There's a trap that health and national security officials know too well. Prepare too early and you’re called Chicken Little. Act too late — and millions may die.
The nation’s health secretary was warned about a possible pandemic — and, he admits now, he didn’t take that first warning seriously enough. But he studied with experts at the Centers of Disease Control. He read papers on virology. He took his concerns to the president. And months later, the administration unveiled a plan to tackle the virus emerging out of Asia, investing in therapies and warning Americans to stock up on canned goods.
The Trump administration has taken the brunt of the blame for America’s lack of preparedness for the Covid-19 pandemic, which has caught the world’s wealthiest nation embarrassingly off-guard and plunged it into an economic and health catastrophe. But the cycle of inattention has roots far deeper than that, according to interviews with top policymakers from three administrations covering 20 years.
Government agencies slowly abandoned their pandemic-planning efforts, with the Homeland Security department in 2017 shelving its decade-plus efforts toof how outbreaks affect the economy. Rather than train government staff to respond to a pandemic, as some high-level officials urged, carefully crafted by the Obama administration and career officials – based on their own sometimes rocky experiences dealing with H1N1 and Ebola -- for an ad hoc process that’s left the White House running consistently days or weeks behind on its response.Now, the Trump administration is facing the biggest public health threat in a century — relying on some of the same career officials and experts who advised Bush and Obama on pandemics to shape their coronavirus strategy today.
The officials also described the complexity of trying to stave off future threats and tamp down existing ones, such as the Obama-era effort to set up a long-term, global health security strategy with foreign partners in 2014 while simultaneously fighting the spreading Ebola outbreak ravaging West Africa.
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