A couple of weeks ago, I asked Larry Brilliant, the renowned epidemiologist who helped eradicate smallpox, what is the one message he would bring to the daily press briefing if he were president. He answered without hesitation: “I would begin the press conference by saying ‘Ladies and gentlemen, let me introduce you to Ron Klain … Covid czar.’ ”
In 2014, Barack Obama appointed Ron Klain as the White House Ebola response coordinator to fight what was then the world’s biggest health threat. Klain is not a doctor or public health expert; he’s a lawyer with deep experience in politics. He served as chief of staff to two vice presidents, Al Gore and Joe Biden. His day job is vice president and general counsel of Revolution, the investment fund of former AOL CEO Steve Case, but he’s still very much a political animal and is serving as an adviser to Biden’s presidential campaign.
The Ebola experience defines him. After an initial response that critics said was too slow, Obama took aggressive action, including deploying thousands of troops to West Africa and bringing on Klain as the Ebola czar. Those efforts were instrumental in averting a wider catastrophe. Klain now is firmly in the I-saw-this-coming camp, having testified in Congress and written op-eds trying to alert the country to pandemic danger, with more urgency earlier this year. He has become the face of Biden’s response to the crisis, specifically as a Khan Academy-esque lecturer in a four-minute video that highlighted the shortcomings of the Trump administration’s response to the epidemic with simple whiteboard drawings and presented Biden’s brief plan to address the disaster. (The unsurprising four-point plan includes more testing, emergency hospitals, more medical supplies, and financial aid.) More than 4 million people watched the video.
WIRED spoke to Klain by phone on April 3. The interview is edited and condensed.
Steven Levy: You are playing a unique role in this crisis. You led the United States in a pandemic response, but you’re also advising the candidate likely to oppose the current president in November. How do you balance being an information resource and a partisan advocate?
Ron Klain: In both cases it’s about telling the truth. The pandemic itself shouldn’t be a political issue. It should be an issue about getting the response right. When I speak about that publicly, when I advise Vice President Biden privately, I focus on the lessons we’ve learned from the Ebola response and how those lessons and other learnings can be applied to get this current situation right.
Let’s talk about the lessons. You were not an epidemiologist when you were appointed in 2014 to address Ebola. What did you have to learn fast and how did you do it?
I was brought in not because I knew about public health or pandemics but because I had had experience in making the different arms of the government work together and making them work effectively and quickly. That really was the challenge—coordinating between the different agencies, and in that case in particular focusing on getting a lot of help to West Africa, which was obviously the frontline of this epidemic in the fall of 2014. The high-level lessons applicable today are, first and foremost, let the medical experts be the touchstone of the responses—let them be the people who are formulating this strategy, let them be the spokespeople. And, secondly, use every power that the federal government has to harness that direction into effective action, whether that’s getting the right equipment produced and put in the right places, whether it’s getting the right people mobilized and put in the right places. The federal government has vast power to do things if a president is willing to use it effectively. Those are the two things, by the way, that are both missing from the current coronavirus response.
Why isn’t this being done now?
President Trump has had a really hostile relationship with science and expertise, on not just this issue but many issues. He likes to go with his own gut, as he famously says. We’ve caught an issue where his own gut is not up to the challenge and where he should be listening more to the scientists and the experts than his hunches or his son-in-law. The second part of it is he has seemed reluctant to ruffle the feathers you need to ruffle to put the full weight of the federal government behind the response.
You mentioned working with Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, who is a key part of the federal response. Do you have an insight of what he’s going through and how he is trying to thread the needle?
Tony Fauci is a national treasure. Tony can be most effective by being a part of this administration. He understands that to help us all, he has to work with Donald Trump. But he has done it without compromising his well-deserved reputation for telling the truth. In my Ebola team, when public anxiety rose, we had an abbreviation in the office: PTFOTV, which stood for ‘Put Tony Fauci on TV.’ That was our main response on the communications side. That would be my advice to the Trump administration as well: PTFOTV.
The Trump administration has blamed the Obama administration for the slow response to the pandemic, charging that it had a dysfunctional testing system. Was the testing system broken when Trump took office?
No. Among the many ridiculous things they say, this is the most ridiculous. As any expert will tell you, you can’t build a test for coronavirus until you have a coronavirus. We didn’t have this novel coronavirus until late 2019.
I think he was saying that the infrastructure of testing itself was broken.
