OPINION:
The fifth anniversary of COVID-19 is approaching. With a possible bird flu pandemic looming and a mysterious deadly outbreak spreading in the Democratic Republic of Congo, we should quickly learn the lessons of this ongoing pandemic.
We still average roughly 20,000 new cases and 255 new deaths in the U.S. each day. Many Americans, even those recently boosted, are on their third or fourth incidence of the disease. These repeat cases, while less deadly, burden our lives, families and economy; significantly increase the risk of “long COVID” and risk a new, worse variant emerging.
Moreover, while the pandemic has ebbed, much of that decline is because few tests are being taken, and still fewer are reported. We hammered President-elect Donald Trump for saying that if we stopped testing, the disease wouldn’t look so bad. We’ve now adopted his “nothing to see here” policy. We cannot accurately gauge the degree of harm COVID-19 continues to inflict on the nation.
What, then, can we learn?
Lesson 1: Rely on science, not dogma.
Based on what public health officials told us, we closed our schools, communities and economy, which inflicted enormous costs on our families and the nation. Dr. Anthony Fauci has since told us the social distancing rule that prompted those closings had no scientific basis — “It sort of just appeared.” Similarly, there was no science behind the mandate to wash our groceries. These and other policies were based on dogma, not data, and that has proved extraordinarily costly.
Lesson 2: Honesty is the best public health care policy.
To be fair, you can’t expect scientific certainty — pandemics have their own fog of war. Nevertheless, Americans deserve honesty. Credit the vaccines with reducing severity, but we are far from what Dr. Fauci and other officials promised: The vaccines would eliminate COVID-19 just like polio. Shockingly, public health officials knew this wasn’t true all along. Dr. Deborah Brix, the former White House coronavirus response coordinator, testified to this. They sold us a bill of goods.
Not surprisingly, Americans’ faith in public health is at an all-time low. As a result, despite millions of dollars in advertising, only 1 in 5 Americans have received the latest booster shot.
Unless that trust is repaired, we face major problems in fighting the next emerging pathogen.
Lesson 3: Pharmaceuticals are key, but they aren’t silver bullets.
Five years in, the United States has spent more than $30 billion on COVID-19 vaccines — vaccines that people won’t take and are waning in efficacy. On top of that, we’ve spent over $6 billion in the development of remdesivir, a COVID-19 antiviral that studies have shown is ineffective — yet the federal government is still pushing it on Americans. We haven’t defeated COVID; rather, we are consigned to a cycle of viral attrition.
Public health leaders dismissed it out of hand if it wasn’t produced by one of the pharmaceutical giants. I represented a group of health care professionals and thousands of others who petitioned the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to recommend nasal hygiene to fight the virus. The record indicates the CDC never read the studies we submitted.
Obesity is a major factor in COVID-19 risk. Rather than tell Americans to stay on the couch and order pizza, officials should have pressed Americans to get up and get moving. Poor dental health is also a major COVID-19 risk factor. But you didn’t hear Dr. Fauci or the surgeon general imploring Americans to see their dentist.
I’m pro-drugs and pro-vaccines, but we should try some new approaches, too. We need a balanced, all-tools, open-minds strategy.
Lesson 4: An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.
The time to defeat the next pandemic is now, before it emerges. Prevention strategies, in particular health, wellness and hygiene, are time-tested, high-impact tools to prevent and fight disease. We should aggressively promote them. I agree with Robert F. Kennedy Jr., President-elect Donald Trump’s nominee for health and human services secretary, on this. Likewise, we need to work better with overseas partners to help stop threats before they reach our shores. In addition, we need to invest in disease surveillance technologies to help us get a handle on novel pathogens before they become threats.
Lesson 5: Empower Americans to make informed health decisions.
Federal officials didn’t trust Americans to make their own health decisions, so they censored science. They censored doctors from developing alternative treatment regimes. They censored Nobel laureates who posited alternative strategies. They censored companies that had data-backed alternative countermeasures. Full disclosure: I represent one such company. People deserve health freedom, not censorship.
Lesson 6: Accountability drives results.
We stopped holding our public officials accountable along the way. Instead, we created cults of personality and allowed politics to drive public health policy. You were either for or against masks. Dr. Fauci was a god or a villain. These are false dichotomies.
Results and facts matter: We haven’t had a significant innovation in fighting COVID-19 in years. Our current medical countermeasures have proved incapable of ending the threat, we are still experiencing unacceptable human, economic and societal costs from the disease and we are poorly prepared to face the next threat we face. We let our public health officials take their victory laps way too early.
My hope is that the incoming Trump administration and health officials will revisit our approach to countering COVID-19 and public health generally. To this end, Mr. Trump and his advisers have expressed the desire to rethink our approach to health. I hope they do this before bird flu or the Congo virus — or a new COVID strain — becomes the next pandemic.
• Robert Housman is an attorney and has worked in the field of chem-bio defense and medical countermeasures for almost 15 years. He is lead defense counsel in United States v. Xlear, a lawsuit brought by the Federal Trade Commission regarding COVID-19 claims.
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