This Emergency Is Over. Now It ’ s Time to Get Ready for the Next Pandemic

Having been a part of the team that developed a leading COVID-19 vaccine, I am often invited to speak or write about the successes of our work—work that led to the fastest vaccine development in history. But, more than three years into the COVID-19 pandemic and with America’s public health emergency expiring on May 11th, it has become increasingly clear that this moment is not only an opportunity to reflect on successes but also grapple with the setbacks, pitfalls, and failures that defined our response to COVID-19. Read More: Don’t Move Past COVID-19. Learn From It [time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”] The responsibility to improve our response to future global health crises, I think, lies in correcting our less-than-perfect actions. There are countless opportunities to tweak, iterate, or outright overhaul our pandemic response—but as I review our fight against the virus, particularly from the front row of the frontline, three paths of action stand out. First, the federal government needs to change the paradigm that defines our federal research focuses, with an emphasis on being proactive instead of reactive. There are 23 families of viruses associated with human infection, and the state of the research into each of these families varies significantly. In my specialty of coronaviruses, we had made significant strides before the pandemic struck. The strides we made were not because of any extraordinary funding streams, but merely because we were...
Source: TIME: Health - Category: Consumer Health News Authors: Tags: Uncategorized COVID-19 freelance Magazine Source Type: news