Looks Like We Won't Bother to Prepare for the Next Pandemic

 


The United States—and to be fair the rest of the world, but I will focus on here—whiffed the pandemic. We ignored warnings and abandoned programs designed to give us what little preparedness that we had. We couldn't make enough PPE or medical equipment, or ramp-up testing when we needed it most. Our reward is almost a million people dead, and around 11 million people with "long COVID."

There were plenty of people warning us that we were unprepared for this. Back in 2005, Bush wanted to invest in preparedness (for a replay of the Spanish Flu), but Congress wouldn't listen. In 2014, Obama asked for money to prepare for an Ebola epidemic, cut Congress wouldn't listen. In 2015 Bill Gates did a TED talk about how we weren't ready for a pandemic, nobody listened. Then just months before the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic started, the Trump administration undermined a federal-level pandemic unit that had been established.

Now it's looking like deja vu all over again—and directly in the wake of the worst wave of them all. The Biden administration included a substantial amount in the latest government funding bill to continue funding for present pandemic response and prepare for future pandemics. 

Congress cut that funding because of squabbles among Democrats about how to pay for it. There is now a plan to pass a separate bill for that funding, but doing that is a lot harder than including the funding in must-pass funding legislation. 

To their credit, the FDA has requested funds for preparedness in their FY 2023 budget. But that is a request, not a guarantee. And FY 2023 doesn't start until October.

So even though the pain of this pandemic is fresh in our minds, and even though a team of experts has given us a well thought-out roadmap showing where to go from here, I can see no evidence that anyone in charge is thinking about setting out on the journey.  

This is something I intend to contact my representatives about and I urge you to do the same. This time we got a virus that was virulent and adaptive, but not especially deadly. It would be profoundly stupid to allow ourselves to start from square one next time around.

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