The Security and Global Health Project is proud to present a weekly web series with Security Mom Juliette Kayyem and Medicine Mom Dr. Margaret Bourdeaux. Each week, our experts will answer your questions from quarantine and give you advice on staying sane and sanitary in a global crisis. We hope you'll join our Moms every Tuesday, and don't forget to Tweet with #QuestionsFromQuarantine for a chance to have your question featured in next week's episode!

Juliette Kayyem writes that President Trump is more hindrance than help in the U.S. response to the COVID-19 pandemic and describes how leaders in and out of government have to plan around him.

Juliette Kayyem writes that even though the shutdowns happened remarkably quickly, the process of Americans resuming their lives will be far more muddled.

The coronavirus is America's first 50-state disaster, and each governor is dependent on outside help that may never come writes Juliette Kayyem.

Juliette Kayyem writes that even with a robust government response to the novel coronavirus, many people will be in peril. And the United States is anything but prepared.

Juliette Kayyem, Faculty Chair of the Belfer Center’s Homeland Security Project, has been proving real-time perspective on the coronavirus on Twitter. 

The authors describe how the current coronavirus outbreak demonstrates how hospitals and clinics, when overwhelmed, leave a significant portion of the afflicted population unattended.

Bill de Blasio warned New Yorkers on Friday that their city might be subject to retaliatory attacks from Iran. “I’m not saying this to be alarmist,” the mayor said as he and his underlings ticked off—in a slightly alarming fashion—a series of defensive measures the city might take after the American air strike that killed the Iranian general Qassem Soleimani. Though the New York Police Department had received no specific, credible threats, de Blasio and other officials warned of more bag checks at the subways and increased police presence throughout the city. The city is no stranger to terrorism and would maintain a better-safe-than-sorry posture. “If you see something, say something,” de Blasio said.

Recent talk of homeland threats, and the just-in-case operational response, are based on nothing more than the rather uncontroversial assessment that Iran will feel obliged to do something to respond to the killing of Soleimani. The homeland-security practices to which Americans became accustomed after 9/11 long ago became a bad habit—one more divorced than ever before from the kinds of threats the United States might actually face. Intended to calm the public, gestures like the ones de Blasio described presume that Iran would be both reckless and capable enough to target an American city—and that greater vigilance alone would prepare us for that possibility. Now nearly two decades old, the post-9/11 style of security theater also risks masking the real vulnerabilities in the American homeland against a potential Iranian action.

Juliette Kayyem writes that there are challenges our children face in this world. One of the risks they do not face — because science and medicine have found a cure — is a public health pandemic of diseases that used to kill our most vulnerable and youngest. 

In 2018,  Congress passed the Synthetic Trafficking and Overdose Protection (STOP) Act with bipartisan support which was designed to close a loophole in a post-9/11 security law that has allowed international drug traffickers to easily ship opioids to the United States without detection — and laid out clear deadlines for doing so. Juliette Kayyem questions why the U.S. government is not enforcing this law.