“A week before the inauguration, I led an exercise that had the outgoing national security team from the Obama administration sitting side-by-side with the incoming national security team for the Trump administration. We sat in a very large room on the White House campus and walked through a series of scenarios. One was very specifically a pandemic scenario, and it raised exactly the types of questions that we’ve been confronting for many weeks: shortage of supplies; vulnerable populations; when to close schools; how to deal with issues around quarantine. All of these are the types of things we told the incoming team, “You need to be thinking about this, you need to be planning for it, because these are the types of issues and the threats you’re going to face. Emerging infectious disease, contagious disease, should be treated like the national security threat that it is…'”

Watch the full interview here: