Joe Nocerra, co-author of "The Big Fail: What the Pandemic Revealed About Who America Protects and Who It Leaves Behind," speaks to "Forbes Talks" about his new book, what the U.S. did wrong during the COVID-19 pandemic, former President Trump's role in the failures, and more.
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00:00 Hi, everybody. I'm Diane Brady. I'm here with Joe Nassara, journalist and author who, along
00:08 with journalist Bethany McClain, has just published The Big Fail, what the pandemic
00:13 revealed about who America protects and who it leaves behind. Good to see you, Joe.
00:20 Nice to see you, Diane.
00:22 So I feel like a lot of people would say we're still living in a somewhat pandemic economy,
00:29 post-pandemic economy. I know that The Big Fail sort of immediately says to me that there
00:36 were lessons here to be had about what we didn't do right. What do you think was most
00:41 surprising to you in the research that you did?
00:45 Was that there really was zero science behind lockdowns, which were described, at least
00:53 in blue states, as an example of following the science. But when you actually looked
00:57 into it, there has never been a study pre-pandemic about the efficacy of lockdowns. And post-pandemic,
01:07 the efficacy is very much in doubt.
01:10 Yeah. In some ways, when I heard about the test case they were using was the Spanish
01:15 flu from essentially a century earlier, which may not be the best test case for what to
01:22 do in the 21st century. When you say that was surprising, is it really when you're looking
01:27 at the damage that lockdowns caused? Because I certainly think about it with regard to
01:31 my children and schooling.
01:34 Oh, without question. I mean, the worst, the worst outcome of lockdowns was the effect
01:42 it had on children, especially disadvantaged children who were deprived of the ability
01:49 to go to school. And it had ramifications from suicidal thoughts to lack of hot food
01:58 that kids rely on to the basic of basics, which is, what are you learning? So many kids
02:04 just dropped out of school, just abandoned school. You can't overstate how bad it was.
02:11 You tackle so much in this book. You talk about the industrialization of hospitals.
02:17 You talk about politics, policies. Let's focus on the politics for a second. You know, we
02:26 see so much extremism now, and certainly a lot of people start with blaming Donald Trump.
02:33 To what extent is it fair to see him as the villain in this scenario?
02:38 Well his ability to polarize or the fact that he was such a polarizing figure definitely
02:47 played a role. Also his, you know, sort of refusal at the beginning to acknowledge that
02:54 this was real. And then his refusal, you know, once it really got going to do anything except
03:01 sit on his rear. Now, the one good thing about that, really good thing, was that all the
03:08 people who were involved in Operation Warp Speed, at least the ones who were not part
03:15 of the administration, were Democrats. They really didn't care about Trump or care for
03:21 Trump and their whole attitude was we have to do this for the country and this guy will
03:24 just leave us alone, we can get it done. And sure enough, he did leave them alone and they
03:29 did get it done. That's a good thing.
03:33 We should clarify, those who don't recall, Operation Warp Speed was the race basically
03:38 to create a vaccine.
03:41 That's right. And they did it in less than a year and no vaccine previously had ever
03:45 been done in less than four or five years. And even before that, it was more like a decade.
03:49 So that's really, it's a remarkable accomplishment. And in our book, we may be anti-lockdown,
03:58 but we're very pro-vaccine because, you know, our goal was to be led by the data, the real
04:04 data. And vaccines saved a lot of lives and prevented a lot of really bad cases of COVID.
04:13 You know, one of the things that continues to be a question, this obviously goes into
04:17 the Biden administration, is spending. The amount of, you know, this was a triumph of
04:22 big government in some ways. We saw so much money being poured into supporting certain
04:27 sectors of the economy. Is that part of the big fail to you or would that be part of the
04:34 success or a bit of both?
04:36 It's a little bit of both, really. I think it's frustrating to see that the airlines
04:43 got so much money, you know, the thing was something on the order of $25 billion. And
04:51 in return for that money, they were supposed to keep people on their payroll. And they
04:54 did until the expiration date. So they got to keep the money and they laid everybody
05:00 off the minute they could. And airlines, you know, they had spent so much money buying
05:07 back their stock and did they really deserve that kind of dough? And meanwhile, restaurants
05:14 could get nothing. They were, their business model was such that it was very hard for them
05:20 to get government funded, the government funded aid that other small businesses got. And restaurants
05:27 are really the heart and soul of so many communities. And yet they were really left to fend for
05:32 themselves. And I found that to be very frustrating. The other aspect of this, Diane, is, you know,
05:42 the Zoom class.
