Third Way: Preparing For The Next Pandemic
Klaus Vedfelt
As of September 19, 2021, 674,000 people have died from covid-19 in the United States. While we could not have prevented all of these deaths, at least some of these deaths were avoidable had the United States been better prepared. Yet who could have seen a global pandemic coming, especially one that would kill so many people during the century with the greatest technological advancements and healthcare? Unfortunately, pandemics like the one we are currently facing are only expected to grow in number in the decades to come.
Pandemics are Coming
While almost everyone can agree that the death toll of covid-19 is horrifyingly high and the social and economic repercussions it has had are awful as well, what many people do not know is that we are currently contributing to a greater chance of future pandemics that have the chance to ravage our country just as aggressively. Climate change and the human actions that contribute to climate change, such as deforestation, are going to be directly responsible for future pandemics in the coming decades. Some of these will be diseases that already exist in certain countries that will simply worsen and spread to America and other countries in the west. Some will be brand new and just as deadly as coronavirus.
While certain infectious diseases currently operate almost solely in Africa, such as malaria and dengue fever, global warming will cause these to spread to other countries. This is because they can currently only survive at certain high temperatures. However, as global warming continues to cause temperatures around the entire globe to rise, soon the mosquitos and other pathogenic microbes that carry these diseases will be able to thrive outside of Africa.
Deforestation, a human activity that we have continued to practice despite all the warnings against it, also contributes to the increase in number and spread of infectious diseases. Deforestation leaves many animals without homes, forcing them to migrate into areas that are occupied by humans. Certain animals have always carried infectious diseases, such as bats, yet they are usually confined to forests and therefore do not have enough contact with humans to be able to spread those diseases. 60% of new infectious diseases come from forest-dwelling animals and are then spread to other animals. Ecohealth Alliance has found that one in three of these outbreaks are linked directly to land-use change by humans and deforestation. While some of these diseases are already well-known and terrifying, such as Ebola and Nipah, it is likely that we will continue to experience new infectious diseases that we did not know existed before as we continue to destroy the habitats that contain them.
Biden’s Pandemic Preparedness Plan
Given the increasing likelihood of the occurrence of future pandemics, the Biden administration has released a pandemic preparedness plan. The main goals of this plan are focused on improving the medical defenses for pandemics, such as vaccine readiness, ensuring situational awareness and monitoring possible infectious disease threats, strengthening the public health systems to better respond to pandemics, building core capabilities, and increasing the nation’s capacity for manufacturing important resources, such as respirators and face masks. This plan would require $65.3 billion to be invested in the program over the next decade and Biden is requesting Congress for some portion of that to be invested immediately in order to start preparing as soon as possible. However, Biden’s pandemic preparedness budget has received quite a bit of pushback within Congress.
Biden initially called for Congress to immediately invest $30 billion in the pandemic plan as a part of his $3.5 trillion reconciliation package. However, somewhat surprisingly, Biden’s own moderate Democrats are the ones negotiating to cut the investment down. Currently, they only want to invest about $5-8 billion, especially given that Congress has already allocated billions of dollars of funding to the CDC during the pandemic. It looks like they have about reached a compromise of $15 billion instead. Yet most of the money that Biden is asking for would not go towards the CDC, although they would still receive a small portion of it.
This money and the pandemic preparedness plan are vital for preventing the hundreds of thousands of deaths and upturned lives that covid-19 has caused in this country. One benefit that would come from Biden’s plan would be for scientists to develop a universal vaccine for all betacoronaviruses. They would also hopefully be able to develop separate vaccines for all of the pathogens that can potentially infect humans, such as Ebola. Previously, when pathogens have arisen, public health agencies have had to wait for Congress to appropriate money to fight the disease. With this plan and the funding that goes with it, the waiting time would no longer happen and thus lives could be spared in the time that was previously wasted.
Going Forward
Given the large-scale and widely felt trauma that has ensued from this pandemic, it is clear that it is in everyone’s best interests to be prepared for the ones that are still to come. The first step in this would be to enact Biden’s pandemic preparedness plan and invest money in both the healthcare system as well as in situational awareness to monitor existing and evolving infectious diseases. However, this is not enough by itself. While it is still unclear exactly where covid-19 came from, it is more likely than not that it existed in the environment and passed onto humans somehow. In order to prevent this from happening again, we must treat the environment better and try to reduce as much of the environmental damage as we can before it is too late.
