By mid-February, Burr had dumped hundreds of thousands of dollars of stock in various companies, including some hotel chains that would soon lose much of their value in the face of a growing pandemic. He also told a private lunch gathering on Feb. 27, in a speech obtained by NPR, that coronavirus was “much more aggressive in its transmission that anything we have seen in recent history. It is probably more akin to the 1918 pandemic.” Publicly that same month, he was assuring Americans that the United States was well-prepared for any outbreak.