America’s Pandemic Failures
The C.D.C. acknowledged it had botched its Covid response. It is part of a broader set of failures.
NY Times 18Aug2022
Full article URL:
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/18/briefing/monkeypox-cdc-walensky-covid.html
(excerpt)
Fragmented systems
Another problem that made the U.S.’s Covid and monkeypox responses less effective: The American public health system is divided — among the federal government, 50 states, thousands of local governments and many more private organizations and workers both inside and outside the health care system.
We saw the results when the U.S. first started distributing Covid vaccines. Poor planning and communication between the layers of government, along with limited supply, made it harder for front-line officials to plan for how many shots they could get in arms. Similar problems have appeared with monkeypox vaccine distribution.
The C.D.C. is a key federal agency that is supposed to rise above this fragmentation and help coordinate the national response to disease outbreaks. But throughout the pandemic, as Walensky acknowledged, it has struggled. And it seems to be struggling with monkeypox, too.
Reactive, not proactive
Many of these problems could have been avoided with better pandemic preparedness. The federal government could have, for example, bulked up mask stockpiles or manufacturing before the pandemic, easing early concerns about shortages.
But the U.S. has underfunded public health for years, experts said. So when Covid first began to spread, officials suddenly had to shift limited resources to deal with a crisis that had caught them by surprise — making mistakes more likely. In the early days of the pandemic, experts often said that the plane was being built as it was being flown.
Covid has worsened the problem. “Health departments have lost a lot of staff and have been very burned out,” said Caitlin Rivers, a senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security. “There’s just not a lot left to bring resources to their full potential.”
To address the gaps, the Biden administration has called for tens of billions more in funding for pandemic preparedness.
Congress has so far ignored those proposals, in what seems like history repeating itself.
The bottom line
Nearly three years into Covid, the U.S. is still not ready for the next pandemic. The C.D.C. is moving to remedy some of the problems plaguing the country’s public health system. Those changes, along with the broader lessons from Covid and monkeypox, could be the difference between another deadly pandemic and a crisis averted.
