COVID And Pandemics With Deric Gilliard
How do governments navigate the uncharted waters of a global pandemic? In this episode, we delve into the critical lessons learned from COVID-19 and explore the complex decisions that shaped public health responses, economic recovery plans, and healthcare system preparedness with Deric Gilliard. From balancing safety and freedoms to ensuring a resilient healthcare infrastructure, this conversation offers a behind-the-scenes look at the strategies and challenges governments face in combating pandemic threats. If you're curious about what it takes to manage a crisis of this magnitude—and how these insights could prepare us for the future—tune in now.
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COVID And Pandemics With Deric Gilliard
In this episode, we're going to discuss a very important episode called COVID and The Coming Pandemics by an expert in this field, Deric Gilliard. Deric is an activist, historian, and writer who worked with the last five presidential administrations in the US Department of Health and Human Services.
Is it about the economy versus the loss of life? We're about to see some of that impact again perhaps on steroids. These are all these things I could never say while I was in the government.
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Deric, welcome to the show.
Thank you, John. I appreciate being here.
I'm telling you, it sounds like you had an amazing life dealing with COVID and threats. I can't even imagine.
It was something else.
Tell me a little bit about how you got involved in this kind of service and what kind of things you experienced during COVID if you can step-by-step so my audience can get a feel. Your governmental experience is something everybody doesn't see every day.
Deric's Journey Into Government Service
Thank you, John. I'll start with how I went to work for the government. Previous to that, I worked for Dr. King's organization, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. I was the Communications Director. Like a lot of small organizations, they insured me but not my family. My oldest son was a senior. All of a sudden, he started having seizures out of the blue. He didn't take drugs. He wasn't playing football. We couldn't figure it out.
The medicine was extremely expensive. I had to go look for a job that had benefits for the entire family. I don't even know if people get jobs through newspaper ads anymore but only 1 of the 2 times I ever got a job through the newspaper. I applied for the regional office of the US Department of Health and Human Services, which is the eight Southeastern states.
This White liberal nurse in the Clinton Administration said that her office needed to more directly reflect the people that we served in the eight Southeastern states. She hired me. That began my journey in 1998. There are thirteen agencies within HHS. At that point in time, all of those agencies that were in the eight Southeastern states reported to the regional director. That meant I did work with the FDA, Centers for Medicare, Medicaid, the Administration for Children and Families, and HRSA.
It manages all the federally qualified health centers where roughly 40% of the people in the country get their primary healthcare services because it's on a sliding fee scale. Also, the Office of Minority Health, including the CDC, which we always call the 800-pound gorilla. They didn't listen to us. That's part of HHS in addition to the National Institutes of Health and all these others. It was a very broad swath so it was a steep learning curve. That's how I got started in 1998.
That's an amazing thing it sounds like.
It also is a region that had, honestly, the most Black people. In many instances, they are the vestiges of slavery and Jim Crow. There was a lot of distress in the medical field because of things like Tuskegee but that's one example. We had 7 of our 8 governors in the eight Southeastern states who were not interested in expanding Medicaid so it's opening the door for more people. There were a lot of challenges there. For me, it was a great privilege to spend those 25 years in that office.
Did you write the book The Longest Four Years of My Life based on your personal experience while serving in office during the COVID?
Yes. That book specifically is focused on the Trump years because of the impact of COVID during that particular time. We're about to see some of that impact again perhaps on steroids.
Concerns About Future Pandemics
My wife asked me to ask you. With your experience, you see another pandemic coming.
I do. Look who his nominee is to run the US Department of Health and Human Services. Who is a documented vaccine denier? The strains of COVID mutate every year and that's why for the people who get the shots, they suggest you continue to get them because they're protecting you from new variants of the virus. Yes, I'm concerned not just about COVID but things like polio, which has almost been eradicated in this country. If we aren't vaccinated for that, we could see a surge in polio.
I tell all my friends that I wish I'd have been smart enough to buy into Pfizer before it happened and get into their stock because we could all done something like traveling and living on the beach. Some say they agree with it and some say they think they're off the grid somewhere. You called them the 800-pound gorilla. I don't exactly know what that means. Why don't you explain that a little bit?
