A Promised Land by Barack Obama

Author:Barack Obama [Obama, Barack]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
Tags: Biography & Autobiography, Presidents & Heads of State, Political Science, American Government, Executive Branch, History, United States, 21st Century
ISBN: 9781524763183
Google: hvr4DwAAQBAJ
Amazon: 1524763160
Publisher: Crown
Published: 2020-11-17T18:43:29.759375+00:00

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EVERY JOB HAS its share of surprises. A key piece of equipment breaks down. A traffic accident forces a change in delivery routes. A client calls to say you’ve won the contract—but they need the order filled three months earlier than planned. If it’s the kind of thing that’s happened before, the place where you work may have systems and procedures to handle the situation. But even the best organizations can’t anticipate everything, in which case you learn to improvise to meet your objectives—or at least to cut your losses.

The presidency was no different. Except that the surprises came daily, often in waves. And over the course of the spring and summer of that first year, as we wrestled with the financial crisis, two wars, and the push for healthcare reform, several unexpected items got added to our already overloaded plate.

The first carried the possibility of a genuine catastrophe. In April, reports surfaced of a worrying flu outbreak in Mexico. The flu virus usually hits vulnerable populations like the elderly, infants, and asthma sufferers hardest, but this strain appeared to strike young, healthy people—and was killing them at a higher-than-usual rate. Within weeks, people in the United States were falling ill with the virus: one in Ohio, two in Kansas, eight in a single high school in New York City. By the end of the month, both our own Centers for Disease Control (CDC) and the World Health Organization (WHO) had confirmed that we were dealing with a variation of the H1N1 virus. In June, the WHO officially declared the first global pandemic in forty years.

I had more than a passing knowledge of H1N1 after working on U.S. pandemic preparedness when I was in the Senate. What I knew scared the hell out of me. In 1918, a strain of H1N1 that came to be known as “the Spanish flu” had infected an estimated half a billion people and killed somewhere between 50 and 100 million—roughly 4 percent of the world’s population. In Philadelphia alone, more than 12,000 died in the span of a few weeks. The effects of the pandemic went beyond the stunning death tolls and shutdown of economic activity; later research would reveal that those who were in utero during the pandemic grew up to have lower incomes, poorer educational outcomes, and higher rates of physical disability.

It was too early to tell how deadly this new virus would be. But I wasn’t interested in taking any chances. On the same day that Kathleen Sebelius was confirmed as HHS secretary, we sent a plane to pick her up from Kansas, flew her to the Capitol to be sworn in at a makeshift ceremony, and immediately asked her to spearhead a two-hour conference call with WHO officials and health ministers from Mexico and Canada. A few days later, we pulled together an interagency team to evaluate how ready the United States was for a worst-case scenario.

The answer was, we weren’t at all ready. Annual flu shots

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