05:44 Of which you and I would be part?
05:47 Absolutely. And we could stay safely in our homes and enjoy our Zoom cocktails with our
05:53 friends and order our Zoom meals with DoorDash and buy our whatever we needed from Amazon.com.
06:00 And then there was a whole class of people labeled, quote unquote, essential, who were
06:04 not given that option and who had to go to work. I mean, basically put their lives on
06:09 the line so that we could live in comfort. And I found that to be deeply offensive.
06:16 So when we're talking about lessons here, what do you want the takeaway of the book
06:21 to be? I mean, one of the kind of fundamental lessons is really that, you know, capitalism
06:26 as it's currently structured, you know, did not prepare us for this pandemic and arguably
06:32 might not prepare us for the next one. In terms of where we are today, what do you think
06:38 are, do you still see some of the legacy problems that will make us ill-suited for the next
06:44 big crisis that comes along?
06:47 I do. Let me separate it into two buckets. The first one would be the capitalism bucket,
06:54 the economy bucket. I'm glad the government was willing to spend as much money as it was
07:03 to help people with extended unemployment and the aid it did give to small businesses.
07:10 But I do think that one of the things it proved was that there are certain aspects of the
07:14 economy that really shouldn't be basically for profit. I mean, hospitals that are trying
07:23 to maximize shareholder value, you know, the only way you do that is to have more procedures,
07:32 many of which might not be necessary, and to scrimp on certain kinds of patient care,
07:38 which is one of the reasons the big hospitals mostly didn't accept the kind of patient who
07:44 was on Medicaid because they didn't make them any money. Ditto private equity in nursing
07:49 homes, which was a true disaster. Private equity owned 10 or 15 percent of the nation's
07:54 nursing homes, but more than that, they had an ethos that other private equity, excuse
07:58 me, that other nursing homes followed, and that really was a disaster for the country
08:02 and for the elderly. On the other side, on the mitigation side, on the public health
08:10 side, I would say the biggest failure was the unwillingness to tell the truth to the
08:17 American people. And I don't, you know, the unwillingness to say, for instance, those
08:24 three words, "We don't know." We don't know at the beginning whether this will harm children
08:30 or not. We don't know the effect of certain things. We don't know if it makes sense to
08:34 be six feet apart or three feet apart. And people, Sweden got a lot of criticism, obviously,
08:44 because they had a no lockdown, a very little mitigation strategy, although they did protect
08:48 the elderly. And one of my sources in the book pointed out that Sweden, when the time
08:54 came for vaccines, when the vaccine became available in Sweden, 97 percent of the population
09:01 got vaccinated. And the reason for that is because the population trusted their government,
09:08 because the government had told them what the situation was, why they were doing what
09:12 they were doing, how people could respond if they didn't, you know, want to be out in
09:17 restaurants and so on and so forth. And so that trust is something that we really lost.
09:24 And even more important than whether we have lockdowns the next time or whether we wear
09:28 masks the next time, the need for the government to tell us the truth is the most important
09:35 thing.
09:36 Well, the lack of trust was almost a preexisting condition prior to the pandemic, was it not?
09:42 I mean, we were already seeing this lack of trust in institutions, you know, across the
09:49 board on both sides, you know, of the aisle, so to speak. I mean, did this sort of exacerbate
09:57 the lack of trust or it was really reflected it in a way?
10:01 I think it brought it into a different realm. Public health, you know, public health by
10:09 and large had people believed in public health. Obviously, there was the autism vaccine, the
10:18 anti-vaccine people who believed it created autism and things like that. I'm not I don't
10:22 want to minimize that. But when Anthony Fauci started saying, I am science and if you don't
10:30 believe in me, you don't believe in science. And when public health, you know, when it
10:35 became when they allowed it to become this blue state versus red state thing, you know,
10:39 are you going to lock down or not lock down? If you don't lock down, then you're not following
10:42 the science. It was ridiculous. It was ridiculous. And it didn't have to be that way. And it
10:52 was because the the government officials in charge, especially at the beginning, were
10:58 so adamant about their righteousness that it really eroded a lot of trust, especially
11:04 when it turned out in so many ways they were wrong.
