Trump Administration Makes The Conscious Choice To Make America Less Prepared For The Next Pandemic

Way back in the ancient days of the year 2020, the world went through this pandemic thing called COVID-19. For those of you not old enough to remember such ancient history, it was a fairly significant health issue that caused a few disruptions throughout the world, including in these here United States. Trump was president at the time of the wild spread of the pandemic. There were shutdowns. There was a supply chain shitstorm. People argued over masks and school closures while staring at shelves where toilet paper used to be available so we could wipe ourselves. The government displayed such an impressive failure of leadership that I myself questioned why we should have a government at all if this is how it was going to behave.

But, to be fair, there were also some impressive things from government to come out of the pandemic. Trump’s administration initiated Operation Warp Speed to develop and distribute COVID vaccines so we could all get back to our lives. While the first Trump administration didn’t do so great at the distribution part of the plan, and managed to coat the world in incredible amounts of misinformation around the pandemic and these vaccines, it was still an impressive feat to bring these vaccines to market in record time. One of the government agencies that powered Operation Warp Speed was the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease (NIAID), which was responsible for collating research on previous pathogens similar to COVID-19 and for building out the trials for the vaccines that would eventually come to market. If it weren’t for NIAID, it’s unlikely the government’s response to the pandemic would have been as rapid, or successful.

And if you think I’m wrong about that, there’s a chance that the next pandemic will provide us with an answer. That’s because this second Trump administration is actively choosing to remove exactly this sort of pandemic work from NIAID’s proactive efforts.

NIH director Jay Bhattacharya explained the restructure at an event with other top agency officials on 30 January. “It’s a complete transformation of [the NIAID] away from this old model” that has historically prioritized research on HIV, biodefence and pandemic preparedness, he said. The institute will focus more on basic immunology and other infectious diseases currently affecting people in the United States, he added, rather than on predicting future diseases.

Nahid Bhadelia, director of Boston University’s Center on Emerging Infectious Diseases in Massachusetts, says the decision to deprioritize these areas will leave people in the United States more vulnerable to pathogens that are constantly evolving in wildlife around the world and spilling into human populations, sometimes sparking outbreaks. “Just because we say we’re going to stop caring about these issues doesn’t make the issues go away — it just makes us less prepared,” she says.

This is one of the things I’ve found about Trump’s second term most perplexing. His reelection efforts were arguably chiefly torpedoed by the pandemic. There’s an old saying in parenting that even a child can learn a lesson from pain. If a child touches a hot stove, they will get burned and will not touch it again. By installing the likes of RFK Jr. and his cadre of conspiracy theorists to manage the health of Americans, and by keeping the very agency that allowed for his rapid response to COVID from doing likewise in the future, it appears Trump wants to keep touching the hot stove. I don’t get it.

And it’s not like we don’t have outbreaks of infectious disease happening right now. We absolutely do. The measles infection count that has gone on for 14 months in this country is insane. There’s no reason COVID can’t mutate and come right back into our lives as a major health issue. Or there could be another novel pathogen that grinds all of our lives back to a halt once more. For a man so concerned with building walls, he’s tearing down the virtual protection that is proactive research and knowledge.

“NIAID’s work clearly neither prevented the pandemic nor prevented Americans from experiencing among the highest levels of all-cause excess mortality in the developed world during that time,” [Bhattacharya and subordinates] wrote. “Given the increasing prevalence of allergic and autoimmune disorders and the burden of common infections in the population over the past few decades, the NIAID must focus research on these conditions with a greater sense of urgency.”

This is a wild fictionalization of what occurred at NIAID. The agency doesn’t make healthcare policy. It advises the Executive Branch on what is needed to prepare for new and existing diseases, performs research into detecting those diseases before they become pandemics, and provides research and planning into how to respond to them. When Anthony Fauci led NIAID in 2017, he warned the administration of all of this and asked for funding to prepare for it. Not only did he not get his funding, but the administration also made staff and budget cuts impacting our pandemic preparations.

“We do need a public-health emergency fund. It’s tough to get it … but we need it,” Fauci said. “Because what we had to go through for Zika — it was very, very painful when the president asked for the $1.9 billion in February and we didn’t get it until September.”

But the Trump administration did not create such a fund, and instead cut spending for federal agencies responsible for detecting and preparing for outbreaks. In May 2018, Trump’s national security advisor disbanded the National Security Council’s pandemic response team, while in October 2019, the administration declined to renew funding for a pandemic early warning system.

This administration is doing it again, except worse. This time, it’s not removing some funding and some staff that were used to prepare us for the next pandemic. Instead, he’s just removing the mission of pandemic preparedness from NIAID entirely. And there are future plans to remove funding for research on novel pathogens, as well.

The instructions to agency staff members to rebrand the institute’s language are only the first step towards implementing this new vision, according to the NIAID employees. NIH principal deputy director Matthew Memoli has ordered more changes, including the review of the portfolio of grants funding biodefence and pandemic preparedness, in the coming weeks and months, they say.

This is crazy. It’s as though we’re all in the back seat of the family minivan, while mom and dad drive us somewhere… except we have no GPS, no maps, the steering wheel moves on its own, and the windshield is made of lead.

The stove is still hot. And, unfortunately, as Trump makes another attempt to touch it, it won’t be his fingers that are singed, but our own.