Many posts have discussed COVID and pandemic preparedness.
Britt Lampert and Anemone Franz at The Hill:
The White House’s pandemic preparedness team has quietly withered to a single part-time employee.
Last month, Dr. Gerald Parker, the top White House pandemic preparedness official, resigned as senior director for the National Security Council’s Biosecurity and Pandemic Response directorate. His exit drew needed, though still scant, attention to a troubling reality: the biosecurity office now has no full-time staff, and the White House Office of Pandemic Preparedness and Response Policy (OPPR), which some headlines mistakenly claimed Parker led, has sat empty since late June.
This collapse comes as pandemic preparedness and public health programs are being dismantled, measles outbreaks in undervaccinated communities reach a 33-year high, and H5N1 bird flu spreads through U.S. farms. The White House offices responsible for coordinating the U.S. government’s response to biological threats have effectively vanished.
Congress established OPPR in 2022 with broad bipartisan support to coordinate and strengthen domestic pandemic preparedness and response. It worked alongside the National Security Council’s Global Health Security and Biodefense directorate (renamed Biosecurity and Pandemic Response, or BPR, in 2025), which focused on global threats to national security.
As OPPR’s first (and so far only) director, Maj. Gen. Paul Friedrichs told Congress the office was meant to build on “the foundation laid by multiple administrations over the past twenty years which have recognized that biological threats are increasing in frequency and impact.
Jennifer Calfas, Josh Dawsey and Sabrina Siddiqui at WSJ:
As President Trump sat with top donors at his New Jersey golf club this month, he made a private admission: He believed the coronavirus vaccine was one of the biggest accomplishments of his presidency, but he couldn’t bask in it.
Trump told donors at a dinner—who were paying $1 million to be there—that he wished he could talk more about Operation Warp Speed, the government program he initiated that helped expedite the development of the vaccine, attendees said. The guests included Pfizer Chief Executive Albert Bourla, whose company developed one of the first Covid-19 vaccines.
Trump’s private comments illuminate the fraught politics around vaccines that the White House is confronting, which reached a boiling point Wednesday after the administration fired the head of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and other top officials quit their jobs in the midst of disagreements with Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. over vaccine policy.
The agency is now facing a crisis. Longtime officials there said Kennedy is ignoring scientific findings to pursue an antivaccine agenda, threatening public health as the calendar gets closer to winter and seasonal outbreaks of Covid and other viruses.
