‘No-fail mission’: Preventing the next pandemic
WASHINGTON – In a
White House consumed by the coronavirus pandemic, one of the president’s less visible advisers is driven by the fear that the next outbreak could be even worse.
Dr. Beth Cameron had been preparing for an event of this magnitude for decades. As a senior national security official on biodefense in the Obama administration, she took part in the government’s response to the Ebola crisis, and in reaction to that scare wrote a “pandemic playbook” that she left for the Trump administration in 2017.
But the National Security Council office on pandemic preparedness that she helped to lead was shuttered, and when the worst pandemic in a century struck last year, her playbook was ignored.
Now she is back in the role – rebuilding her old office from scratch, reimagined, and providing Oval Office briefings to a new president who has vowed not only to end the current pandemic but to prevent the next one.
“We have a no-fail mission of monitoring and standing up a response to emerging biological threats,” Cameron, head of the National Security Council Directorate on Global Health Security and Biodefense, told Mcclatchy. “He is leaning forward on every aspect of our work.”
Within his first days in office, President Joe Biden reestablished Cameron’s team and signed an executive order calling for the creation of a national center for epidemic forecasting and outbreak analytics – a nerve center that would help the government track and project the course of viruses moving through populations.
Cameron’s NSC team is looking outward, coordinating with foreign governments and alliances to prepare for the next emergency that, like COVID-19, may come from overseas. The proposed national center – which has funding in the American Rescue Plan signed into law by Biden – would look inward, improving the country’s data collection, early warning systems and state and local reporting on public health threats.
Together, those two offices mark the beginning of an overhaul to the country’s biodefense infrastructure – an effort that experts say is long overdue.
The proposed national center could become home base for the myriad of small offices across the government keeping track of mathematical infectious disease models and, in theory, streamline local health care data.
Scientists inside and outside of government who warned that a disastrous global pandemic was inevitable have been asking for a central office like this for years.
“One major challenge with the COVID-19 pandemic, and with previous biological threats, has been accessing real-time data and integrating data streams across the U.S. government and national healthcare systems,” Cameron said in an email.
“We urgently need a National Center for Epidemic Forecasting and Outbreak Analytics to modernize the U.S. disease warning system in order to scale action to prevent, detect, respond to, and recover,” she said.
Forecasting the next storm
Some of the leading experts on infectious diseases say the coronavirus outbreak in the United States could have been far less devastating from the start.
Evidence collected over the past year indicates that the novel coronavirus known as SARSCOV-2 showed up a few times on the West Coast in late 2019, but didn’t take off. The first cases identified in the Seattle area in
January 2020, scientists say, were largely contained.
But a single biotech conference in Boston led to hundreds of thousands of infections within those critical early weeks, possibly allowing the virus to take hold.
“There’s definitely a scenario with a coordinated federal response where we had caught the East
Coast introductions in time, and have what would’ve amounted to a completely different future with COVID-19,” said Dr. Sam Scarpino, director of the Emergent Epidemics Lab at Northeastern University.
“One thing that’s generally true about epidemics, and we’ve seen this play out with COVID, is that you either stop it or you don’t,” he said. “There’s very little room for middle ground.”
The coronavirus pandemic showed that epidemic forecasting – the ability to identify a new virus quickly, map its trajectory, and potentially stop it – is crucial to national security.
Those forecasts are most critical at the very start of a pandemic, when decision-makers – from local mayors to the president – are relying on them to gauge the threat.
A single model published by academics on March 16, 2020, that warned of catastrophe from COVID-19, projecting half a million deaths in the United Kingdom and over 2 million in the United States, jolted the White House and shocked the U.K. prime minister into ordering a nationwide lockdown.
The U.S. government, despite repeated calls by scientific professionals within both Republican and Democratic administrations, has yet to standardize the public health data that cities and states collect and send to the federal government.
Experts say that lessons from the pandemic could help lead to real institutional reforms.