Texas experts call for investigation of federal pandemic response.
Pair seeking independent, bipartisan review of federal response to spread of coronavirus
Two of the nation’s most influential experts on the coronavirus pandemic, both based in Texas, are calling for an independent, nonpartisan investigation of the U.S. response to the novel coronavirus. “We must prevent this from happening again,” said Gerald Parker, who directs the pandemic and biosecurity program at Texas A&M’s Bush School of Public Service. “This is not going to be our last pandemic.”
Peter Hotez, a Houston-based vaccine researcher and frequent commentator on cable news, noted that the current virus, SARSCoV-2, is the third coronavirus to pose a major health threat in the last 20 years. And given that outbreaks had already wreaked havoc in China and Europe, U.S. public health systems were notably slow to respond.
“What hurt Wuhan was what hurt New York City,” said Hotez, “which is that virus transmission went on for six weeks before there was any public health intervention.” In a videotaped interview with John Sharp, chancellor of The Texas A&M University System, Parker suggested an investigation modeled on the nonpartisan 9/11 Commission.
Democrats in Washington, D.C., including the chairmen of both the House Homeland Security and Intelligence committees, have pushed to create such a commission modeled on the bipartisan effort that followed 9/11. Democrats
have also set up an oversight subcommittee in the House to investigate the Trump administration’s handling of trillions in coronavirus relief funding.
But Republicans have resisted such calls so far. House Republicans voted against the creation of the House oversight committee, arguing it was an attempt by Democrats to dig up dirt on the president. Republicans have instead largely focused on China’s han
dling of the outbreak and whether there was a cover-up by the Chinese government, an effort led by U.S. Rep. Michael McCaul, a Texas Republican whose district stretches from Austin to Houston.
McCaul said in a May interview with Hearst Newspapers that he believes Congress could do both.
“I think they think maybe if we focus on China or the Communist Party, we may be taking our eye off — they want to focus on the president,” McCaul said at the time. “I think you can probably do both.”
“Pandemic preparation used to be a nonpartisan issue,” said Parker, who under President George W. Bush served on the large team that prepared the United States’ first pandemic security plan. “I wouldn’t be surprised if a COVID Commission came to a similar conclusion as the 9/11 Commission: that we suffered a failure of imagination.”
He noted that, as with the coronavirus, the nation’s security experts knew that terrorism posed a major threat long before that threat hit home with the September 2001 attack. In the late ’90s, while in the Army, Parker studied terrorism in the Department of Defense’s war college. “There was chatter about it,” he remembers. “There were several major studies about how to reorganize departments to better defend ourselves.”
Similarly, he said, U.S. defense officials have long considered pandemics as major threats to national security. “This should not have been a surprise,” he said. “This was not a black swan event.”
Hotez, who also participated in the interview with Sharp, said later that he feared a congressional panel would become “a political circus.” Instead he proposed a review by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine.
Among the questions Hotez wants answered: How, for the whole month of February, did the U.S. miss evidence that the virus was already here? Given the crowding and high number of underlying conditions in low-income neighborhoods, what was done to prepare African-American and Hispanic communities in the early days? Why didn’t the CDC have a centralized epidemiological model, including models of cities and metropolitan areas? And how can the U.S. prepare for future epidemics?