Another Pandemic Is Inevitable, and We’re Not Ready
President-elect Trump’s picks to lead the nation’s top public health agencies also don’t inspire confidence.
Every week or so, scientists issue another warning that the H5N1 bird flu is inching closer to exploding into a pandemic. Despite having contended with a pandemic that broke out less than five years ago, the US has no solid plan to handle a new one — nor have our leaders done anything to incorporate the lessons learned from the government’s less-than-ideal handling of Covid-19.
Too many Americans died from Covid because the public health community took too long to issue warnings, was slow to create tests to assess the situation, and was sluggish in shifting its response to fit the data on airborne transmission. The much-criticized lockdowns could have been less disruptive and saved more lives had they been periodically adjusted as data changed on who was most at risk and which activities were riskiest.
Already, some of the same mistakes can be seen in the response to H5N1, which started in poultry before a new variant began infecting the nation’s dairy cows. The US Department of Agriculture announced last week that it would start sampling the nation’s milk supply to test for the virus. California instituted a recall of some raw milk and raw milk products after samples tested positive. But there’s a lot more that could be done to reduce the odds of this situation leading to a pandemic.
Moreover, President-elect Donald Trump’s picks to lead the nation’s top public health agencies — the officials who would be in charge of any pandemic response — have prompted concerns among scientists and health experts. They include Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a vaccine skeptic and raw milk enthusiast, for the top job of secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services. He also has ties to the California producer whose farm was the subject of the state’s recall after several batches of raw milk products tested positive for the virus. The farmer told Politico he’s been asked to apply for the position of “raw milk adviser” at the Food and Drug Administration.
Trump’s pick to run the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, former Representative Dave Weldon, pushed false theories about childhood vaccines as a member of Congress and was a critic of the CDC and its vaccine program. And to lead the National Institutes of Health, Trump has named Jay Bhattacharya, author of the Great Barrington Declaration, which criticized the government’s Covid response and promoted the theory — based on bad science — that the pandemic would end quickly through herd immunity. Marty Makary, who Trump picked to head the FDA, promoted the same notion of herd immunity as he promised that even without vaccination, Covid would disappear in several months.
We likely won’t know how these officials might handle the next crisis until their Senate confirmation hearings early next year……..
https://archive.is/fNhp4#selection-1711.0-1759.127