The CDC moved too slowly at several points in the coronavirus pandemic, ultimately hindering the U.S. response, former FDA Commissioner Scott Gottlieb writes in a new book, Uncontrolled Spread.

The big picture: The book argues that American intelligence agencies should have a much bigger role in pandemic preparedness, even if that’s sometimes at the expense of public health agencies like the CDC.

“Typically, security agencies have viewed the CDC as ‘having this mission’ or ‘having the ball on this.’ Clearly they don’t,” Gottlieb told Axios…

“We need to have human assets in the medical community so we understand when an outbreak emerges,” he said. “We need to have the capability of monitoring typical streams of intelligence, like signals intelligence and maybe even satellite intelligence, looking for things that could be trip wires for an outbreak of disease.”