Lack of governmental capacity means botching the next pandemic response is inevitable

COVID-19 was a catastrophe and, throughout history, humanity’s responses to catastrophes have been a nearly unbroken series of abject failures. And now, as avian influenza spreads through dairy cattle herds in multiple states, many healthcare leaders say they would not be ready if it spreads widely among humans.

Meanwhile, the Centers for Disease Control is being hamstrung by state agriculture departments and dairy farmers, as it struggles to track the virus. Politico describes this gap as “emblematic of the trust gap between key agriculture players in both red and blue states and federal health officials.”

This version of the avian flu virus, H5N1, probably won’t spread among humans, but it might. But some day, perhaps soon, some virulent virus will hit us as hard as the coronavirus did, or even harder.

And we won’t be prepared. The whole government, federal, state and local, remains at a high-risk to botch the next crisis.

It’s hard to understand how we got here. In the four years since the start of the pandemic, there has never been a proper accounting of what actually happened and why.

How could we have gotten here?

That our COVID-19 response was a failure seems a foregone conclusion. Excess deaths, for instance, were up to 83% worse in the US than in Western Europe through the end of 2021. Contrary to conventional wisdom, though, the causes of our failure were not political.

Although it’s true that containment failed, the differences between the choices made by most Republican and Democratic governors have been greatly exaggerated. It is also true that federal crisis management collapsed and that this occurred during the Trump administration, but systemic problems existed long before 2020 and continue to exist today.