They are so large. Even though they're 1 of our 13 agencies, they do what they want to do to a large extent. For example, here in our region. There are ten regional offices across the country. In theory, the CDC director should work very closely with the HHS regional director. We should have their buy-in like we would have with all of the other agencies. Essentially, if we said we needed something, we'd get that positive response and report but they flick us off like a fly on your shirt.
You better watch it. We're going out globally.
These are all these things I could never say while I was in the government. I had to bite my tongue and the blood would come out of the corners of my mouth. To be honest, I fought the CDC to a large extent for a lot of the issues that happened during the Trump administration in the sense that Robert Redfield was the director. He was being muzzled by the people in the administration. They were very structured about what he could and could not say.
He would have been much more forthcoming and more honest about the danger of COVID when the president was choosing to believe it was going to disappear and some of these other issues. They had somebody in DC who was in the White House. His name was Michael Caputo. He had no health or medical background. He would go through and censor things that were coming out of the CDC. The people in the CDC, and I knew many of them, felt they were being prevented from honestly and earnestly doing their job to protect the American people.
Insights On Dr. Anthony Fauci And CDC Challenges
All that insight is information. We're not right or left on what we're doing. We're trying to reach everybody with help for whatever the threat is, be it COVID. We had a gentleman, a Black man, who's got a ministry all over the country where he's helping the youth and the Black families figure out ways for fathers to become more prevalent in their lives. The question that went through my mind is what do you think of Fauci? Be honest because I'm listening.
I know there are people who say he had some level of complicity in terms of allowing COVID to do what it did. Honestly, I don't know about that. I have not seen that proof but he did his very best to warn and encourage the people to be prepared for the pandemic about the serious nature of the pandemic. He got under the president's bad side several times but did it in a gentle way. Anthony Fauci did the best he could to continue to warn and educate the people about the serious nature and the dire consequences of COVID within the structure of the administration and continue to keep his job.
Another question I might have for you is that because of the mandates and the way things happened, all these businesses were shut down. In your experience, could you think of a different alternative that they could have come up with or maybe even thought about or heard about while you were in that service that would have been better than shutting down all those businesses?
Healthcare Communication Strategies
That was a lot of what I had to deal with because one of my jobs was to monitor all of the governors and what the governors were saying and the big cities like Florida. They were going to stay open at all costs until it got bad. Finally, they did shut the businesses down. Here in Atlanta, our mayor said they were shutting them down. There's pain either way, John. It's like picking your poison.
Maybe we need to have a system in place that says, "If your employees can't work and you can't pay the bills, we have a certain period where we're going to be able to support you and we have that in place." We put that in place now because the question sometimes comes down to whether is it about the economy and jobs, and I know that means feeding people, versus the loss of life. It's a tough situation.
The biggest flap I remember is that Amazon and Walmart made a lot of money during that time. They got to be open where the small businesses got hammered. That's a lot of drama. Plus anybody who wanted to come across the border was coming across the border and wasn't required to deal with the mandate. That all goes into my thinking about it as well. You're right. Preparation is the key.
We need to think about that and hear from that no matter who's in government. Thank you. Please tell us what you believe is the best way to protect our families and businesses from pandemics in your experience as a government guy and a guy who's a ministry guy. Your wife's in ministry. Tell us what's in your heart about the best way to protect these people.
Balancing Public Health, Economic Impact, and Personal Choice
When it got bad in 2020, there were a lot of people who said, "We have to make a decision. Do we keep businesses open and the numbers are going to continue to rise and people are going to get sick and people are going to die or do we focus on closing businesses or suspending businesses suggesting that people social distance, wear masks, and at least go look at getting vaccinated?" I want people to get vaccinated. Although initially, I was very hesitant about getting vaccinated because I've seen people taken advantage of.
