Pandemic Preparedness

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.

The Long Shadow of COVID

Many posts have discussed COVID. Five years later, we are only now starting to grasp its long-term consequences.

Erica Pandey and Erin Doherty at Axios:

Covid was a top issue in 2020 exit polls, with 52% of voters saying controlling the virus itself was more important than rebuilding the post-pandemic economy.That mindset shifted over the next four years, as closed schools, inflation and isolation frustrated voters — and changed many of their votes.

"Younger voters are in the process of understanding who they are and what their values are, and that was disproportionately shaped by Covid," says John Della Volpe, director of polling at the Harvard Kennedy School Institute of Politics. "It intensified economic anxiety and created this survivalist mindset.""Democrats helped create this vacuum, which was filled by Trump and Trump-aligned podcasters and influencers."

Case in point: In 2020, voters under 30 broke for Joe Biden by 24 points, but in 2020, Kamala Harris only won the youth vote by 4 points, The Atlantic reports.

And many parents in deep blue cities and towns flipped their politics after seeing the effect of school closures and Covid isolation on their kids.

... 

Those who experience these events from the ages of 18 to 25 are more likely to develop a lasting lack of trust in political institutions and leaders, according to a study from the Systemic Risk Center at the London School of Economics.

"You can think of epidemics as somewhat of a stress test for governments. Leaders have to respond fast and with the right policies," says Orkun Saka, the study's author. "There is almost no way to get it completely right. When you get it especially wrong, there is a deep scar in the eyes of the young generation."

Kate Cohen at WP: 

Study after study after study has confirmed what everyone I know has expressed: that the pandemic altered our sense of time, which has in turn warped our memory. One study from a year into the pandemic asked participants to describe their experience of time and then sorted their responses into formal-sounding but utterly familiar categories, such as “temporal rift” (“Everything that happened before the pandemic feels like it happened in some distant era, in the ‘Before Times’’’) and “temporal vertigo” (“The pandemic itself seems to be going on for both 10 years, and two weeks”).

The covid-19 pandemic, which to date has killed between 7 million and 20 million people worldwide, including more than 1.2 million Americans, is almost perfectly designed to be forgotten.

For starters, it had two modes, both of which resist memory. One mode was horrific. People saw loved ones die struggling for breath — or couldn’t see them at all because of safety protocols. Front-line health workers risked their lives and witnessed horrors in understaffed, underequipped hospitals. For those who experienced the pandemic as extreme trauma, memories of specific events are often too painful to revisit — and acute stress can make retrieving those memories more difficult.

The other pandemic mode was humdrum. Most of us who were spared life-and-death trauma probably experienced the pandemic as featureless tedium: day after day in the same place with the same people and no present or future events to divide the calendar into little memorable bites. “Gone are the rehearsals that made Sundays Sunday, the town board meetings that made Wednesdays Wednesday,” I wrote at the time, in a column about why my family of nonbelievers decided to hold a Zoom Shabbat (essentially, to make a Friday feel like Friday). “Time stretches out, unmarked, unshaped and, therefore, incomprehensible.”

Masks in 1918

Many posts have discussed COVID, vaccines, and masks.

We have been here before.

 J. Alexander Navarro at The Conversation:

In mid-October of 1918, amidst a raging epidemic in the Northeast and rapidly growing outbreaks nationwide, the United States Public Health Service circulated leaflets recommending that all citizens wear a mask. The Red Cross took out newspaper ads encouraging their use and offered instructions on how to construct masks at home using gauze and cotton string. Some state health departments launched their own initiatives, most notably California, Utah and Washington.

Nationwide, posters presented mask-wearing as a civic duty – social responsibility had been embedded into the social fabric by a massive wartime federal propaganda campaign launched in early 1917 when the U.S. entered the Great War. San Francisco Mayor James Rolph announced that “conscience, patriotism and self-protection demand immediate and rigid compliance” with mask wearing. In nearby Oakland, Mayor John Davie stated that “it is sensible and patriotic, no matter what our personal beliefs may be, to safeguard our fellow citizens by joining in this practice” of wearing a mask.

Health officials understood that radically changing public behavior was a difficult undertaking, especially since many found masks uncomfortable to wear. Appeals to patriotism could go only so far. As one Sacramento official noted, people “must be forced to do the things that are for their best interests.” The Red Cross bluntly stated that “the man or woman or child who will not wear a mask now is a dangerous slacker.” Numerous communities, particularly across the West, imposed mandatory ordinances. Some sentenced scofflaws to short jail terms, and fines ranged from US$5 to $200.

Bush and Pandemic Response

Matthew Mosk at ABC:

In the summer of 2005, President George W. Bush was on vacation at his ranch in Crawford, Texas, when he began flipping through an advanced copy of a new book about the 1918 flu pandemic. He couldn't put it down.

When he returned to Washington, he called his top homeland security adviser into the Oval Office and gave her the galley of historian John M. Barry's "The Great Influenza," which told the chilling tale of the mysterious plague that "would kill more people than the outbreak of any other disease in human history."

"You've got to read this," Fran Townsend remembers the president telling her. "He said, 'Look, this happens every 100 years. We need a national strategy.'"

Thus was born the nation's most comprehensive pandemic plan -- a playbook that included diagrams for a global early warning system, funding to develop new, rapid vaccine technology, and a robust national stockpile of critical supplies, such as face masks and ventilators, Townsend said.

The effort was intense over the ensuing three years, including exercises where cabinet officials gamed out their responses, but it was not sustained. Large swaths of the ambitious plan were either not fully realized or entirely shelved as other priorities and crises took hold.

But elements of that effort have formed the foundation for the national response to the coronavirus pandemic underway right now.

President George W. Bush in 2005: "There is no pandemic flu in our country or in the world at this time. But if we wait for a pandemic to appear, it will be too late to prepare. And one day many lives could be needlessly lost because we failed to act today." pic.twitter.com/vq0j13DwLL

— CSPAN (@cspan) April 5, 2020

Civic Virtue and the 1918-19 Pandemic

Michael Apfeldorf at the Library of Congress.

In 1918, the United States faced one of the worst public health challenges in its history. An influenza pandemic – also known as the Spanish flu – infected an estimated 500 million people worldwide, killing 20-50 million people, including hundreds of thousands of Americans.

In response to that crisis, the American Red Cross mobilized countless Americans to assist their fellow citizens. Historical primary sources provide examples of civic virtue–that is, of citizens dedicating themselves to the common welfare, even at the cost of their own interests.

Precautions taken in Seattle, Wash., during the Spanish Influenza Epidemic would not permit anyone to ride on the street cars without wearing a mask. 260,000 of these were made by the Seattle Chapter of the Red Cross which consisted of 120 workers, in three days.

“Need Red Cross Workers to Make More Flu Masks,” The Seattle star., October 26, 1918

The Public Health Nurse She answers humanity’s call : Your Red Cross membership makes her work possible

...Some possible sources include:

• “Red Cross Opens Influenza Hospital“ – an article asking citizens to donate food to the hospital.
• “The Public Health Nurse: She answers humanity’s call” – a poster inviting citizens to donate money to support community nurses.
• “Many Women Nursing; More Badly Needed” – an appeal by the Red Cross Influenza Committee to fill an urgent nursing shortage.
• “Need Red Cross Workers to Make More Flu Masks” – a call for volunteers to make flu masks. (On the same page, “Flu Nurse Dies as Martyr to Disease” illustrates the extent to which many volunteers sacrificed.)