Consider This from NPR - Are We Ready For The Next One? The Striking Pandemic Warnings That Were Ignored

Episode Date: March 19, 2021

Dante Disparte, founder and chairman of Risk Cooperative and member of FEMA's National Advisory Council, explains how lessons from last year can help us in the next pandemic — and why warnings from former Presidents Bush and Obama were not enough to prepare the U.S. for the coronavirus. In participating regions, you'll also hear from local journalists about what's happening in your community.Email us at [e-mail] more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Support for NPR comes from NPR member stations and Eric and Wendy Schmidt through the Schmidt Family Foundation, working toward a healthy, resilient, secure world for all. On the web at theschmidt.org. Remember 15 days to slow the spread? This afternoon we're announcing new guidelines for every American to follow over the next 15 days. A year ago, we were a couple days into it. Avoid gathering in groups of more than 10 people.

Avoid discretionary travel. 15 days in mid-March. Maybe that's all it would take. We will be extending our guidelines to April 30th. Of course, the campaign soon became 30 days to slow the spread. But again, with the implication of a limited time frame. We can expect that by June 1st, we will be well on our way to recovery. We think by June 1st, a lot of great things will be happening. Back then, there was still so much we

didn't know about the coronavirus. We didn't know about the importance of masks. In fact, no one at the White House that day was wearing one. We didn't know about the importance of masks. In fact, no one at the White House that day was wearing one. We didn't know about asymptomatic transmission either. And we didn't understand that the virus spreads primarily through the air, not from touching surfaces. But amid so many unknowns, one thing was obvious. Even then, just days into the pandemic, we could have seen it coming. These types of events were not a surprise. Dante Desparte is a member of FEMA's National Advisory Council. You know, the clarion calls were ignored

all over the world. I think that's one big revelation that's made painfully obvious at the one-year anniversary of COVID-19 being designated a pandemic. Consider this a year in as the U.S. vaccination campaign races against dangerous variants and the pandemic still rages around the world. It's worth asking, are we ready for the next one? From NPR, I'm Adi Corn in other currencies. Send, spend, or receive money internationally, and always get the real-time, mid-market exchange rate with no hidden fees. Download the WISE app today, or visit WISE.com. T's and C's apply. For a lot of Asian Americans, the shooting in Atlanta was tragic, but also didn't come as a shock. I'm exhausted, heartbroken, and none of this

surprises me. In fact, to be honest, I've been expecting this. What it means to be Asian in America on It's Been a Minute from NPR. It's Consider This from NPR, and it may seem like the coronavirus came out of nowhere, but actually, we've been warned. And in hindsight, the specificity of those warnings, it's remarkable to hear. Scientists and doctors cannot tell us where or when the next pandemic will strike or how severe it'll be. But most agree at some point we are likely to face another pandemic. In 2005, on the heels of the SARS outbreak and amid growing concerns about bird flu,

President George W. Bush wanted to invest in pandemic preparedness. If allowed to smolder undetected, it can grow to an inferno that spreads quickly beyond our ability to control it. Bush wanted to invest in early detection programs, stockpile antiviral drugs, and establish a system of coordination between federal, state, and local officials. Meeting those goals, he said, It will require the active participation of the American people. And it will require the immediate attention of the United States Congress. So we can have the resources in place to begin implementing this strategy right away. Translation, being prepared will cost money. George W. Bush asked Congress for a spending package worth $7.1 billion.

7.1. And here's what he actually got in that year's budget as broadcast on NPR in December 2005. Republican leaders attached money for Katrina relief, that's $29 billion more, money for U.S. to prepare for an avian flu pandemic, that's $3.8 billion, and an extra $2 billion to help lower-income Americans pay for... Did you catch that? $3.8 billion. It would take 500 packages of that size to equal one American rescue plan, the massive pandemic relief package just signed by President Biden. And that package was just a fraction of what the government spent on the pandemic in the last year, a total of around $6 trillion. By one estimate, that's more than all the post-9-11 wars combined through the year 2020.

President Bush wasn't the only person sounding the alarm about a pandemic. He wasn't even the only president. There may and likely will come a time in which we have both an airborne disease that is deadly. In 2014, President Obama asked Congress for money to help fight the Ebola epidemic and invest in future pandemic preparedness. So that if and when a new strain of flu like the Spanish flu crops up, five years from now or a decade from now, we've made the investment. Obama did get most of the funding he requested at the time,

more than $5 billion, but a lot of it was used on Ebola. Is the United States ready to battle a major epidemic? I feel like it's probably not. This is from C-SPAN in 2018, when Atlantic journalist Ed Young warned the Trump White House wasn't interested in pandemic preparation, a contrast with the two prior administrations. Young interviewed Anthony Fauci at the time, who had counseled every president since Ronald Reagan. And Fauci said he had not yet spoken to President Trump, who was elected two years prior. In fairness, Fauci said there was no obvious disease threats looming.

So I think we are currently in peacetime, right? So there's not a major crisis that is banging on our doors. Young argued then that it was exactly the time for the American government to invest more in public health, more in hospital preparedness, and more in global aid to help other countries control disease within their own borders. And this has been part of the history of dealing with infectious disease for decades, if not longer. A crisis hits, everyone throws a lot of money and investments at it, people pay attention, crisis abates, and then everyone forgets. And it's this cycle of panic and neglect that dooms us to this level of constant under-preparedness.

