In The Wake of the Covid-19 Pandemic

We’ve made tremendous strides in science and healthcare in years past, but errors were made from the beginning with Covid-19.

The origin of the virus had become highly political. Some scientists claimed that it was a natural spillover event while others insisted that it resulted from a laboratory accident. (Note: From my research, I have concluded that there is no evidence Covid-19 emerged directly from animals, unlike SARS and MERS, while circumstantial evidence suggests that it came from a laboratory accident in Wuhan, China.) In a recently declassified document,the CIA has now determined that the virus most likely originated in a laboratory.

Public health authorities, including those at the World Health Organization (WHO) and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control (CDC), denied that the virus was airborne even though physicians from Wuhan published an article in Lancet in February 2020 stating, “We are concerned that 2019-nCoV could have acquired the ability for efficient human transmission. Airborne precautions, such as a fit-tested N95 respirator, and other personal protective equipment are strongly recommended.”

In June 2020, an article in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) identified airborne transmission as the dominant route of Covid-19 spread. In May 2021, a Lancet editorial by prominent scientists listed 10 reasons why Covid-19 was airborne. On December 23, 2021, over a year after the virus first appeared, WHO finally announced that Covid-19 spread by airborne transmission. The CDC performed poorly as well by reversing itself several times regarding its advice on Covid-19 transmission. Even worse, the CDC botched its diagnostic Covid tests during the early phase of the pandemic, contributing to the US’s poor performance compared to other countries. During its heyday, the CDC had a well-deserved stellar reputation based on its many accomplishments. Over the decades, its leadership changed from public health physicians rising to the top to political appointees who didn’t have the necessary qualifications needed to lead the science-driven agency. In his book The Premonition: A Pandemic Story, Michael Lewis described how the CDC became a sclerotic bureaucracy, incapable of responding to the rapidly spreading pandemic.

Globally, the pandemic’s impact has been catastrophic: billions of children’s schooling disrupted, businesses destroyed, trillions of dollars in economic losses, and at least 20 million people died.

Meanwhile, the virus keeps mutating and spreading. Millions suffer from chronic sequelae known as “Long Covid.” Misinformation is running rampant, particularly on social media, sowing confusion on how best to move forward.

With the recent election of U.S. President Donald J. Trump, Americans voted to pursue a new strategy born from frustration with the status quo and misinformation. Among his first actions, President Trump has withdrawn the U.S. from the WHO because of its mishandling of the Covid-19 pandemic. The White House listed its grievances against WHO, but it didn’t specify what reforms it would want the organization to make to prompt the U.S. to rejoin it.

President Trump has also frozen the activities of the federal agencies in charge of public health (CDC), biomedical research (NIH), and food and drug protection (FDA). With highly pathogenic avian influenza infecting poultry, severely impacting the availability and cost of eggs, and spreading in dairy cattle, now is not a good time to muzzle the agencies in charge of this crisis. Sticking our heads in the sand and pretending that deadly zoonotic viruses will go away is not an effective response strategy. The Trump Administration must develop strategies and policies to address this and other health crises.

President Trump has also decided to stop gain-of-function research on pandemic potential pathogens to reduce the risk of another Covid-19 from happening again. This is a prudent move that should prompt introspection and dialogue in the biomedical research community. They have lost public trust. Rather than refuse to discuss the possibility that Covid-19 resulted from a laboratory accident, virologists should convene conferences and examine the risk/benefit ratios of the experiments that they conduct, using the criteria established by the National Research Council in 2004.

While it’s easy to throw up our collective hands in despair over the decisions the new administration is making, now is not the time to give up. The Trump Administration could oversee the dismantling of some parts of the federal government. While transition periods can be difficult, they do create opportunities to build new infrastructures that are better aligned with addressing the ‘wicked’ problems of the 21st century. The siloes created over the 20th century need to be replaced with new leaders and organizations that facilitate cross-disciplinary collaborations that promote human, animal, plant, environmental, and ecosystem health (i.e., One Health). We need qualified leaders with recognized expertise in their fields. We must recognize that our health and well-being depend upon the health of the world around us.

There is no substitute for the resources of the federal government. In the meantime, universities and private foundations can provide some of the services that the U.S. federal government can’t or won’t provide over the next four years. For example, during the early phases of the Covid-19 pandemic, Johns Hopkins University established a Coronavirus Resource Center that served as a de facto CDC with up-to-date Covid-19 epidemiologic data. The newly established North American One Health University Network (NAOHUN) is investigating how its members might mitigate future public health crises. Consortiums such as NAOHUN could set new standards on how federal governments could respond to future health crises. There are great challenges ahead.

Back to Blog