WASHINGTON – In a White House consumed by the coronavirus pandemic, one of the president’s less visible advisers is driven by the fear that the next outbreak could be even worse.
Dr. Beth Cameron had been preparing for an event of this magnitude for decades. As a senior national security official on biodefense in the Obama administration, she took part in the government’s response to the Ebola crisis, and in reaction to that scare wrote a “pandemic playbook” that she left for the Trump administration in 2017.
But the National Security Council office on pandemic preparedness that she helped to lead was shuttered, and when the worst pandemic in a century struck last year, her playbook was ignored.
