The pandemic was a test of America's public health bureaucracy. It failed.
Those failures were legion, and they were spread across multiple officials, agencies, and layers of government. But no institution failed quite as abysmally as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), which, through a combination of arrogance, incompetence, and astonishingly poor planning, wasted America's only chance to mitigate the effects of COVID-19 before it spread widely.
The CDC is supposed to be America's frontline institution in the fight against infectious disease. Its job is to analyze viral threats, track their spread and development, and provide the public with relevant information about how to respond to outbreaks. Not only did the agency do this job poorly in the early stages of the pandemic, but it actively hindered efforts that would have greatly improved America's response, and it made planning errors that were both predictable and avoidable. At nearly every stage of the pandemic, the CDC got things wrong and got in the way. Its failures almost certainly made America's pandemic worse.
The CDC's most notorious breakdown came early on, when it was developing a testing system to detect COVID-19. As former Food and Drug Administration director Dr. Scott Gottlieb documents in a scathing new book, Uncontrolled Spread, the agency made multiple critical errors along the way.