‘We didn’t follow through’: He wrote the Ebola ‘lessons learned’ report for Obama. Now he weighs in on coronavirus response

Christopher Kirchhoff knows how to assess the U.S. government’s response to a public health crisis.

Kirchhoff, an aide at the Pentagon who moved to the White House during the height of the West African Ebola outbreak, was tapped to write a 2016 report about the lessons the U.S. could learn from the epidemic — and the steps it could take to prepare for the next outbreak of an emerging infection.

“It was through that experience that I think we all came to realize that it’s not just Ebola, but actually there’s a number of pathogens that could be super dangerous to our security,” Kirchhoff said.

STAT on Monday spoke with Kirchhoff, a political scientist by training, about what he learned from compiling the Ebola report and what he thought of the U.S. response to Covid-19. Kirchhoff — now , a philanthropic organization — spoke carefully, often pausing for several seconds before answering and continuing