George W. Bush in 2005: 'If we wait for a pandemic to appear, it will be too late to prepare.'
The former U.S. president stressed the importance of planning for pandemics and laid the foundation for the present day federal response to COVID-19.was on vacation at his ranch in Crawford, Texas, when he began flipping through an advanced copy of a new book about the 1918 flu pandemic. He couldn't put it down.
President George W. Bush walks towards microphones to speak to the press, Dec. 22, 2005 at the White House. Over the ensuing months, cabinet officials got behind the idea. Most of them had governed through the Sept. 11 terror attacks, so events considered unlikely but highly-impactful had a certain resonance.
In a November 2005 speech at the National Institutes of Health, Bush laid out proposals in granular detail -- describing with stunning prescience how a pandemic in the United States would unfold. Among those in the audience was Dr. Anthony Fauci, the leader of the current crisis response, who was then and still is now the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.
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