All those warnings and funding efforts nonetheless left us unprepared to control the coronavirus before it grew into a worldwide pandemic. Which brings us back to the question we started with. Are we ready for the next one? I spoke about that with Dante Disparte, who you heard from earlier. He's a member of FEMA's National Advisory Council. He's also the founder and chairman of Risk Cooperative, a risk management and insurance advisory firm. Because we've been warned before, because we've heard, even from the White House, this kind of warning, what happened to your mind? Well, in the risk management industry, we talk about something called near misses.

And when it comes to novel zoonotic diseases or novel infectious diseases, we often have many, many near misses. Coronaviruses, SARS, MERS, influenzas, H5N1, and so many more over the last 20 or 30 years have been very clear near misses. Let's not forget the Ebola outbreak not long ago either. And every one of those then hinged on the ability of the global community to respond and mount an effective response. We've started to defund over the last decade all of those early alert systems that would signal this is real. And I think now that we've had this great big pandemic, we should really never, ever defund nor ignore these early warning signs. So in the early part of the pandemic, there were a lot of things that were revealed almost right away, whether it's the supply chain, whether it's PPE, which now we can just throw around this, but the idea of personal protective equipment, not a given even

in hospitals. What are some other things that were revealed in those early months? Well, yeah, absolutely. As you think about the very earliest days of this pandemic, recall the scenes in Italy when the Italians were singing to each other to provide encouragement of what was an obvious lockdown that was gonna come across the Atlantic to the United States. That revealed that this was, one,

a threat that was on its way to us, and two, crucial, crucial time was lost in terms of mounting a response and beginning to have very basic equipment ready, such as masks, personal protective equipment, ventilators. And so in a case where COVID wasn't going to provide a death sentence to someone, the void of very basic hospital equipment and material was what really created the dramatic effects that we saw in the States. Similarly, the idea of testing,

the idea of information sharing, there's been a lot of looking back at that period and talk about what we could have done. But did we even have the infrastructure to do that sort of thing? Well, here is one of the more insidious aspects of this crisis, and I hope one of the lessons we take forward. You cannot install a smoke detector in your house when the house is on fire. And so both for the testing bottlenecks and the scientific bottlenecks, even till now, so much of the data that we rely on, on the overall figures and the infection rate and the confirmed cases, is backward looking. We don't have real-time reporting. We don't have tools in the hands of people for contact tracing that are trusted and that are technology driven. So my hope really on the other side of this is that these types of capabilities become trusted and become ubiquitous. It also shines a big light, Adi, on our healthcare system.

A healthcare system that has millions of people on the margins of it who had to then pay or prospectively face the risk of healthcare cost in In a case like this one doesn't really do us much good as a country. We need to have everybody covered in this type of event. Now, I know there is this bipartisan commission on biodefense, and they have released a report in which they have made some suggestions about kind of what to do and how to prepare. But one of the things they call for is a budget that is funded for several years. And it's always helpful to have money, but can you talk about the ways that we have not invested in this area of preparedness in this country?

No question. And I'm very familiar with that group's work. In fact, one of its co-chairs, Governor Tom Ridge and I wrote an article some years ago back in 2017 calling for the equivalent of a DARPA, a Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, on looking at pandemic preparedness specifically. Back then, the United States spent about $6 billion on pandemic preparedness and biodefense across a very diffuse set of agencies. And so imagine the calculus today. This is trillions of dollars of taxpayer money to shore up our economy and to prompt research and development of vaccines. That type of capability needs to be evergreen and it needs to be global. Is part of the problem that we haven't understood what department of the government or who should really be tackling this. Meaning,

is it biodefense? Is it in the context of bioweaponry and terrorism? Or is it in the context of pandemic and illness? Is it in the context of climate change and the idea of fueling pandemics? To me, it seems like we don't quite know who should be taking care of this. And maybe that's why no one has really been taking care of it. No question. And this gets to the question about we're as good as the weakest link in this one, and not only as a country but as a planet. Something that manifested itself more than a year ago in a village in China

now suddenly brought the entire world economy to its knees. This is as much a public health and global public health emergency as it is a household one. And so many people are relegated to making decisions that would be typical of a doctor, the Hippocratic type of decision making. If I go outside, do I imperil people? If I don't go outside, will I be able to make enough money to eat? So this is a whole of society risk. You talked about rebuilding institutions. Can you give some examples? Well, what's clear is that coming into

this, science and data did not have the loudest seat at the table. We saw it a lot and we still see it today with hesitancy on the vaccine, with misinformation and disinformation spreading rampantly around the world, even mask wearing. When the 21st century saw its first pandemic, the simplest remedies were four or 500 years old, social distancing, quarantine, hygiene, and mask wearing. And yet even on those very simple personal choices, we saw a lot of misinformation. And so restoring institutional trust, giving science the loudest seat at the table, and getting accurate information to people in real time from authorities they trust is going to help us. But it's about social conformity and compliance

with those rules. That will make a big difference moving forward as well. How do your suggestions not end up in a drawer again or at the bottom of a budgetary discussion? Because when I hear the voices of presidents through the years referring to this as a concern, somehow it doesn't match what we experienced last year. Well, one hope, of course, Audi, is that people listening today will hear that, A, there were lessons learned and that there were a lot of things we could have done in hindsight that would have improved the outcome. If there's anything I would like to say on this broadcast today,

it is that this is not the last of the major global new health events that we will see. But so many of the remedies for the next pandemic will rely on exactly what we had to do to put the COVID pandemic in check. Dante Disparte. He's a member of FEMA's National Advisory Council and founder and chairman of Risk Cooperative. It's Consider This from NPR. I'm Adi Cornish.

Support for NPR and the'm Adi Cornish.