{"id":837587,"date":"2025-03-29T16:12:54","date_gmt":"2025-03-29T21:12:54","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/2025\/03\/29\/on-covid-19-anniversary-concerns-about-the-lessons-unlearned\/"},"modified":"2025-03-29T16:12:54","modified_gmt":"2025-03-29T21:12:54","slug":"on-covid-19-anniversary-concerns-about-the-lessons-unlearned","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/2025\/03\/29\/on-covid-19-anniversary-concerns-about-the-lessons-unlearned\/","title":{"rendered":"On COVID-19 anniversary, concerns about the lessons unlearned"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

Five years after the World Health Organization declared COVID-19 a pandemic, public health experts say that, despite some gains,\u00a0the United States is not fully prepared for another public health disaster.\u00a0<\/p>\n

At least two people<\/a> have died in a measles outbreak that has infected at least<\/a> 222 people in 12 states.<\/p>\n

Avian influenza has evolved<\/a>\u00a0to move from mammal to mammal.\u00a0<\/p>\n

And President Donald Trump\u2019s key health advisers, who were nearly uniformly<\/a> critical of the Biden administration\u2019s response to the pandemic, are, in some cases, vaccine skeptics.<\/p>\n

In the first weeks of the Trump administration, Robert F. Kennedy Jr.\u2019s Health and Human Services Department has made sweeping changes to the health agencies, including firing swaths of employees or offering buyouts to leave their posts.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Two key vaccine panels at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Food and Drug Administration had meetings abruptly canceled. The National Institutes of Health has reportedly<\/a> cut grants related to mRNA vaccines and vaccine hesitancy.<\/p>\n

In response to the ongoing measles outbreak, Kennedy has said the decision to get vaccinated is a \u201cpersonal one.\u201d In an interview<\/a>\u00a0with Fox News on Monday, Kennedy claimed that if people are healthy it\u2019s \u201calmost impossible\u201d to die from an infectious disease. He also appeared<\/a> to link measles to nutrition and touted unproven treatments for the illness, such as cod liver oil.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat we need is good science on all of these things so people can make rational choices,\u201d Kennedy said.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Future of pandemic legislation\u00a0<\/h2>\n

Congress also hasn\u2019t done all it can to prepare for another pandemic.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Many provisions in a key piece of pandemic preparedness legislation known as the Pandemic and All-Hazards Preparedness Act expired in September 2023. Lawmakers tucked a reauthorization\u00a0into an early draft of\u00a0the most recent year-end stopgap spending law but that draft was pulled at the 11th hour.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The 2006 pandemic preparedness law was in part a response to the 9\/11 attacks in 2001 and Hurricane Katrina in 2005. It was reauthorized in 2013 and then again in 2019, each time with changes. \u00a0<\/p>\n

Some of the provisions typically included in the pandemic law were attached to a fiscal 2023 appropriations law, which established the White House Office of Pandemic Preparedness and Response Policy.\u00a0A fiscal 2024 spending law also extended some measures through the end of last year.<\/p>\n

But authorities included in the pandemic preparedness\u00a0law\u00a0had certain sunset dates that have since expired. Among them<\/a> include the authority to temporarily reassign certain state and local personnel during public health emergencies and national advisory committees for at-risk populations.<\/p>\n

Senate Democrats last week circulated\u00a0last year\u2019s broad health care package\u00a0\u2014 which included a reauthorization of the pandemic law\u00a0\u2014 in an effort to fast-track the bill\u2019s passage.<\/p>\n

The pandemic legislation was not included in a potential legislative vehicle \u2014 the continuing resolution to keep the government running that Congress is voting on this week.<\/p>\n

View from experts\u00a0<\/h2>\n

Public health experts said that since the pandemic, the United States has improved its data-sharing abilities. There\u2019s also a greater public awareness of infectious diseases than there was before COVID-19.\u00a0<\/p>\n

But in other ways, the country has yet to learn some key lessons from the pandemic, they say.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cUnfortunately when we look at the responses to our current bird flu and measles outbreaks (not to mention our historically bad flu season), we seem to be making the same mistakes over and over again,\u201d Jerome Adams, the former surgeon general under the first Trump administration, said.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Adams criticized the decision to cancel the FDA\u2019s vaccine advisory panel meeting to select the flu strain to target in the fall and winter vaccine rollout.<\/p>\n

\u201cBy sidelining these processes, we risk creating gaps in our readiness, which can have dire consequences when a public health emergency arises,\u201d he said.\u00a0<\/p>\n

He also said that the growing threat of antimicrobial resistance is one of the most pressing and underappreciated threats facing the country. He said as people use more antibiotics, the risk of creating superbugs that are resistant to treatment grows, which could lead to the next pandemic.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Jeffrey Kerby, the chair of the Committee on Trauma at the American College of Surgeons, said that the country learned from the COVID-19 pandemic how to design systems that best help public health institutions work across jurisdictions.\u00a0<\/p>\n

He said in addition to a pandemic, the country also should prepare for other mass population events, like natural disasters or military combat.\u00a0<\/p>\n

He said that he\u2019d like Congress to focus on maintaining resources for medical operations coordinating centers<\/a>, entities developed during the COVID-19 pandemic to help coordinate responses across jurisdictions.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cWe need that resilience to be able to handle that with the limited bed capacity we have in the U.S. health care system,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

He said he\u2019d like the centers to be kept up and running even when there\u2019s not an existing emergency so the system is prepared in the event that a disaster occurs.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cThe daily coordination of time-sensitive care keeps the engine of disaster response warm and running,\u201d he said.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Chrissie Juliano, the executive director of Big Cities Health Coalition, a nonprofit that focuses on public health policy in urban areas, said the country\u2019s data infrastructure is more prepared to handle another health threat now compared with five years ago.\u00a0<\/p>\n

She pointed to the CDC\u2019s Public Health Infrastructure grant, which provided flexible funding for state and local health departments to invest in public health programs.\u00a0<\/p>\n

But she said that public health institutions face the growing issue of misinformation\u00a0and disinformation, particularly when it comes to vaccines. She said the nation is seeing that play out on a smaller scale with the ongoing measles outbreak.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cOn the one hand, we\u2019ve made real investments and real change, and we\u2019re in a place where the system as a whole can respond better,\u201d Juliano said. \u201cNow, on the other hand, the field, governmental public health, et cetera, has lost the public\u2019s trust.\u201d<\/p>\n

Juliano said that the recent clawbacks of federal funds and pandemic-era policies also worry her.<\/p>\n

She said that as lawmakers consider whether to reauthorize the legislation this time around, she\u2019d like to see funding for the Public Health Emergency Preparedness Program<\/a> prioritized.<\/p>\n

\u201cNot reauthorizing legislation whose primary purpose is to protect the public health and emergency is exceedingly shortsighted,\u201d she said.\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n

Elida Center
Read More<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Five years after the World Health Organization declared COVID-19 a pandemic, public health experts say that, despite some gains,\u00a0the United States is not fully prepared for another public health disaster.\u00a0 At least two people have died in a measles outbreak that has infected at least 222 people in 12 states. Avian influenza has evolved\u00a0to move<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":837588,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2127,32379],"tags":[11780,42563],"class_list":{"0":"post-837587","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-anniversary","8":"category-covid","9":"tag-anniversary","10":"tag-covid"},"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/837587","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=837587"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/837587\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/837588"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=837587"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=837587"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=837587"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}