11:07 Let's take where we are today. I mean, let's start with the politics. We have a number
11:11 of people who are currently now running for office. Ron DeSantis, you know, comes to mind
11:16 as somebody who wants to be the GOP nominee. And, you know, Florida was kind of in some
11:22 ways a test case for all that was good and bad about this whole pandemic. What what do
11:31 you make of sort of the current conversations around the lessons learned when you listen
11:36 to the political discourse around this?
11:39 Well, it's it's interesting. You know, there's I think there's widespread agreement on both
11:50 the left and the right that closing schools was a disaster. And I don't think you'll see
11:54 that happen again. One of the reasons that was instituted in the beginning was that during
12:01 influenza, influenza kills children. And our previous pandemics had all been influenza
12:07 based. So it made sense in the beginning. We don't know anything about this virus. What
12:11 are we going to do? Well, let's shut down the schools that, you know, but at a certain
12:15 point it didn't make sense anymore. And I think we all now realize what a mistake that
12:19 was on the left and the right. I think that in terms of DeSantis, you know, my view is
12:27 that he handled the pandemic very well at the beginning. He was a little I mean, Florida
12:32 is a state where people can be outdoors a lot more than they can be in in northern states.
12:37 And that really helped. But, you know, he made a decision that he wasn't going to be
12:43 only listening to public health officials. He was also going to listen to the to business
12:47 people and the economists in his state. And he was going to balance he was going to balance
12:52 how to manage COVID. You know, I mean, think about this. COVID isn't the only people only
12:57 thing people died of between 2020 and 20. And we did a terrible job of protecting people
13:03 with cancer, people who needed surgery, people who needed stuff, you know, it's just that
13:07 our maniacal focus on COVID at the expense of everything else, I think was a mistake.
13:14 Whether we realize that now or not, I am not sure. But by and large, I do think that as
13:21 a society, we're going to be a lot more cautious the next time around. And I would I would
13:26 argue that if there is another wave of COVID, which it could very well be, there will be
13:32 no lockdowns. And masks will be not mandatory. But, you know, you can decide you can decide
13:39 for yourself. And I think nobody's going to close down a sports arena and nobody's going
13:44 to tell basketball players they have to or have to get vaccinated to get on the court.
13:49 None of those things are going to happen. We have learned we have learned a lot about
13:54 how our society is able to react in a human way to a pandemic.
14:03 What's fascinating for me is the infrastructure that we now have in place that in some ways
14:08 feels like at least a semi permanent legacy. Let's take, for example, the triumph of remote
14:14 work, which I think is controversial in terms of the productivity. You hear a very different
14:19 message from CEOs than you do from the workers of the Zoom class you mentioned. You know,
14:24 you're seeing a lot of big government, I'd say, in terms of the role of government, the
14:30 type of surveillance that we do for good and for ill. I mean, what do you think in some
14:36 ways should be unwound given the research that you've done or at least reconsidered?
14:42 I don't have any problem with remote learning. I mean, remote learning, remote, remote work
14:47 to me is is a deal is something that has to be negotiated between a company and its workers.
14:55 I totally get Goldman Sachs wants its workers in-house. And I, you know, I like going to
15:01 I like going to an office. I like talking to people. I think good ideas flow from that.
15:04 But I also know a CEO who will remain nameless, unfortunately, because that's the way he wants
15:09 it, who loves the fact that his workers are working remotely. And he says, you know, I've
15:15 saved 70 percent of my office space cost and we have little cluster offices where people
15:22 can meet. And, you know, we just think it's wonderful. So to me, that's just that is an
15:27 important change. I don't think we'll go all the way back, but I'm OK with that. Surveillance,
15:34 not so great. But we you know, the thing that's missing, Diane, is is the kind of infrastructure
15:42 that would allow you to immediately begin contact tracing. Mm hmm. You don't have that.
15:49 Which comes down to trust, maybe. Right. Yeah. Is that have any is that a matter of trust?
