OUR NATION’S COVID-19 FAILURES ARE BROAD

WASHINGTON — After the last vaccine is injected, and the last COVID19 patient is released from the hospital, we will need a public accounting of all the ways our government failed, starting with the man at the top. Recrimination is already largely pointless, but preparation isn’t, as this probably won’t be the last pandemic our country faces.

It’s an oversimplification to say that President Donald Trump is responsible for more than 300,000 excess deaths. But given all the natural advantages our country started with — as varied as weather to Americans’ penchant for personal space — we should have been one of the developed world’s best performers, instead of among the worst. Much of the difference between how the United States should have fared and how it actually did can be chalked up to the ways that Trump bungled the pandemic: denying the seriousness of COVID-19; turning minor precautions such as masks into political litmus tests; ignoring his own scientists. “Every time that the science clashed with the messaging, messaging won,” Kyle McGowan, a former chief of staff with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, recently told the New York Times.

“Damage has been done to the CDC that will take years to undo,” said McGowan, a Trump appointee.

The media are already performing postmortems on Trump’s errors, and I suspect the Biden administration will happily extend their work. I worry, however, that they’ll stop before giving the public a full and unsparing analysis of all the ways our government failed, including ones that have little to do with Trump.

Some of those failures were as consequential as any of the White House’s missteps, most notably the testing debacle that left us blind for crucial weeks as the virus spread undetected. The CDC’s main reason for existence is to protect Americans from deadly disease, and after decades to prepare, it dropped the ball when the Big One arrived, and Trump can’t shoulder all the blame.

Trump didn’t sneak into a CDC laboratory at night and mess with reagents so tests wouldn’t work. Trump didn’t make the CDC ship tests to health departments despite knowing there were problems. Trump’s political appointees — of which there were only four in the 11,000-person organization — did not cause the “process failures, a lack of appropriate recognized laboratory quality standards, and organizational problems related to the support and management of a laboratory supporting an outbreak response” cited in a CDC internal review recently obtained by NPR.

In fact, these sorts of problems long pre-date Trump. Years ago, there were issues with a CDC test for MERS; and again with the one for Zika. A scientist who was at the CDC during the Zika debacle told The Washington Post that the agency’s COVID-19 testing failures reflected “exactly the same mistake I saw during Zika.”

A structural problem, in other words, not a partisan one. The Food and Drug Administration similarly failed in a way that was predictable to its critics: a deadly lack of urgency and an aversion to altering sacred bureaucratic precedent, which manifested in a reluctance to authorize any test except the scarce, faulty ones from the CDC.

Fixing such deep bureaucratic problems will require hard and unrewarding work, serving no partisan agenda, since what’s needed is managerial reform, not bigger or smaller government. As with any such overhaul, many incumbent staffers will doubtless resist. And even if we persist with reform, there will be no real way to verify that it worked until there is another new disease to worry about.

It won’t be any easier for President Joe Biden to address the many problems evident at lower levels of government. States and cities were caught flat-footed, and many of those that failed catastrophically were led by Democrats, most notably New York Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo and Mayor Bill de Blasio.

Democrats will be tempted to take the easy way out of this morass: laying all the blame at Trump’s door and suggesting the problems were solved with his leaving office. But this is a kind of Trumpian fantasizing and won’t serve us any better.