Covid-19 facts could prevent other pandemics
Quietly and without fanfare, President Joe Biden has signed a bill that, miraculously, had sailed though the Senate and House of Representatives without a dissenting vote. The bill requires the Biden Administration to declassify information concerning the origins of the COVID-19 virus, including potential links to the Wuhan Institutes of Virology in China. It exempts information that would undermine national security.
The COVID Origins Act, spearheaded by Republicans, is sensible legislation, with both promise and perils. As the world enters the fourth year of living with COVID, Congress should view this law as an opportunity to help prevent or manage other pandemics. A factual analysis of the origins of the coronavirus could dispel insidious rumors, speculation and conspiracy theories about a virus that has killed more than 1 million Americans, including 50,000 in Pennsylvania and 3,800 in Allegheny County.
The coronavirus created a pandemic of misinformation, spread through the ubiquity of social media, that undermined the work of public health workers. It eclipsed factual public health guidance with falsehoods and dubious theories. Separating fact from fiction concerning the origins of the coronavirus — whether from a laboratory leak or a natural transmission through an infected animal — can only benefit the nation.
At issue is whether members of Congress — and candidates, members of the press and others — can view the declassified information through a lens that is not rabidly partisan. A politicized debate concerning the origins of the coronavirus ensued almost immediately after the first human cases were reported in the Chinese city of Wuhan in late 2019.
The pandemic’s origins may never be known. Its results, however, and the errors made in managing and treating it, are history. The coronavirus continues today, though deaths and infection rates have decreased significantly, and most mandatory public precautions, such as wearing facial masks, were lifted in 2022.
The only effective response to the next pandemic is to start preparing for it now.
If the federal government had acted earlier and with more urgency, it could have saved possibly hundreds of thousands of lives in this country alone. The weakening of the nation’s public health system over the last 20 years also undermined the U.S. response, including cuts in public health jobs, hospital preparedness, and emergency budgets for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
By January, 2020, U.S. medical experts feared a developing pandemic that would become more deadly than any since the 1918 flu pandemic, which killed at least 50 million. Instead of taking the lead early on, however, the federal government ignored numerous red flags about a coming biological disaster. In a taped interview, former President Donald Trump said he wanted to downplay the virus to avoid panic.
The rest is history. A commitment not to repeat it, without demagoguery or partisan rants, should inform the congressional review of declassified documents, and any other effort to illuminate COVID-19.