“We did not step up and meet the challenge that we needed to meet”

Members of the group, whose lengthy string of emails now read like a chilling foreshadowing of the unfolding deadly pandemic, came to be known by the chain’s dark-humored subject line, “Red Dawn Rising,” a reference to the campy 1984 cold war movie about a gritty band of Americans who fend off foreign invaders. Now several have broken their silence about the early warnings in interviews with ABC News to describe their lingering distress about the missed chances to spare lives.

“We did not step up and meet the challenge that we needed to meet,” said Dr. Jeffrey Duchin, Seattle-King County Public Health Officer, and a contributor to the email chain. “We didn’t act quickly enough to do the things that we needed to do early enough. And we still are not doing the things we need to do to get this outbreak under control.”…

“The president began to say [in March] that nobody could imagine that something like this could actually occur,” said Dr. Dan Hanfling, a biosecurity and disaster response expert from Virginia. “The truth is that there was a group of us that had been trying to raise the alarm.”

Hanfling said it was unclear how much of the information from the chain filtered up to top policymakers. Senior officials including Dr. Anthony Fauci, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Director Robert Redfield, and Surgeon General Jerome Adams, were copied into the chain at least once. Fauci told ABC News he “didn’t pay that much attention” to the emails.