Here are the facts, and his own words:
First, Klain in 2019 was appearing on a panel marking the 100th anniversary of the 1918 flu pandemic, hosted by the Scowcroft Institute of International Affairs. Much of the discussion is eerie in retrospect, as the participants note how unprepared the United States was if a similar viral event were to occur.
The specific question Klain was addressing, posed by moderator Andrew Natsios, director of the institute, was: “What could we do to create the incentives for industry to perhaps invest more money in research on this, for a universal flu vaccine, which, of course, companies are working on now?”
Klain had been the White House coordinator for responding to the Ebola outbreak in 2014-2015 but served as Biden’s chief of staff when the swine flu pandemic struck. This is the section that turns up in the
videos on YouTube:
“I wasn’t involved directly in the H1N1 response, but I lived through it as a White House staffer. And what I will say about it is a bunch of really talented, really great people working on it. And we did every possible thing wrong. And it’s, you know, 60 million Americans got H1N1 in that period of time. And it’s just purely a fortuity that this isn’t one of the great mass casualty events in American history. Had nothing to do with us doing anything right. Just had to do with luck.”
But as Klain keeps going, he makes it clear he’s talking about vaccines.
“If anyone thinks this can’t happen again they don’t have to go back to 1918, they just have to go back to 2009-2010. Imagine a virus with a different lethality and you can just do the math on that. Now, what did that tell us? It told us that the vaccine will arrive late, told us that if it’s not prepared in advance or right away, if we don’t have the answer before, we’re not going to get the answer in time. And it told us that our systems for deciding how to distribute and administer vaccine in the time of crisis are going to be badly, badly tested. They also told us one other thing — that we really lack a global policy mechanism for dealing with these untested vaccines in an emergency situation.”
Looks like American elected the right man for the job.