Joe Biden has failed to defeat COVID-19 as promised. Here’s how he must shift his strategy.
In his first full day in office, President Joe Biden promised to defeat COVID-19. He has not succeeded.
To be sure, he has notched some important wins, notably the rapid expansion of vaccine access and passage of the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan. In recent days, the administration has made crucial and commendable strides to offer free rapid tests and high-quality masks to Americans.
But flip through the goals the president laid out one year ago, and it’s clear he has fallen short. We must learn from this year of missteps. As Biden builds his 2022 strategy, he must integrate five essential principles.
• Level with the American people. The first plank of Biden’s 200-page pandemic strategy was: “Restore trust with the American people.” He tried, but Americans remain deeply distrustful of government and public health agencies.
This is partly due to political opportunists fanning embers of skepticism into raging fires of mistrust. But some of it is undeniably due to muddled messaging from the administration.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has repeatedly stumbled in communicating important information, failing to acknowledge uncertainty or explain scientific rationales. At times, the CDC has abruptly backtracked.
CDC Director Rochelle Walensky is right to note that her team is “making decisions in imperfect times.” There’s no doubt it’s a challenge. But the repeated missteps have eroded confidence.
The only way forward is transparency. If you’re uncertain, tell us. If the science is murky, explain that. If your recommendations are aimed at protecting the economy as much as preserving public health, level with us. Trust is a two-way street.
• Vaccinate the world. This is not only a moral imperative but also a matter of raw self-interest: Novel variants emerge among the unvaccinated, and no border can stop their spread.
I commend Biden for doubling the U.S. commitment for vaccine donations to the developing world. But we can do far more.
We should be leading the charge to transfer technology and establish coronavirus vaccine production in the global south. We should be strengthening cold chains to safely transport vaccines, training healthcare workers to deliver them and helping to build better data systems. These investments will yield benefits well beyond COVID-19.
• Protect our health-care workers. Health-care workers are exhausted and demoralized. Even before the pandemic, 78 percent of U.S. physicians reported signs of burnout. It’s so bad now that the American Association of Critical-care Nurses reports 66 percent of its members are considering quitting the profession.
We must do what we can to bolster the workforce in the short term, with pay bonuses and continued support from military medics. In the long term, we must support the workforce’s mental health, as Congress started last year. We should also encourage hospitals to enact reforms to reduce the administrative burden on providers, such as improving clunky electronic records systems.
These items might seem a step removed from the day-today fight against COVID-19, but they are mission-critical.
• Value public health. In
2002, just 3.1% of total health spending was devoted to public health. Astoundingly, it has only gotten worse. Public health’s share of health-care spending is expected to be just 2.4% next year.
That’s indicative of our values as a society: We prioritize high-tech, high-cost medical care over cost-effective, population-level interventions that promote health and wellness, leading to immense blind spots in this pandemic.
Take testing. PCR tests are the gold standard for diagnosing individual infections, but they are expensive, and it can take days to get results. Other countries recognized this early in the pandemic and moved quickly to approve and distribute rapid antigen tests, which are far easier to use at a population scale. But the Food and Drug Administration has been far slower and more cautious. As a result, we have a dire shortage of rapid tests.
Meanwhile, public health is under fire. At least 32 states have passed laws limiting the authority of public health agencies since the pandemic began. And more than 500 top public health officials nationwide have left their jobs, often in the face of vicious harassment.
We must do better not just at supporting and funding public health but also at incorporating the field’s principles into our strategies.
• Prepare, prepare, prepare. We’re focused on omicron now, but new and potentially more deadly threats are inevitable.
The administration must continue to buy and stockpile vital supplies. It must continue to support the CDC’S new disease forecasting center. We must also keep pressing for bold policies to reduce the likelihood of future pandemics, such as protecting ecosystems to keep wildlife away from humans. Perhaps most importantly, we must build powerful coalitions with public, private and academic institutions to find solutions to our most urgent global challenges.
Incorporating these five planks into a revamped national strategy won’t bring an instant end to the pandemic. But it will put us on the path to recovery.