OPINION:
President Biden asked Congress for billions more last month to research, develop and purchase additional vaccines and to try to prevent or at least be better prepared for the next pandemic.
As the lessons of COVID-19 demonstrated, we cannot prioritize vaccines over pandemic prevention at large. The initial promise of the vaccines preventing COVID-19 clearly gave many false hope that they could avoid infection.
The $82 billion President Biden proposed over five years for preventing a future pandemic is another matter.
As bad as the lockdown was — more than 1 million Americans dead, an at least $16 trillion hit to the economy, untold associated misery and mental illness — we simply have to do what we can to prevent another pandemic, even if that means pouring money for now into the Biden administration’s public health operation.
During the lockdown, we heard much about the similar shutdown in 1918 and comforted ourselves with the knowledge that if we could survive this once, we probably would not have to endure it again. Pandemics, we hoped, were 100-year anomalies. But science increasingly says that is not so.
One study found we have a 50% chance of another pandemic within 25 years. Another found the likelihood of another 2020-esque pandemic-caused shutdown has tripled in the last few decades.
Still another study found that we were handicapped against COVID-19 because it was so deeply embedded in our population before we even knew it existed. At least five states had cases before the government even received the genome of the virus on Jan. 9, 2020.
There are promising technical developments we could harness to accelerate the effort, but they will bring additional threats we’ll have no choice but to address. For instance, gene synthesis screening, the process of “printing” DNA for insertion into a cell, holds great hope for accelerating research in a variety of related fields. But it also could be hijacked by those who mean us harm to quickly create dangerous bioweapons.
The current process for ordering DNA sequences from labs does not give comfort. Most companies, particularly in the United States, honor U.S. guidelines for selling DNA sequences — background checks, checks against lists of hazardous sequences within the U.S., etc.
But no such guidelines exist in other parts of the world. At the very least, criteria should be established among all the countries involved to assure background checks and oversight over who orders these sequences and special scrutiny for those who order sequences or are working on research that could prove harmful to humans.
That finding was part of a review conducted through the National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity that focused on how to promote safe biomedical research, prevent sequences from reaching dangerous hands and avoid research that may be too dangerous to conduct.
The board suggested four key points to fortify the nation’s public health response to emergencies such as COVID-19.
The first obviously is to develop fully effective countermeasures, which we still have not done with COVID-19. The second is to make sure we are prepared to respond quickly, to detect sooner and to mobilize in a more organized and effective manner.
The third is to build partnerships with the businesses involved in developing vaccines and antivirals. Much of the necessary research won’t be done without a commercial interest getting involved, and the board’s plan calls for finding the firms that are most deserving of the trust involved in delivering these gene sequences and building relationships with them to limit risk and improve effectiveness.
Finally, the plan calls for money for workforce development — paying for schooling and research that gives our researchers a leg up.
Some of the money the president has requested would be ticketed to enhanced monitoring of wastewater treatment systems to try to detect sooner when disease becomes present in a population. Valuable months were lost preventing the spread of COVID-19 because officials didn’t even know it was present in the United States.
Other areas that need attention include better personal protective equipment, including more effective and less expensive air sterilization and filtration and increased oversight on gain-of-function research and other research with heightened danger for humans. This is a necessary piece, given lax lab conditions may well have exacerbated the current COVID-19 outbreak.
One thing we learned in dramatic fashion from our experience with COVID-19 is that we were not prepared. We were not organized. We did not fully understand the threat. Many of the initiatives we undertook did not fit the mission and caused delays in solving the problem.
It will require a significant federal investment, to be sure, but we have an opportunity now to do better, to make our response more cohesive and effective, because the next threat likely will be here sooner rather than later.
• Brian McNicoll, a freelance writer based in Alexandria, Virginia, is a former senior writer for The Heritage Foundation and former director of communications for the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform.
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