Consider This from NPR - What Lessons Have We Learned From The Covid Pandemic?

Episode Date: April 25, 2023

President Biden has officially ended the national emergency that was declared during the COVID-19 pandemic. But so farthere's been no official commission to look into how the country could be better prepared for the next pandemic.Now, the non-partisan Covid Crisis Group has issued a report titled "Lessons from the Covid War." NPR's Mary Louise Kelly speaks with the group's director, Philip Zelikow, about the report's findings.In participating regions, you'll also hear a local news segment to help you make sense of what's going on 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. It's been more than three years since we started to hear headlines like these. A dangerous virus is spreading rapidly in China, and U.S. officials are very worried that it could come here. A deadly, never-seen-before coronavirus has now been found in four other countries. The World Health Organization will meet to decide if the virus represents an international public health emergency. It has now spread to Europe, Australia and the United States.

It was March 11th, 2020, that the World Health Organization declared COVID-19 a pandemic. WHO has been assessing this outbreak around the clock and we're deeply concerned both by the alarming levels of spread and severity and by the alarming levels of inaction. Just two days later, then-President Trump made this announcement. To unleash the full power of the federal government in this effort today, I am officially declaring a national emergency. In the days and weeks that followed, lockdowns began to kick in all over the country. California shutting down bars and wineries and asking those 65 and older to self-isolate. So I regret to have to announce that as of tomorrow, our public schools will be closed. Stay at home. That is the order tonight from four state governors as the coronavirus pandemic

spreads. New York, California, Illinois, and Connecticut. And seemingly overnight, our lives changed in nearly every imaginable way. Stay-at-home orders meant time away from the office, time away from school, stores, friends, even haircuts. Graduation ceremonies were canceled, weddings postponed, entire school years spent online. And of course, in this country, we have lost more than a million people to COVID-19. But now, the United States is moving on, or at least the federal government is moving on. The White House is just now saying that the president has just signed a bill that will end the national emergency declared during the COVID pandemic. And next month, the Biden administration plans to disband its COVID response team. Consider this. For all the loss we have experienced during the COVID-19 pandemic, what have we learned from it? Well, one group set out

to answer that question. We hear from the director of the COVID crisis Group, after the break. From NPR, I'm Mary Louise Kelly. It's Tuesday, April 25th. This message comes from WISE, the app for doing things 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. Support for NPR and the following message come from Carnegie Corporation of New York, working to reduce political polarization through philanthropic support for education, democracy, and peace. More information at carnegie.org. It's Consider This from NPR. In November of 2002, just over a year after the 9-11 terrorist attacks, a national commission was set up to investigate what happened. The commission released its findings in July 2004. NORAD and the FAA were unprepared for the type of attacks launched against the United States on September 11, 2001. One of the group's goals was to determine what our leaders could have done to be better prepared.

Two decades later, some argue such a commission is needed to investigate why the country wasn't better prepared for the COVID-19 pandemic. But as efforts to create that commission stalled in Congress, one group took matters into its own hands. Philip Zelikow was the executive director of the 9-11 commission, and now he leads the nonpartisan COVID crisis group. In its just-released report, the group writes, quote, we were supposed to lay the groundwork for a national COVID commission. We thought the U.S. government would soon create or facilitate a commission to study the biggest global crisis so far in the 21st century. It has not. So the COVID crisis group went ahead, interviewed more than 300 people and published their key findings.

The key to this crisis and the key to what went wrong was we weren't really ready to meet an emergency. We had the best science. We were willing to spend the most money. That wasn't the problem. The problem was in knowing what to do and being ready to do it. I think the reason we wrote the report was so that people would actually have a better idea of what you really need to do in an emergency like this. And I think anyone reading this report will just say to themselves, oh, I think I understand this now. I think I understand why things went so wrong in all these different ways. And also they'll notice a lot of things that went right, a lot of improvisations that began to work. And then we want to hold those lessons and not lose them.

What was the central question or central questions you were trying to answer? Well, then there were these dozens of members of the group from all these different fields, just a really extraordinary set of people, all of whom have their own experience with the crisis. And instead of kind of going back afterwards and trying to do a hindsight analysis of, you know, the statistics and correlations, we instead went into this asking ourselves, why did people make the choices they made? What information was available to them when they made these choices? What tools did they think they had to choose from? What institutions or, you know, or capabilities did they have or not have? See, what very early happened was because after the initial lockdowns, which actually folks at the time thought would only last for a few weeks, people really didn't know what to do. And in the absence of knowing what to do, flying blind because we had no good surveillance on the

progress of the disease, with no tools, flying blind, we had to rely on all these blunt instruments, which then polarized the country. The report runs hundreds of pages, so we're not going to be able to get at every choice and every decision that officials and leaders were grappling with. But I want to focus on one of them, which was Operation Warp Speed, because y'all spent a lot of time on this. This was the Trump administration program to develop a vaccine and fast, as the name suggests. My read is that y'all concluded whatever other mistakes the Trump administration made during the pandemic, Operation Warp Speed, getting a vaccine, this was a success. It was a success. Actually, President Trump himself had almost nothing to do with it.

