The Tragedy Is That We Knew This Was Coming

Why does this keep happening to us?

Once again, we didn’t do enough to respond to a threat that the experts saw coming in advance. And, now we are paying the price.

Experts have long seen a coronavirus-like pandemic as a threat. In January 2019, Daniel Coats, then the director of national intelligence, warned that “the United States and the world will remain vulnerable to the next flu pandemic or large-scale outbreak of a contagious disease that could lead to massive rates of death and disability, severely affect the world economy, [and] strain international resources.”

In September 2018, Anthony S. Fauci, our nation’s leading expert on infectious pathogens, told CBS News that “the thing most threatening to us . . . would be something that spread widely, generally a respiratory infection, something that has a high degree of morbidity and mortality.”

And, just last year, the Trump administration ran a pandemic exercise simulating a severe influenza pandemic for which there was no vaccine.

The draft conclusions said the United States was underprepared for a pandemic and was disorganized to deal with one. It said the country didn’t have the capacity to manufacture personal protective equipment, needles and syringes, pointing out that these supplies, along with antiviral medications, respirators and ventilators, would be “limited and difficult to restock.”