The Time To Prepare For Next Pandemic Is Now
We just passed the third anniversary of “15 days to stop the spread,” and Americans now realize this slogan wasn’t the only thing that didn’t turn out as planned with the pandemic.
Covid-19 the disease is largely out of the headlines now; but the damage done by Covid-19 the disruptor to our economy, our schools, and our society remains a salient issue.
A full one-third of Americans’ retirement savings have been wiped out. More than 2 million Americans lost their jobs in the restaurant sector alone, and those jobs still have not all returned. Kids are said to be a year or more behind in school because of the complicating factors of the pandemic.
Our public health apparatus is, in effect, returning from war. It is battered and bruised and its capabilities have been depleted. It did score some major victories, but it made some mistakes and took some losses as well.
How do we gear up for the next pandemic? What do we need to do to recover from the Covid pandemic? How do we minimize the risk of more lockdowns even as the world becomes more interconnected and dangerous transmissible diseases become more common?
Those questions came up this week when the Bipartisan Commission on Biodefense met on Tuesday in Washington. The commission is a group of former senior government officials developing recommendations for pandemic preparedness, among other things, and the meeting will be part of developing a Blueprint 2.0 for pandemic readiness.
Former Senator Joe Lieberman from Connecticut and former Governor of Pennsylvania and Secretary of Homeland Security Tom Ridge are the co-chairs the commission. Asha George, an Army intelligence officer who currently works on the House Committee on Homeland Security, is executive director.
The commission’s work will address a variety of matters, including how to get boots on the ground more quickly after outbreaks, how to improve biosurveillance, and how to better coordinate state, local and federal efforts. Its recommendations will inform congressional policymaking, as will various appearances before Congress in the coming weeks by Secretary of Health and Human Services Xavier Becerra.
The commission and the members who question Becerra will have to deal with some serious shortfalls left by the upheaval to public health preparedness efforts caused by Covid-19.
The Strategic National Stockpile of medicines and vaccines for diseases such as smallpox, monkeypox and Ebola is depleted and in need of replenishment. When a monkeypox outbreak began last May, the US had virtually no vaccines available, even for the most immunocompromised.
There were 200 million doses of smallpox vaccines for non-immunocompromised in the stockpile in 2018, but there are questions about whether they are still viable. Unlike Covid-19, where death rates were below 1/10th of 1%, the fatality rates for smallpox are about 30%. After an influenza outbreak in 2007 killed 12,000 Americans and hospitalized more than a quarter-million, the US stockpiled flu anti-virals. Now more than 15 years later, the viability of those anti-virals is uncertain.
Given these important issues, HHS and the Administration for Strategic Preparedness must replenish the aging stockpile now rather than waiting until we are again scrambling to respond to an outbreak.
Some of the other matters before the commission are more complicated. As we learned in this pandemic, resources may come from Washington, but the health care response will be delivered at the local level – and needs will vary. The companies that supply these medicines need to know more about how government plans to respond to pandemics so they can prepare, research, and seek efficiencies and breakthroughs.
Americans went about 100 years between clock-stopping disease outbreaks, but it is doubtful it will be that long before the next one. This is especially true given the technological capability of our adversaries to create and deploy bioweapons. Our societies are likewise more tightly packed and vulnerable to outbreaks.
Rather than being time to relax now that Covid-19 has subsided, now is time to use those lessons freshly learned to immediately begin preparation for the next public health emergency.
Jason Altmire was a member of Congress from 2007-2013. He is an adjunct professor of health care management at the Texas Tech University Health Sciences Center. Follow him on Twitter @jasonaltmire.
