In the absence of a federal commission on the COVID-19 pandemic, over 30 experts felt a duty to speak out and have written a book on how the US lost the pandemic war.
Despite partisan divides, pretty much everyone agrees that America’s leaders made mistakes during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Now, a group of more than 30 heavy-hitting experts from the worlds of policy, public health, science, biodefense and patient advocacy has written a book reviewing some of those errors and making suggestions for avoiding similar missteps in the future.
The book “Lessons from the COVID War,” published Tuesday, is deliberate in its use of military metaphors. COVID-19 should have been attacked like a foreign invasion, but too often the nation’s leaders were absent from the battlefield, they argue.
Group members held “listening sessions” with nearly 300 people, and in the absence of a federal commission on the topic, they felt a duty to speak out about what they found.
Though data suggests the world remains extremely vulnerable to another pandemic, only 12% of Americans believe their government is doing enough to prepare, according to a poll of 1,000 residents released this month by YouGov, funded by the education charity Rhodes Trust.
To get a deeper sense of what they found and what they believe needs to be done to prevent a repeat, USA TODAY spoke with two of the COVID Crisis Group members:
- The book’s primary author, Philip Zelikow, who also is the group’s director and former 9/11 Commission executive director.
- Dr. Mark McClellan, who ran the Food and Drug Administration and then the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services during the George W. Bush administration.
Here’s what they said.
This interview has been edited and condensed. Find a full list of the crisis group members and their expertise at the end of this article.
What made you want to join this project and help write this book?
McClellan: This process is so important right now: taking a good, honest look with an eye toward the future. Not so much about complaining, but about what could have gone better and making sure it doesn’t happen again. I’m not sure we’ve learned those lessons yet.
Are we any better positioned now to fight another pandemic than we were in January 2020?
Zelikow: Everybody got a sense of how well they thought institutions were performing in the crisis. Generally, everyone’s going to tell you: not good. Do you notice any really big things that have been done to fix the “not good?” No.
Both of those fundamental perceptions are correct and our report details why.
Are your ears ringing? Experts are studying whether its linked to COVID or the vaccine.
Latest: Another COVID booster is now approved for older people and those at high risk
Briefly, what’s the answer to why?
Zelikow: We went into a 21st century pandemic with a 19th century system. We’ve come out of that pandemic essentially retaining the 19th century structure.”
What do you think were some of the biggest failures of the pandemic?
McClellan: The big thing was not having systems in place, public health, health care, etc., that were well prepared for the kind of war we can fight now against new infections.
The science available to address a new pathogen like COVID has changed enormously – the ability to develop tests and treatments and vaccines at a pace never before seen in the history of pandemics. We saw heroic activities by health care organizations (and) hospitals all across the country to try to respond to the threats of infection and serious illnesses. That was a remarkable achievement of American health care.
What we were less good at was taking the steps in health care that could have prevented it. Health care and public health need to work together for an effective response in the 21st century.
We’ve got effective treatments now for COVID. We shouldn’t still be seeing 250 deaths a day. We haven’t taken those extra steps to connect those amazing biomedical capabilities to getting it to the front lines.
Zelikow: The most palpable area was schools. There’s hardly an American family that doesn’t have an opinion on that. At its root, the (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention) was asked to make very practical judgments, including weighing costs and benefits about school closures, that it was utterly unsuited to make.
Everyone wants schools to reopen. The issue is how to do it and what kinds of tradeoffs we would accept? If you don’t address those issues usefully, you have nothing to say. The result was paralysis.
Why are closing our schools twice as much as (Europe and Israel)? They were practical and operationallyminded people who did the trade-offs, worked out toolkits and then implemented them. We did none of those things.
Do you have a sense of why?
Zelikow: We tried to answer the crisis with books and money. This person is having a heart attack in your front yard and you run to help. You don’t know what to do. Someone says, ‘I have this book on emergency medicine.’ Someone else writes you a $10,000 check. We came to this crisis throwing people books and checks. The failure in the crisis that people sense is that the institutions were not fully operational and didn’t know what to do.
The reason institutions were weak was because we hadn’t organized to do emergency operations. We didn’t have that kind of preparedness, but a number of other countries did and then therefore did way better than us in every respect, including retaining the confidence of the people.
You mention America’s lack of data and data-sharing as one of the big problems. What do you mean by that?
McClellan: Public health data systems are just out of date. There are over 300 local, territorial public health offices that don’t communicate well with CDC, let alone with health care responders. There are interoperable systems on the health care side, but we haven’t brought those to bear for working with public health and being systematic about being able to know when there are new cases being report