15:56 No, no, it's not a matter of trust that that's a matter of having a a a citywide societal
16:03 infrastructure like they had. San Francisco did a really good job of this, but that's
16:07 because they've been through the AIDS crisis. So they had this infrastructure already. They're
16:11 the only city in the country that really was prepared like this. And that, by the way,
16:15 they're the only city no city in America did as well during covid as San Francisco. It's
16:22 interesting, by the way, that that CEO you mentioned wants to remain nameless. That alone
16:27 says something about the times that we're in. That's not the reason why it's it's it's
16:33 it's a it's a I better say this quietly. It's a Warren Buffett company. Oh, OK. Ergo, ergo,
16:41 ergo, you need permission. There is that you have to manage up to a situation to just talk
16:46 about. Is there is there anything else when you when you think about, again, the takeaway?
16:51 You know, again, we want people to read the book, of course, the big fail. But as we're
16:56 thinking about it now, you know, toward the end of of twenty twenty three, what are some
17:02 of the things that you think should be on the public agenda around this that maybe are
17:07 not? Well, I mentioned I mentioned the need for trust. I mentioned the need for what I
17:13 what I call radical honesty. I think that's one thing. But I also think that science needs
17:20 to do the studies that can really tell us what works and what doesn't. And we need to
17:27 have a consensus, a national consensus about how to approach a pandemic. Remember, so much
17:35 of this planning began during the Bush administration. And well, before the pandemic, because he
17:42 had read John Barry's book, The Great Influenza, and he said, oh, my God, this is going to
17:45 happen and we need to be prepared. And there was a huge fight over what the pandemic measures
17:51 should be. Should there be a lockdown kind of thing or should we, you know, protect the
17:55 elderly or protect the immune to compromise and let everybody else go about their own?
17:59 And we never came to a consensus about that. And as the pandemic grew, that division, which
18:06 had been, you know, unseen in 2007, suddenly became huge and political. And, you know,
18:14 after after the financial crisis and after a lot of crises, the country has had a national
18:22 commission or some effort to come to terms with what happened and why and how to prevent
18:28 it again. And you'll notice there hasn't been anything like that with the pandemic.
18:35 Yep.
18:36 And it's a shame. It's a shame. And the main reason, I think, is because everybody knows
18:41 that they'll never come to a consensus and they'll never come to an agreement about what
18:46 worked and what didn't. And they're not willing to do the science. And so they're just leaving
18:50 it, you know, like for the next time. And I think that's I think that's tragic.
18:56 Let me ask one other question in terms of whether spending or response. But I think
19:00 spending is something that certainly is top of mind. How do we compare to other countries?
19:06 Because that is one of the things that gets a lot of criticism now is who got support.
19:11 You mentioned, for example, the airlines versus the restaurants. But also there was a lot
19:15 of money pumped into the system to support, you know, the average American through this.
19:22 Is that something that you think is being revisited or should be revisited as a policy?
19:28 I think it should be revisited somewhat. I mean, Germany, I think Germany was giving
19:35 every citizen. I can't remember how much it was, but I mean, it was on the order of five
19:40 or six thousand dollars a month.
19:42 Wow.
19:43 I mean, so they had they had one. Their policy was we're going to take care of everybody.
19:47 We're not going to worry about companies. We're just going to let people make sure people
19:51 have enough money to live. And we're not going to worry about it. We had a different a different
19:56 approach. You know, we were going to help small businesses. We were going to extend
20:00 unemployment and doing it the way we did it resulted in a tremendous amount of fraud.
20:07 So even if you say, I don't mind spending this kind of money, I don't mind the potential
20:13 threat to inflation, even if you even if that's your stance, that the fraud was was just obscene.
20:21 It was just obscene. And so the question is, you know, you can't just say we're not going
20:26 to give people anything if we're going to shut down businesses and so on. You can't
20:31 do that. The economic consequences would be severe. But on the other hand, I mean, we
20:39 did pump out so much money, we practically guaranteed ourselves that 8 percent inflation
20:44 that we had. And that was that was pretty damaging.
20:46 Yeah. Well, the book is The Big Fail by Joe Nassara and Bethany McLean, with whom you
20:52 collaborate on another book, I believe, 13 years ago. So that's right. I'm the power
20:57 team. All the devils are here. All the devils are here. And and it goes on sale this week.
21:05 And thanks very much for joining us, Joe. I'm thrilled that you took the time to talk
21:10 to me.
21:11 Thank you.
21:11 Thank you.
21:12 Thank you.
21:13 Thank you.
21:14 Thank you.
21:15 Thank you.
21:16 Thank you.
21:17 Thank you.
21:18 Thank you.
21:19 Thank you.
21:20 Thank you.