We need to educate people who are open to learning pluses and minuses. We need to be totally honest. I always want our politicians and medical people to be honest with the people because if people know what's going on, we can come together, be a united front, and defeat anything, particularly if you're young and healthy. It may end up being like a bad cold to you. You may be asymptomatic. You don't even know you have it. You don't experience anything but we want to make sure people are aware that if they get around the vulnerable, the elderly, and people with preexisting conditions and comorbidities, it's very likely that we could pass something on to them that will lead to either their deaths or debilitating illnesses.
Politicians and medical professionals need to be honest with the public because people are aware of what is really happening. When we come together as a united front, we can overcome anything.
What I saw personally was it looked a little one-sided to me when it all happened and when we went through it. One side of the argument was everybody's got to follow our mandates. We're from North Carolina and these North Carolinians are a little different critters than some of the country. This following mandate deal didn't go down very well and it didn't look like it to me. Maybe you have a better take on it. Anybody who was against the vaccines or the mandates of wearing masks when they couldn't prove that they did anything caused more division in the country.
Your idea is good but it should be two-sided. "Here are the pros and cons. Here's what the mask does. Here's what it doesn't do." People like you, because of your experience, can say things about that with education and say, "Here's what works and doesn't work." As a voter and an American, I would have preferred that over saying, "Do what Fauci or the government says." Nobody had the game in. That's my take on it. We might get a lot of hate mail on that but whatever. I don't know how you feel about that.
I agree with you. You want to be brutally honest. There have been studies later subsequently that question the effectiveness of the masks. I don't think there's anything that I've ever seen that questions the effectiveness of the vaccines. I've seen people who point to outliers or situations. If you vaccinate 100 million people, you're going to have some people who have bad reactions and die. Nobody wants to hear that and that's terrible for that person in that family but it's reality. There was a playbook that was left for him. In my office before the pandemic, we were doing pandemic preparedness and tabletop training about all the scenarios. That was discarded. That's problematic at this point for me.
What I can experience, because I've been in business for almost all my life, is that the shutdown of businesses wasn't the best idea. It could have been done a little differently but in hindsight, it's always the best. My final question is in about a two-minute recap, discuss the longest four years of my life and how my audience can simply prepare. Give us a detail of the book and how they can prepare to receive peace over these kinds of threats.
You need to know that when we do the action guide, we're going to drive people to Amazon and your link so they can get this book. What we're doing is looking for people like you who can give a guide to help people understand what's coming. Some of the information you give us is good. The fact that you're looking at it from both sides, the equation helps me to personally receive what you're saying. We want people to speak what's on their hearts about this because that's what works. In two minutes, give us your dissertation or whatever it is.
One of the things that I do detail a lot is the vulnerable communities that were most impacted here in the eight Southeastern states by COVID. A lot of them were in the rural areas to be perfectly honest. In many instances, they were the less educated people and people of color. They were the poor and the working poor. Too often, it was people who believed one way or the other but didn't do any research and necessarily know what to believe.
I have the opportunity to chronicle so many cases of people going to a funeral and then 80 people catching the disease. Some of the places like Albany, Georgia and Montgomery, Alabama were terribly hit. I agree with you. Give people all the information and let them make the decision. You're right. We'll never go back in the foreseeable future to telling people, "You have to have it." That was the problem.
There were places that said, "If you're going to work here, you have to get vaccinated." People push back against that. If we don't have people picking up our garbage, parking our cars, stocking our grocery shelves, serving our food, or pumping our gas, our whole economy shuts down. Those are the people who are frequently the most vulnerable people. It's people who pick all of our food and vegetables in the fields. Hopefully, we can think about them at least as much as we think about ourselves because all of us are important. It's hard to put a value on one person more than another person.
That sounds like your wife preaching.
I do believe in justice and equity. There's nothing that Christ talks about in the Bible more than justice, to be perfectly honest. It's in my blood, John. I can't help it. As Americans, we should think about the least of these and at least give them a high priority of condition.
Lord said, "The poor will always be with us."
That's right. He did.
Thank you very much for spending your time. I know you're traveling. Have safe travels. I pray blessings for your family. We appreciate the expert advice you're giving us. Blessings again.
Thank you very much, John.
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