Editorial: We have to face our COVID-19 pandemic stumbles — before we forget them
Now that we have vaccines and rapid tests and Paxlovid for COVID-19 — not to mention boundless supplies of KN95 face masks and toilet paper — it’s easy to forget the early days of the pandemic when we had none of those things.
And every year further from the chaotic months of 2020, our memory will fade of how badly prepared the United States was for the emergence of a deadly new pathogen. That’s why it’s imperative that Congress pass the PREVENT Pandemics Act before the end of this year. The multi-part bill introduced in January by Sens. Patty Murray (D-Wash.) and Richard M. Burr (R-N.C.) will help us understand the mistakes of our response and prepare for the inevitable next pandemic. Though it has broad bipartisan support, the bill has languished, presumably for lack of urgency.
The bill is urgent, however. Not necessarily to fight the current pandemic, but because we can’t afford not to address our recent failures before the next one takes us by surprise.
Public health leaders have struggled to communicate effectively with the public, but it doesn’t have to be that way.
The bill would do many important things, starting with a crucial act of establishing a 9/11-style commission to review the federal and state responses. This is not about assigning blame, but making a clear-eyed assessment of the many ways the nation stumbled in its early response.
There was the embarrassingly slow rollout of testing and contact tracing. The U.S. was still trying to cobble together testing materials when other nations had already set up huge testing and tracing programs.
There was the discovery that the nation’s stockpile of pharmaceuticals and medical supplies maintained by the Department of Health and Human Services had been depleted and allowed to degrade, such as those 170 broken ventilators sent to Los Angeles County and the thousands of medical face masks that were expired.
There was the breakdown of the supply chain for basic medical supplies and protective gear — and no plan by the federal government to help, leaving states to procure things like face masks and gloves on the open market.
We will never know how many of the nearly 1.1 million Americans who have died from COVID-19 so far might have lived if the U.S. had been more prepared in 2020.
The U.S. needs a clear-eyed examination of the ways the pandemic response was bungled. California, which had its own missteps, should do the same.
In addition to the response review, the bill would modernize and standardize public health data and communication, which was a mess in 2020; shore up the government stockpile and blood supply; and establish an Office of Pandemic Preparedness and Response Policy in the White House that can help lead the nation through a rapid and appropriate public health response.
“The next time there is a crisis like this, we cannot have people asking ‘Why can’t I get a test? Where can I get reliable information? How can we be so unprepared for this?’” Murray said during a speech asking her colleagues to include the bill in the end-of-year funding package.
We agree. Congress should pass the bill before we forget what we need to remember.
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