it the Wuhan Corona virus.

They've with the first band travel from China.

They've made it is a political weapon and by announcing, you know, travel restrictions of travel bans and then saying we need to come together, we're not coming together is a global community.

Quite quite the reverse were unraveling.

He means come together as Americans.

He doesn't mean come together.

And what he does with global trade is, yes, inward looking.

It's a very inward looking message.

Now I believe in both.

I need I think we need to come together as Americans, and I think we have to come together as as a global society.

One of the things that the White House did that really reflects me and other Americans is they said, that, uh, scientists should clear their health messaging on covert 19 with the White House, which is exactly backwards.

It's the White House that you clear its health messaging with public health professionals.

Um, and that just gives you a tenner, a tone of what's going on.

I never would have happened in the past.

Not under President Obama.

Not under President Bush?

Not at all.

Remember, President Bush started PEPFAR, the greatest U.

S health aid program in the history of the world helping sub Saharan Africa in an AIDS epidemic.

Remember President Obama?

I was the leader in the West African Ebola crisis, you know, sending the military and getting a huge emergency appropriation getting in United States Security Council resolution.

And days after he made the announcement for sending the military to Liberia, the U.

K in France sent their militaries into West Africa as well.

So that was leadership on Dhe was certainly not seeing that now travel ban aside, then what would you like to have seen him do?

What needs to be done now?

What should have been the message to the American people here who were desperate for that leadership there?

I mean, there's some very, very clear answers.

You know, we don't need the draconian methods that we've seen in China, you know, locking down Wuhan and wider Hoob, a province of 60 million people, people would say, is that no, what has course the decrease in the violence?

That's what W.

H.

O said.

But But this is important.

The same decrease occurred in South Korea and Japan without draconian methods.

We can do this with a tried and true public health approach.

We've done it with all other diseases in the past, which is which is widespread testing, contact tracing, isolation and quarantine for those who are a significant risk to the public social distancing school closures trying to cancel all mass gatherings, Church service is looking out for business conventions, political rallies and political conventions, remote working and remote learning.

In other words, Now what we need to do is to flatten the curve and buy ourselves time before we can get a specific treatment which could be online within a few months, or a vaccine which unfortunately won't be here for another year to a year and 1/2.

And to be clear, all those measures that you just outlined should be, in your view, put in place in the U.

S.

And globally right now.

Right now.

Absolutely.

I mean, there may be some pockets around the world where it's so early that you can just use containment and you don't have toe.

Um, you know, close everything, mass events down.

But I think in most places you do and certainly in the United States and the signs have been here so clear and for so long that there's ah lot of silent transmission in the community going on all over the United States.

So why, then, just lastly, why didn't President Trump say that's a very simple list?

Took you 20 seconds to say it.

It was very powerful.

It would have sent the message.

Don't panic, but this is what we need to do to flatten that curve.

We're all in this together.

Why didn't he do that?

I think because he mistakes border control with public health.

Um, and somehow he thinks that, you know, America first.

Meaning means battening down the hatches.

Um, and you know, don't let those people come here on DDE that will work.

But that's not what the public health people are telling him.

I can assure you, I know just about everybody on it on the on the White House task force, and I've known them for for years on DDE.

I can assure you that that's not the message they're telling them.

Nobody's saying that border closures are the answer to this.

I believe he did that for political reasons, because it makes him look tough.

You know, if you ban travel, it's America first.

You're looking tough.

You're looking after Americans.

That's a message he's trying to send.

I think there will be, you know, a small a percentage of America that will be very happy with that.

But I can assure you, in the holes of the CDC, state and local health departments, people are shaking their heads.

Professor, thank you very much.

My pleasure.