the former adviser to presidents bush and obama, infectious disease specialist james lawler, think ofhe university of nebraska, wrote -- "cdc is really missing the mark by the time you have substantial transmission, it is too late. it is like ignoring the smoke detector and waiting for your whole house to be on fire before you call the fire department." if you can comment -- and go back even further. his own people, trump some azar,, like navarro, like were 70 alarms i in january. in fact, intelligence agencies were saying a pandemic is about to explode on the global scene. >> right. again, it is like the thing about mitigation or non-arms it will inmate -- nonpharmaceutical mitigation, it is simplistic. like you think we are so modern, so advance in our signs that we would have to resorort to things like closising of schools and businesses and social distancing -- w which seems so crude becaue you woululd think k there woulde some treatment or some scientific method. unfortunately, the reality is with viruses w which the population has no resistance to and there is no o treatment f f

this is from james lawler, infectious disease doctor at the university of nebraska.he writes an email, on january 28th, mind you, the subject is great understatements in history. napolean's retreat from moscow, a stroll gone bad. pompeii, a dust storm. hiroshima, a bad summer heat wave. in wuhan, just a bad flu season. you get a sense, mark, there were doctors in the public health community knew what was going on. to david's question then, given all these recommendations that were coming from the national security council, including azar, the public health community, why did the president want -- >> what our story lays out, for all the warnings coming from the different channels, the president and his team had different reasons to discount them. so mr. azar in their view was being alarmist. peter navarro, who is the trade adviser and a real china hawk, was discounted in part because he had cried wolf so many times about china. his views on china are so well-known that they were dismissed as just being overly hawkish. he's always looking to the worst of what china mig

on health policy, the faltering response to the coronavirus, "the new york times" reporting on james lawleraid basically in march, the cdc is missing the mark, by having community transmission it's too late. there were all of these e-mail chains and discussions among people like yourself, people who are the experts, basically saying that the administration, specifically the president, either didn't understand or didn't care to deal with how bad it was. i assume you're familiar with some of that reporting, your response, it is clear to you that some of the counsel council wasn't heed zbld i agree that dr. fauci is a national treasure, i and the ama have the j utmost respect for him. he said we were slow to impact and that has certainly had negative impact. there will be time for after action review. at this point we need to have an all hands on deck approach, we need more ppe, my colleagues, are calling for more ppe, we need significant expansion and testing capacity and we need to make sure that areas are not today's hotspots that might be tomorrow have the icu bed capacity and the ventilat

james lawler, associate professor and director of national programs at the university of nebraska medicalenter. and dr. ashish jha, director of the harvard global health institute and practicing physician. hello to all of you and thank you for being with me. you know i like to look for the next progression, if you will. dr. ahmed, take us through what we are learning today. we are seeing a peek, maybe, but at least a spike in the deaths here on the east coast of new york and new jersey. however, they were not unexpected or anticipated. you didn't need to necessarily look at a model for that. we are seeing a leveling off of confirmed cases. what does it all mean? >> dr. ahmed: that leveling off is actually very encouraging. we are extremely encouraged by how much fewer cases we are seeing than expected. especially mortality. i think it's a reflection of our social distancing, that we've been advocating for quite a while now. >> harris: if this is something we are controlling, to some degree now with our own social behaviors, dr. 's jha, the focus has been so much i'm going back to work. re

one infectious disease doctor, james lawler, who served in the white house under president bush and asadviser to president obama wrote in one email that the government's slow response was "like ignoring the smoke detector and waiting until your entire house is on fire to call the fire department. and in another he wrote, "pilots can tell you what happens when a crew makes decisions based on intuition rather than what their instruments are telling them." among the many horrifying parts of that story is imagining trump as an airline pilot. if trump had been flying during the miracle on the hudson, we would be calling it the whole time blaming the geese and yelling at the passengers, "you know, instead of screaming and putting on your oxygen masks you should be saying 'congratulations, great job, captain.'" it's going to make a great movie. we also considered sullen and bully but we thought in your head you might hear "bulley" and no one wants that. again, what we're experiencing now was not inevitable in those same emails, lawler noted that pandemic response planning began in 2006 under