Leavitt: We're overdue for a pandemic
My point is that it touched every hometown in America. Go to an Internet site when you're interested and put in "Spanish flu 1918" and the name of your hometown, and you'll see that it reached, literally, your hometown in ways that you didn't know about because we are a couple of generations hence. We have been fortunate as generations to have experienced pandemics that were not virulent, but highly efficient. We don't know what the next one will be, we don't know when the next one will be, but what we do know is that pandemics happen, that they are part of biologic life. It is – this is a fact of life, and we need to be prepared.
May I suggest to you that local preparedness for the reasons that I have described is the foundation of pandemic preparedness. If there is one message on pandemic preparedness that I could leave today that you would remember, it would be this: Any community that fails to prepare with the expectation that the federal government or for that matter the state government will be able to step forward and come to their rescue at the final hour will be tragically wrong, not because government will lack a will, not because we lack a collective wallet, but because there is no way that you can respond to every hometown in America at the same time.
Now we will talk much about emergency preparedness in this conference, but it's proper and fitting that we start with pandemic. I had a chance to walk through medical shelters throughout the region of the Gulf Coast after Katrina for weeks. I saw a remarkable thing happen as people moved from all over America to come to that region to help. We learned powerful lessons from Katrina. We learned, first of all, that what you do in advance of the disaster is more important even than what you do after. We also learned that you have to think about the unthinkable because occasionally it happens, and you have to be prepared.
We also learned the difference between a pandemic and any other kind of disaster. In a pandemic, people could not rush to the Gulf Coast because they would be in their own hometowns. A pandemic would not be three hellish days and then moving into recovery. It would be literally a year. Life will need to go on. People have to have food. They will have work. They'll have – the court system will have to operate. We have to think about this now because what we do now will be dramatically important should it occur.
We don't know what a pandemic would look like, we don't know when it will come, but we do know we're overdue and underprepared. Now, that's the reason that the president has asked that we mobilize the country in preparation. I have committed to hold on his behalf 50 summits around the country. We have now accomplished 43 of those. We'll continue to the 50. There will be one in each state and some of our major cities. Over 25,000 people who are health professionals, who are school officials, who are business officials representing local and state governments, representing faith communities, have attended those, and we are now mobilizing as a nation. But we are far from prepared yet.
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