Why does it take a tragedy to awaken the U.S. to danger?

WASHINGTON >> Last week the United States reached a grim milestone when deaths from the coronavirus pandemic surpassed 2,977 — the number killed in the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. Now that a pandemic 9/11 has befallen our nation, we must ask ourselves: Why does it take a tragedy to wake us up to danger?

Before 9/11, we had many warning signs that our homeland was in peril. Terrorists had launched a string of escalating attacks: the 1993 attack on the World Trade Center; the 1996 attack on the Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia; the 1998 bombings of U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania; and the 2000 attack on the USS Cole in Yemen. Despite the warnings, we didn’t take the threat seriously enough — and were caught unprepared on 9/11.

The same is true with COVID-19. Before this pandemic, we had many warning signs: the 2002 SARS outbreak; the 2003 resurgence of H5N1 avian flu; the 2009 H1N1 swine flu outbreak; the 2012 MERS outbreak; the 2014 Ebola outbreak. Despite the warnings, we were caught unprepared for COVID-19.

On 9/11, we had reason for being surprised. Few expected terrorists would turn planes into missiles to strike us here. The failure to anticipate 9/11 was, like Pearl Harbor, a failure of imagination.

But it required no imagination to foresee today’s coronavirus pandemic. In November 2005, following the SARS and avian flu outbreaks, I worked on a speech President George W. Bush delivered outlining our national pandemic strategy. He warned: “Scientists and doctors cannot tell us where or when the next pandemic will strike, or how severe it will be, but most agree: At some point, we are likely to face another pandemic. … Our country has been given fair warning of this danger to our homeland and time to prepare.” Yet here we are, almost 15 years later, caught unprepared by the pandemic we knew was coming.

So how did we fail so badly? Many are blaming the Trump administration’s slow initial response, but as with 9/11, the failures stretch back much further. In 2003, the Strategic National Stockpile was created so we’d have ready supplies of respirators, masks, protective equipment, ventilators and hospital beds. But the national stockpile was depleted in 2009 during the H1N1 outbreak and never fully replenished, leaving hospitals scrambling today.

Today’s ventilator shortage is even more infuriating. The New York Times reports that in 2008, the Bush administration launched a project to stockpile ventilators for a pandemic, and in 2009 the Obama administration contracted with a California company to provide 40,000 of them. But in 2014, the company withdrew without delivering a single ventilator. So the government found a new contractor, but the Food and Drug Administration took five years to approve a new ventilator design, and an order for 10,000 ventilators wasn’t placed until December 2019 — the month the COVID-19 outbreak began. We lost over a decade due to government incompetence.

Questions need answering: Why did our early warning systems fail, allowing the virus to enter our country and spread faster than our ability to contain it? Why didn’t the FDA have a system in place to rapidly develop and deploy testing capabilities, costing us six critical weeks during which the virus could have been contained? Why didn’t we replenish our national stockpile? And why did we allow the outsourcing of critical medical supplies, leaving us without the domestic capability to rapidly produce personal protective equipment, testing swabs and ventilators?

When the pandemic finally passes, there undoubtedly will be a commission to examine these and other questions. We will belatedly fix the holes in our system, just as we did after 9/11. But right now, the death toll rises. As Bush explained in 2005: “A pandemic is a lot like a forest fire: If caught early, it might be extinguished with limited damage; if allowed to smolder undetected, it can grow to an inferno that spreads quickly beyond our ability to control it.” Because of a decade of failures, we’re now in the midst of that inferno. And there’s no excuse for it.