Can America learn from this pandemic before the next one hits?

On March 3, 2020, a soft-spoken doctor by the name of Dr. Matthew Hepburn took to the TEDMED stage at the Westin Waterfront Hotel in Boston to give a long-planned talk about his life’s work: preventing pandemics. His timing was right. On that day, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention had just announced 60 cases of SARS-CoV-2 in the United States, and a cruise ship full of infected passengers would soon be stranded off the coast of California.

Hepburn had spent 23 years in the US Army as an infectious disease specialist. Now, before a nervous audience of medical professionals bumping elbows rather than shaking hands, he identified three keys to fighting pandemics: advanced technologies, global cooperation and political will. “We can mount the most effective pandemic defense the world has ever seen,” he predicted. “Instead of being divided, why not, as a global community, come together and fight this pandemic as a team?”

Before stepping off the podium, Hepburn vowed to never stop fighting to end pandemics once and for all. By the end of this week, he would be embroiled in the divisive and dysfunctional US response to the coronavirus under President Trump. And before long, he was working 16-hour days on Operation Warp Speed, which successfully accelerated the development of COVID vaccines.

Today, Hepburn is senior adviser for pandemic prevention in the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy and co-chair of a federal steering committee on pandemic innovation. His responsibilities include coordinating exercises and pandemic exercises between multiple federal agencies. His goal, he says, is for the government to plan for pandemics with the same level of severity that it brings to preparing for hurricanes or wars. “The American public should expect every aspect of our government to be here for the long haul,” he says.

And yet, as the COVID-19 crisis enters its fourth year, with more than one million Americans dead and the highly contagious XBB.1.5 variant contributing to the surge in cases, the goal of eliminating pandemic threats seems further away than ever. In the United States, our political will is weakening. Our public health staff are exhausted and demoralized. Our deep political divisions have impacted everything from funding streams to a fundamental belief in science. The anti-vax movement is getting more organized every day. And scientists worry that an incoming Republican Congress — having barely seated a president — is more likely to demonize their work in upcoming hearings than support its actual rollout.

“Since the start of the pandemic, our public health institutions have been unable to persuade much of the population to get vaccinated or to get vaccinated or to wear a face mask,” says Dr James Lawler , co-director of the Global Center for Health Security at the University of Nebraska Medical Center. “I think it would be difficult to say that trust in these institutions has improved since then.” According to data analyzed by Kathleen Hall Jamieson, director of the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania, politicized topics are most likely to cause Americans to question “recommendations from federal health agencies.” Unfortunately, she says, “COVID polarized.”

The need to mend these divisions – and to build a system of speed and trust – is particularly acute given that the next pandemic could be imminent. Even while battling COVID-19, we faced a global monkeypox emergency and an Ebola outbreak in Uganda. Taken together, globalization, climate change, deforestation, the proliferation of new biotechnologies and poorly regulated laboratories have increased the risk of new epidemics, experts say.

Some worry that SARS-CoV-2 will end up looking like an empty race for something much worse. “SARS CoV-3 could be right around the corner,” says Lawler. If you were to combine the 10% mortality rate of SARS-CoV-1, which first emerged in 2002, with the transmissibility of SARS-CoV-2, he says, you would have the recipe for a “ catastrophic, Armageddon-like”. pandemic.”

To assess the question of how prepared the United States is to deal with future pandemic threats, vanity lounge spoke to more than 20 doctors, scientists, policy analysts and other experts. The takeaway was clear: We need to up our game. global transparency.

Progress on these fronts costs money, which has dried up, letting viruses take over. “That’s one of the characteristics of viruses: they can’t live outside of a human host,” says Valerie Reyna, director of Cornell University’s Institute for Human Neuroscience. “They need all of us to cooperate to pass them on.”

Redesign of public health messages

There is no doubt that trust and social cohesion can save lives during a pandemic. As proof, we can turn to Japan, where less than 49 out of 100,000 people have died from COVID, compared to the US toll of more than 330 per 100,000. The Japanese government has not mandated vaccines or masks. On the contrary, peer pressure did the job, as The New York Times reported. There the masks are called face underwear. As in: You’d be embarrassed not to wear them. The Japanese government also raised public awareness early on of the dangers of what has become known as the “three Cs”: enclosed spaces, crowded places, and places of close contact. The ubiquity of this phrase, which has become the buzzword in Japan in 2020, has almost certainly saved lives.

But would face cut underwear in the US, where a Beverly Hills doctor and leader of the anti-vax movement was among those arrested for storming the Capitol during the January 6 insurrection attempt? Can the Three Cs compete with Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, a Republican who won Florida Supreme Court approval in December to launch a grand jury investigation into COVID-19 vaccines?

“We are a country divided, and a country divided cannot be prepared,” says Ali Mokdad, professor and director of population health strategy at the University of Washington. Mokdad spent the pandemic modeling its path and confirmed that results can diverge significantly depending on whether or not people follow public health advice.

Americans, however, are not going to wake up one morning and start unanimously respecting authority and following instructions. It is therefore up to public health officials to determine how to communicate with us as we are, not how they would like us to be.

The CDC’s confusing and confusing health advice, sometimes at odds with science, has helped fuel public suspicion of medical authorities, experts say. At the height of the omicron wave, 10 days of recommended isolation became five, with no negative test requirement. Six feet apart in schools has become three, also with little clarity. “Our CDC has been dysfunctional in both administrations,” says Eric Topol, professor of molecular medicine at Scripps Research.