This paper seeks to answer the following question: Why have the bureaucracies and executive arms of two highly centralized presidential regimes – Egypt and Turkey – produced such different responses to the Coronavirus crisis? Its basic hypothesis is that while the crisis did initially provide scope for ministers, technocrats and bureaucrats specialized in public health to play a greater part in making health policy, their ability to maintain this newfound influence depended on their "policy capability". Through a comparison of the two case studies, this article shows that the more centralized a state is, the more unprecedented the crisis is and the more policy capability it has, the greater the role bureaucrats play at the expense of politicians.