Five Years Later, Operation Warp Speed Leader Reflects on COVID Lessons

This month marked five years since COVID-19 arrived in the United States. Our health care system is still dealing with the aftershocks, working to rebuild strong defenses in case of a future crisis.

Dr. Michael Anderson had a front row seat as the pandemic evolved. In 2020, he joined the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services full time, working on Operation Warp Speed—the partnership between HHS and the Department of Defense to accelerate a COVID-19 vaccine—as a senior adviser to the assistant secretary for preparedness and response. He's still a federal contractor to this day, as well as a principal at leadership search and consulting firm WittKieffer, supporting the recruitment of senior-level health system executives across the country.

Before working in the government, Anderson served as a pediatric critical care physician, the inaugural president of UCSF Benioff Children's Hospital in San Francisco and chief medical officer of the University Hospitals Health System in Cleveland. His experience as a doctor and health system executive gave him a unique perspective on the unfolding crisis.

Last month, Newsweek connected with Anderson to learn what the pandemic taught him about crisis management, and which lessons he would pass on to other health care organizations.

Editor's note: Some responses have been edited.

Newsweek: What were some of the common mistakes that hospitals and health systems made during COVID-19?

Dr. Michael Anderson: Not collaborating across typically competitive boundaries was a mistake. It was a tough time because guidelines were changing all the time. The CDC or NIAID [the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases] or Dr. Fauci's organization had to change things on the fly.

Health care systems, they're not as consistent at communicating, but there is deep power in making sure you communicate often, you communicate clearly, and you are honest. And I think honesty in those communications in the places that did it well was [like], "This is evolving," and, "This guidance for masking or for distance or for time off may change."

That can hopefully shield against ill will, [people saying], "See, they're just making stuff up! They don't even know what they're doing!" Well, no, that's not the case—we're just trying to make decisions based on data.

One thing I learned as an ICU physician is that you pick your Plan A, but in the back of your mind, consider if A doesn't work. What's Plan B, and what's Plan C? I think a good leader during times of crisis has a really good Plan A, but in the back of their mind is also thinking, What is Plan B, what is Plan C, and what are the triggers that I need to do to implement that?

What other advice do you have for hospitals that are working to communicate during a crisis? Should external and internal communications look different?

I think for the public, it sometimes has to be a little pithier because [of our digitized] society. The external messaging has to be a little bit more sound-bitey, a little bit more snippet-like.

Internally, you have to be slightly more robust, especially if you're dealing with your wonderful medical staff or your nurses or the folks that report up through you. You've got to be a little deeper in the communication—what evidence is this based on, where's this data coming from?

Number one, most Americans still trust their physician. They trust the local hospital they go to. It's important [that] hospitals actively engage in external communication, you just have to know the audience and modify it. When I was at University Hospitals in Cleveland, before I became a CMO, the CEO had invested a couple million dollars in a TV studio in the hospital. I thought to myself, That's the biggest waste of money that I've ever seen in my life.

How wrong I was, how brilliant he was, in that people trust the voice of a physician. Physicians need communication training if they're going to be good at it, but that TV studio became a chance for our hospital to be a voice of reason at a time of great tension, where our docs could be on CNN or MSNBC in a heartbeat to tell folks what was going on. It was a brilliant move and became a chance for us to help lead the dialogue.

Despite clinicians' and health systems' efforts, we still saw public trust erode during COVID-19. How do we build that trust back after a crisis, and what is at stake if we don't?

We have to be resilient. We have to admit if we made mistakes, where there were hiccups and maybe the best decisions weren't made…I just think we have to be consistent.

I am very, very, very concerned, as a pediatrician and a child advocate, that we're starting to see a backslide in vaccination rates. There's a friend of mine on LinkedIn who posts every day: "You don't know this disease because we've eradicated it, but you should remember it in case it comes back."

It's the scariest notion in my mind, that we could be taking care of patients with polio again, or whooping cough—we're already seeing whooping cough. So I think physicians and health care systems and big organizations like the American Academy of Pediatrics and others, they have to be resilient, because this is a long haul. They have to be consistent in their messaging. They have to reestablish trust. Admit when mistakes are made, but we've got to speak truth. We've got to speak truth to power.

I walk a fine line, because I still consult for HHS, but I'm really concerned that other voices are going to crowd out the voices of physicians and child advocates—and our kids can't suffer. We just can't let that happen.