I think we have the best account of the origins of Warp Speed that's available in print right now. And we kind of explain what it is about it that actually worked and also what about it really didn't work. A lot of people think of it, for instance, as a research and development program. Mostly it wasn't. Pfizer actually refused to participate in Warp Speed in developing its vaccine. It was above all a manufacturing and distribution program. And Pfizer, in fact, did participate in that part of it, and that's where it achieved its great successes. What about the politics of it? I remember interviewing the chief scientific advisor

to Operation Warp Speed, Moncef Slaoui. Dr. Slaoui? Yes, Dr. Slaoui. Back in 2020, there were all kinds of questions over whether then-President Trump was rushing to get a vaccine, rushing to get good news out there and announce it. You know, hallelujah, we're saved, like right before the election in 2020. Did you find politics were in play? Well, politics are always in play when you're developing health decisions for hundreds of millions of people. And politics were in play here too.

Actually, the remarkable thing about Warp Speed was that it was relatively insulated from the cronyism and chaos that characterized so much of the Trump administration. It was insulated partly because a lot of it was lodged in the Department of Defense, and both the Secretary of Defense and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs helped to insulate the program from political interference. And actually, we give some credit to the president's son-in-law, Jared Kushner, who helped to insulate the program's management from some of his colleagues in the administration who would have interfered more with it. I'm thinking about how top health officials, public health officials, talked about the vaccine, how they messaged and communicated. What lessons did you take away from that that we might apply next time? Well, the communication was terrible. If I may be blunt, the good news is that we have actually learned a lot about how to do good communication with people in a crisis. The bad news is we disregarded practically all of that knowledge and those lessons in this crisis.

For example, Operation Warp Speed did such a very good job on manufacturing and distribution. It never created a campaign to persuade people to use the vaccines. And we also discovered that where those campaigns worked, and some of them did, it wasn't because of where you get a bunch of people in Washington cutting public service announcements, telling people what to do. What the persuasive efforts that worked, and people did some of this, is where you actually reached out to leaders in local communities,

whether it was nonprofit efforts to work through the American Farm Bureau Federation in rural communities or to work through urban communities through churches or other community leaders, and help show them what the benefits were of vaccine and work with them as your partners in persuading people. Actually, some of those efforts worked quite well in persuading people to use the vaccine. But in general, at a national level, the communication efforts were poor, and actually, those problems extended on into the Biden administration as well. Hmm. So I hear you saying, you know, there are lessons learned. I hear you saying we need to do

this better next time. How are you thinking about getting traction for this report? This is a long and dense report on a serious subject that a lot of people, frankly, are tired of thinking about. Oh, long and dense, but I think you'll acknowledge that it's not that hard to read. We wrote it very plainly and directly to actually help people just cut through the huge jumble of information on this they've been coping with for the last three years. The main way you get action actually is for people to begin to see what can be done. Once they see what preparedness really looks like and what it means, then they begin to see, oh, this isn't hopeless. It's actually possible to do stuff here. One of the members of our group

told me last week, she was rereading the, and she said rereading it actually made her feel empowered because it's impossible to read through this and not get a sense of, oh, I see what can be done. Yeah. So what is the teachable moment as we eye the next virus that is surely headed for us and try to figure out how to be more prepared, how to fix this for next time? Yeah. I mean, this to fix this for next time. Yeah. I mean, this is really a crisis of competence. It's not a crisis of science. It's not a crisis of unwillingness to spend money. It's not a crisis in the sense that, gosh, no one had ever heard of a pandemic danger. There were great movies and books about it. So, people knew about the danger. They had science. They were willing to spend money. The failure was in knowing what to do and how to do it and then getting ready to do it.

It's like an emergency doctor who has an emergency in front of them on the gurney and is given a textbook and a bunch of money, but that doesn't tell them, yeah, but I need to punch a hole in this person's chest to relieve the pressure on their heart. And how do I do that and have the training and confidence to do that in a crisis? And this book really is kind of a revelation about how do we restore our reputation for competence and problem solving? That was Philip Zelikow, director of the COVID Crisis Group. It's Consider This from NPR. I'm Mary Louise Kelly. Support for NPR and the following message come from the Kauffman Foundation,

providing access to opportunities that help people achieve financial stability, upward mobility, and economic prosperity, regardless of race, gender, or geography. Kauffman.org.