Summaries of Findings and Recommendations from Six Reports on COVID-19 Response by an Ad Hoc Team of Former Members of President’s Obama’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology

Introduction

A subset of the former members of President Obama's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (here OPCAST)—ten people who had been particularly active in producing the six OPCAST reports between 2009 and 2016 that dealt with issues related to pandemic preparedness and response—came together starting in March of this year to consider how insights from those studies might be combined with more recent research and current observations to develop insights about how the U.S. response to the COVID-19 pandemic could be improved.

The members of the team, who have taken part as individuals, on their own time, and without compensation, are: Christine Cassel, University of California, San Francisco; Christopher Chyba, Princeton University; Susan L. Graham, University of California, Berkeley; John P. Holdren, Harvard University (OPCAST Co-Chair, COVID-19 Team Convener); Eric S. Lander, Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard (OPCAST Co-Chair); Richard Levin, Yale University; Ed Penhoet, University of California, Berkeley; William Press, University of Texas, Austin (OPCAST Vice Chair); Maxine Savitz, National Academy of Engineering (OPCAST Vice Chair); and Harold Varmus, Weill Cornell Medicine (OPCAST Co-Chair).

Their effort has led to the production of six reports, addressing

•  the national strategic pandemic-response stockpile (May 20)
•  the role of contact tracing (June 18) .
• the role of public health data in controlling the spread of COVID-19 (July 28)
• testing for the pathogen (August 18)
• recommendations for the coming COVID-19 commission (September 21)
• epidemiological modeling needs (September 28)

Each report has been distributed, upon completion, to selected members of the Trump COVID-19 team and the Biden campaign staff, selected governors and members of Congress, selected public health experts outside government, and the media. The reports have also been posted on the OPCAST team's website, http://opcast.org.

In what follows here, we provide a set of summaries of key findings and recommendations for the six reports. For additional information, please consult the website or contact the Team Convener, John Holdren, at john_holdren@hks.harvard.edu.