Andy Slavitt, who stepped down from his role on President Joe Biden’s COVID-19 response team last week, suggested to CBS News during a Monday interview that Americans did not “sacrifice” enough to stop the pandemic early on.

Slavitt made the remarks when asked by CBS News how much of the pandemic was preventable.

Slavitt blamed politics for some of the mistakes that were made but conceded that the pandemic would have hit the U.S. “no matter what.”

“But I also think we all need to look at one another and ask ourselves, ‘what do we need to do better next time?’” Slavitt continued. “And in many respects, being able to sacrifice a little bit for one another to get through this and to save more lives is going to be it’s going to be essential. And that’s something that I think we could all have done a little bit better on.”

WATCH:

Slavitt’s remarks generated a fair amount of backlash online, including:

TRANSCRIPT:

CBS HOST: The book is called ‘Preventable.’ How much of this pandemic was preventable and how?

ANDY SLAVITT, BIDEN CORONAVIRUS ADVISER: Well of course, we would have had a pandemic here in the U.S. no matter what. But look, we can count the mistakes. And I think it’s important that we do if for nothing else, so we don’t repeat them. We obviously had a set of technical mistakes with the testing and the PPE that we know about. But if we’re honest, we also had two other types of mistakes that caused a lot of loss of life. One, were just plainly political leadership mistakes. There was a lot, we denied the virus for too long out of the Trump White House, there was too much squashing of dissent and playing on divisions. But I also think we all need to look at one another and ask ourselves, ‘what do we need to do better next time?’ And in many respects, being able to sacrifice a little bit for one another to get through this and to save more lives is going to be it’s going to be essential. And that’s something that I think we could all have done a little bit better on.

CBS HOST: So when we look in the mirror and evaluate our own role in all this, the public, how we could have sacrificed more, as you say, and we think about the possibility of a difficult fall or winter or a difficult variant. What more needs to be done now to prepare ourselves as a public, putting aside the government and the scientific part of this, for us as the public, what’s the message?

SLAVITT: Well, there’s a couple simple things. One is that all the people that for so long, live so close to the edge, that don’t have a great safety net, that don’t have great health insurance, but they’re forced to work day in and day out to serve us, they’re growing crops, they’re delivering food to our warehouses, they’re working in grocery stores, they’re delivering food to our door, all those people are at risk all the time. And so … there’s a chapter in the book called ‘The Room Service Pandemic,’ and it talks about how a lot of us had it quite okay during the pandemic and others didn’t. So we should be looking at that. And then look, preventing the spread of the disease is really about a couple simple things, not breathing near one another in large spaces. That’s really, that’s really it if you want to be overly simple about it. And that requires a certain amount of sacrifice and change. It’s a short period of time. And we, none of us can do it forever. And it’s not pleasant. But when we do, we reduce the amount of spread pretty dramatically and if the variants come back in the fall, as it as they will, the people who are unvaccinated really are going to need to pay serious attention to that and consider getting vaccinated–

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Source: Dailywire

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