“One of the problems is that the response has been chaotic with lots of mixed messages. On the one hand, you have the experts, our experts here in the CDC, telling us that spread is inevitable. Tony Fauci has said that we are likely on the cusp of a pandemic with this virus. And, on the other hand, political advisers in the White House and the chair of the National Economic Council said we’ve got this contained. I think we need to be listening to the experts and we need to have our communication grounded in facts.
“We need to organize ourselves and treat this issue—pandemic disease—as a national security threat that it is. We need to be restoring funding for the Centers for Disease Control that has suffered double-digit cuts in the last several years. And we need to be executing on a strategy to assist state and local public health officials who frankly are on the front lines of any response…”