I don’t even begin to understand what that means. We certainly tested everyone who we suspected of having Ebola. We got to the place where we were able to produce and process those tests in a matter of hours, to every single person who we suspected of having Ebola. The problem wasn’t that the infrastructure was broken, the problem here is that the Trump administration sat on their rear ends. When scientists sequenced the coronavirus in January, why didn’t we mass produce tests right away? Every other country got ahead of us on testing.
What about the shortages? The LA Times reported that in 2009, the Obama administration was warned that after H1N1 the stockpile of masks should be replenished. Is that something that the Obama administration missed? Did they leave us with a shortage of Personal Protective Equipment?
We proposed in our budget several years in the Obama administration to increase funding for the stockpile to buy more goods. The Republican House rejected it each time we proposed it. The President’s own Secretary of Health and Human Services, Alex Azar, proposed that the Trump administration increase the stockpile and Trump’s own Office of Management and Budget (OMB) rejected the request. They have had three years to replenish the stockpile, they didn’t do it. The president still has not invoked the Defense Production Act to stimulate production of masks, gowns, face masks, all the things that our doctors and nurses need.
It’s well-documented that Trump and National Security Council head John Bolton ended the pandemic response team in the National Security Council. What were the things that that office would have done if it were operating during this current crisis?
At the end of the Ebola response in 2015, after we beat the epidemic, President Obama asked me for my recommendations. One was to create a permanent unit inside the National Security Council to prepare us for future pandemics. He set up that office in 2015. When Trump came in, in 2017, he kept the office in place and put a Bush appointee, a guy named Admiral Timothy Ziemer, who had been a veteran of fighting AIDS in Africa in charge of the office. In 2018, though, when John Bolton took over as head of the NSC, they abolished the office because they thought fighting epidemics and pandemics was a health care thing, not a security thing.
What would Admiral Ziemer and his team have been doing if they had been left in place? First of all, they would have raised the alarm when we were seeing the news coming out of China about this epidemic, and would have pressed harder to get American experts in China sooner to get the insights that we needed. That’s important inside the White House for this reason: Other people inside the White House were pressing President Trump to go soft on the Chinese because he was trying to get a trade deal. On January 15, just as this coronavirus was exploding in China, he did a trade deal with China. And as a result, President Trump in January is making public statements that the Chinese are doing a great job on the coronavirus. If there had been a senior-level pandemic advisor in the White House, he would have been pushing back against that. They also would have been in charge of placing the orders for the gear we lack today.
Finally, the Centers for Disease Control and the Food and Drug Administration were in a turf war about how to adopt the US test. If someone in the White House were in charge, they would have resolved that bureaucratic dispute. That’s the job of a White House Coordinator—to break those bureaucratic gridlocks. The fact that no one in the White House was overseeing it is probably why that snafu wasn’t fixed.
Some people have charged you with being late on this—at the end of February you tweeted the people should go to Chinatown to shop.
The point of my tweet was that we were seeing a lot of anti-Chinese American violence in this country. The president still hasn’t spoken up about it. That is a horrible thing.
You advise Joe Biden. As an outsider, what can a candidate realistically do in this situation?
It’s important for him to tell people what should happen and that is what he has done. He is laying out his proposals, and I think that’s the most important thing he can do at this stage of the game.
What’s the story behind the video you posted? It’s a weird mix of public service and political advocacy.
Folks inside the campaign thought it would be helpful for me to try to go through what we know about the disease, what we know about the response. It ends with my pitch for Vice President Biden. I think I spent about an hour on it. And I don’t draw; those aren’t my illustrations.
Vice President Biden is 77 years old and a cancer survivor. How intense is his isolation and how do you balance campaigning and protection in a situation like that?
The vice president is following the same precautions everyone else is. He is largely staying at home. Obviously, he has people who have to come into the house for security and whatnot; they’re trying to be very careful. He’s campaigning in a much more virtual way, through Zoom-style town halls and TV interviews and the kinds of things he can do on a virtual basis.
Have you seen him in person?
I talk to him on the phone almost every single day. I participate in various Skype and Zoom conference calls and whatnot, but I have not seen him in person for several weeks.
How do you imagine this election unfolding during the course of this virus? They just postponed the Democratic National Convention. But is there really a likelihood that thousands are going to gather in Milwaukee this August?
We are going to have an election in November, that is a fact. And the question is: How do we make that election the most participatory election possible and a safe election? We should put in place now a plan to allow every American to vote by mail. Maybe that won’t be needed, maybe people can go to the polls, maybe we can staff the polls. I certainly hope so. There’s a lot of reason to think we can.
Let’s say Biden wins. In January 2021, a new term begins. You guys must be gaming out what you are going to do to hit the ground running. What can you say about that?
Right now we have a crisis and our focus is on addressing that crisis. Obviously, as this progresses, the vice president will start to make plans for what he would do in January of 2021.
But you can’t change that crisis now. We’ve been talking about preparedness—aren’t you making plans for what you do if Biden won? I would be more reassured to know that you have a shadow force working to take over when you’re able to actually make those changes. Would the transition be different this time around because of this crisis?
I’m just not going to speculate about a transition or what’s going to happen in January. We have a crisis right now and we are focused on the crisis right now. If the vice president were to win, he will be ready, more than any candidate for president ever, to take over on day one. So there’s a time and place to talk about that. That time and place to talk about that is not right now.
Would you be the coronavirus czar?
I would hope that we would not need a coronavirus czar by January of 2021, but we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it.
I hope we will be close to a vaccine by then.
We will eventually have a vaccine. The question is: Will people take the vaccine? We have a big public discussion right now about the science behind the vaccine, the manufacturing behind the vaccine, the testing behind the vaccine, how soon will all that be done. But all that adds up to nothing if people won’t take the vaccine. Resistance to getting vaccines is a big issue in this country and clearly for a new vaccine there’s going to be all kinds of conspiracy theories and skepticism that we’ll be able to read on the internet and on social media platforms. So we need to be thinking about what that education campaign looks like, what that persuasion campaign looks like to get people to comply with the vaccine. If we’re going to make Covid-19 go away, we’re going to need a very high vaccination rate. The number one public health challenge of 2021 is going to be getting people to take the vaccine.
What is the United States going to be like if the next months are as rough as people are predicting?
We’ll get through it. This is a great country and we have great people and there are a lot of fantastic, amazing doctors and nurses who are fighting this battle every day on the front lines.
The question is: What will the cost of getting through it be and what will the toll be? And if we make better choices, that cost and that toll will be lower. If we make worse choices, that cost and that toll will be higher. And that is the question we face as a country right now.
Are you scared?
I don’t know if that’s the right word. I’m concerned about my family’s health, of the people I know and love. My mother is older and has a heart condition. So, sure. We had a person who was very close to us on Team Biden, Larry Rasky, who I first met 35 years ago, who died from Covid. It’s hard not to see this all unfold and not be concerned.
If you had a freebie—if Jared Kushner called you up and said, “Hey, I’ll give you one shot to do one thing”—what would that one thing be?
I have two “one things,” which I know is cheap. First, I would say you’ve got to put one person in charge. This rotating carousel of people in charge, it’s just got to stop. Somebody’s got to be in charge. And then that one person who is in charge, their first task right now is fixing the supply chain of masks, gloves, and ventilators. That is the job right now. And that means you have to use the Defense Production Act tomorrow to take control of all the manufacturers, to take control of the distribution—double, triple our output overnight. Just say the government will pay for it, and get this stuff made and deployed. That is job one. My second “one thing” would be use the Defense Production Act to take control of the manufacturing and the supply chain and get this stuff made and get it where it needs to go. [On April 4 Trump invoked the DPA but did not take control of the supply chain,]
What do you say to people who are despairing?
Despair is never an answer. When I testified before Congress on February 5, I said this is not a time for panic. And the next sentence of my testimony was that it is a time for grave concern. The point is that panic is never a good way to make decisions. It is never helpful. And neither is despair. We are in the midst of the worst pandemic we’ve seen in over 100 years, since the Spanish flu. It is horrible. Way too many lives will be lost. But the only thing that’s going to get us through this is strong action by our government, which needs to do a better job, and strong action by us as people. The other cause for non-despair is that part of the outcome here is in our own hands. If we practice social distancing measures, if we stay in our homes to the extent we can, wash our hands, do all the things people are telling us to do, we can lower the risk that we get the disease and that people we know get the disease. And that’s empowering, right?
- The mathematics of predicting the course of the coronavirus
- What to do if you (or a loved one) might have Covid-19
- First denial, then fear: patients in their own words
- Fun tools and tips to stay social while you’re stuck at home
- Should I stop ordering packages? (And other Covid-19 FAQs, answered)
- Read all of our coronavirus coverage here
