about the seriousness of the coronavirus pandemic and raises questions about whether the president

and his administration waited too long to take important steps.

Eric Lipton is an investigative reporter at The Times, and he joins us now.

Eric Lipton, thank you so much for joining us.

Your reporting revealed the existence of these so-called Red Dawn e-mails between doctors,

medical experts in the administration. They were obtained, in part, through the Freedom

of Information Act request.

And in one e-mail that I want to ask you about, Dr. James Lawler, who is an infectious disease

expert -- he served in both the George W. Bush and the Obama administrations -- wrote:

"We have thrown 15 years of institutional learning out the window and are making decisions

based on intuition."

What were these e-mails, and what came out of your finding out about them?

ERIC LIPTON, The New York Times: Well, what was going on was that there was a group of

physicians and pandemic experts that, from the Department of Homeland Security, Health

and Human Services, the CDC, the Veterans Administration, that were consulting and comparing

notes, that -- and they were trying to make a really critical decision, which was, at

what point do we go from saying we are going to attempt to contain the infection to which

it's -- we have community spread, and we now need to move to mitigate its spread through

actions like social distancing?

So, at first, the goal was just to contain it, but, at a certain point, you need to say,

we need to flip the switch and say, schools need to close, businesses need to close.

These guys were comparing notes to try to figure out, when was the moment that we needed

to flip the switch? The fire alarm had gone off. Now we needed to mitigate it.

JUDY WOODRUFF: And from your reporting, what were some of the earliest warnings that the

president got? And how did he respond to those?

ERIC LIPTON: Look, I mean, the president's National Security Council -- there were members

on the National Security Council that in January were quite concerned about what was going

on in China and were worried that it was just a matter of time before the pandemic would

be in the United States.

And the Health and Human Services secretary, Azar, spoke with the president in January

as well to express his concern about the fact that this was almost assuredly coming to the

United States and was going to be a public health emergency here.

The president told him to, you know, calm down, that he was too worried about it. And,

repeatedly, in that period, while it's true that the president did limit travel by Chinese

citizens to the United States in late January, there were -- among many of his aides, there

was a belief that the United States needed to be preparing for the next stage of mitigation.

And it took weeks too long to get to that point.

JUDY WOODRUFF: On January the 22nd, in an interview with CNBC, President Trump was asked

about a pandemic and whether there were worries about it.

Here's what he said:

DONALD TRUMP, President of the United States: We have it totally under control. It's one

person coming in from China. And we have it under control.

JUDY WOODRUFF: So, what did we know about the coronavirus at that point in late January?

What did people know in the administration?

ERIC LIPTON: They knew that it was already here in the United States. They knew that

it was almost -- it was just a matter of time before it started to spread widely in the

United States and that, while containment was still important to try to do contact tracing

to limit the spread, that they needed to be preparing for widespread illnesses.

That was evident to any public health expert at that point.

JUDY WOODRUFF: And there is an audio that I want to play for the audience, because,

on February the 25th, Dr. Nancy Messonnier with the Centers for Disease Control -- she's

the director of the National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases -- she had a briefing

call with news reporters in which she issued a warning.

Here's that.

DR. NANCY MESSONNIER, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention: These measures might

include missed work and loss of income. I understand this whole situation may seem overwhelming

and that disruption to everyday life may be severe. But these are things that people need

to start thinking about now.

JUDY WOODRUFF: Just one day later, President Trump said this:

DONALD TRUMP: And, again, when you have 15 people, and the 15 within a couple of days

is going to be down to close to zero, that's a pretty good job we have done.

JUDY WOODRUFF: So, Eric, why was that a key moment in the administration's response?

ERIC LIPTON: Arguably, that was one of the most essential moments in the whole saga,

as we look back on it, on history, because that was the moment when they had been a consensus

among his medical advisers that the United States needed to announce that we needed to

move to social distancing that's in hot spots in particular.

And the president was unready to -- unprepared and unready to do that. And, in fact, he lashed

out at the human -- health and human services secretary, Azar, after Nancy Messonnier made

that statement while he was in India and on his way home.

So, what Trump -- President Trump did instead was to wait three weeks before he embraced

the need for social distancing, and the net result was that there are many more illnesses

and deaths in the United States.

JUDY WOODRUFF: So, we are now in -- Eric, in what is called mitigation, this -- these

widespread closures, all about enforcing social distancing.

President Trump announced the first social distancing initiative, 15 days to stop the

spread, he called it, and that was on March the 16th. But how early was this first proposed

to the president as a solution? And what is known about why he waited to adopt it?

ERIC LIPTON: It was a month prior to that that essentially a consensus was forming among

medical experts in the United States government that we now needed to move to mitigation.

And the thing is there -- it's almost down to a science. Once you have the first death

from a contagious disease like this, or you have a certain percentage of people who are

-- who have the illness, you have a window of about one to two weeks to take severe -- significant

mitigation steps.

If you don't do it, you're going to -- it's like waiting for a house fire to get from

being, you know, on the stove in the kitchen to the roof is burning and the structural

elements of the house are on fire, and then you call the fire department.

We waited until the roof was burning and the structure was on fire in New York state and

New York City before we called the fire department. And that was a decision that the president

made, was to not move ahead with those announcements.

Now, again, it's the governors' choices as to when to do that, but it's the federal government's

role to play a leadership -- and to help the governors make the choices by letting them

know what the public health officials think is needed.

JUDY WOODRUFF: And we know, Eric, that the lack of testing, the lack of personal protective

equipment has all -- all of that has also been a significant and ongoing challenge.

What did your reporting reveal about the delays in dealing with all that?

ERIC LIPTON: Again, there's two phases in this process, the containment and the mitigation

phase.

But during containment, it was evident to any public health expert that this was going

to spread in the United States. So, as of January, they knew that there was going to

be illnesses in pockets across the United States. They didn't know how many.

But they should have known in January that now is the time to spend hundreds of millions

of dollars to buy face masks and other protective equipment for hospitals. They knew that the

material in their supplies was expired and there wasn't enough of it.

Now, they didn't order that stuff until March, but they could have started in January. They

could have started the process of getting ventilators built in January, knowing that

they likely were going to need them. That didn't happen until March. And that has severe

consequences as well.

JUDY WOODRUFF: Eric Lipton with The New York Times, congratulations on some really extraordinary

reporting. Thank you.

ERIC LIPTON: Thank you.