Pandemic Lessons

The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) will end the Public Health Emergency (PHE) for COVID-19 at midnight on May 11, 2023. The U.S. will no longer legally be in a pandemic emergency for the first time in three years. The pandemic upended our lives. What have we learned from the experience?

Lesson One: Innovation Matters.

The pandemic gave the country opportunities to make health care more affordable and accessible; these opportunities were realized by making use of America's greatest resource: ingenuity.

Operation Warp Speed was the government's most demonstrably successful pandemic program. In fact, it is the most successful government program since the moonshot, if one considers impact and speed.

The threat of the coronavirus diminished for many Americans thanks to the COVID vaccines. What does this tell us? That innovation is key not only to medical progress but also to the success of public health responses. With Operation Warp Speed, what usually took ten years—the design and testing of a new vaccine—was accomplished in less than ten months. It was an unprecedented, extraordinary achievement in the history of science and medicine.

Operation Warp Speed worked because it gave America's bio-pharma sector the freedom to innovate and a market to target. It was a public-private partnership where the private sector innovated, and the public sector reduced financial risk and regulatory burdens. Government bureaucracies, to their credit, became responsive to the urgent needs of the times.

Operation Warp Speed showed that when the public sector and the private sector work together, rapid medical progress and access to new treatments can become possible almost overnight. The Biden administration and the Congress should consider launching a 'Warp Speed 2.0', a twenty-first century healthcare model where public health agencies and the Congress reform the drug approval process to reduce the cost of prescription drugs and create pathways to new cures. Machine learning and AI can be enlisted in the effort, allowing for improved ways of approaching health care data and evidence to facilitate the rapid progress of public health. Warp Speed should be the rule, not the exception.

Alongside Operation Warp Speed, the expansion of telehealth was a pandemic-response success story.

HHS implemented a pandemic policy focused on increasing access to telemedicine. During a pandemic, access to health care could mean the difference between life and death. The expansion of telehealth services during the COVID crisis saved lives.

What was true during the PHE will still be true after it expires—that is, telemedicine can allow patients to see their healthcare providers from the comfort and sanctuary of their homes. For patients, telehealth requires no time off from work or family obligations. Weather conditions and transportation are non- factors. And telehealth can bring physicians to our country's 'healthcare deserts' in rural and inner-city communities. Telemedicine has been shown to offer more control, greater access, and lower costs to patients. Congress must act to make permanent the telehealth reforms temporarily implemented during the COVID crisis. It worked and is working, and both Republicans and Democrats support it.

Lesson Two: Follow the Science, not the Scientists.

During the pandemic, our communities were forced to bear unprecedented hardships—from extended lockdowns and school closures to mask mandates and the elderly being isolated from their families.

When public health officials followed the science, good policies turned into good health outcomes. However, when we followed the scientists without the science, the pandemic response went sideways. Public health agencies implemented catastrophic and (in retrospect, demonstrably) ineffective lockdown policies, needlessly crushing small businesses and American jobs, while keeping low-risk children out of school. They also mandated masking over widespread public opposition and preferentially shuttered places of worship. Indeed, it would be difficult to decide where to stop compiling a list of controversial pandemic policies: the vaccine mandates; the public health establishment's seeming endorsement of the 2020 riots; the on- again-off-again focus on ventilators; the definitions of ‘essential’ and ‘non-essential’ workers; reopening standards that seemed to change capriciously; the use of the term ‘misinformation’ as a way to limit scientific, policy, and political debate; the confident dismissal of various new or untried treatments (by previously trusted scientific and medical journals); the varying uses of observational data to advance policy; and others. The fact that these all arose during an evolving response to a new virus is unsurprising, but it is sobering. We saw our nation at its best and its worst.

Following the science—post-Public Health Emergency—requires that we ask and answer these essential questions:

1. Why Were Schools and Colleges Closed?
2. What Could Have Been Done to Better Protect Older, High-Risk Americans?
3. How Effective Were Mask Mandates in Stopping the Virus Spread?
4. Were Restaurants', Gyms', and other Small Businesses' Roles in Spreading COVID-19 Exaggerated?
5. When Should We Have Stopped Prioritizing COVID-19 over Other Health Problems?

We're learning from the science that COVID lockdowns, closures, and mandates may have had little to no effect on the virus spread and mortality rate. In a study released last year, researchers at Johns Hopkins University concluded that lockdowns did "little to reduce COVID deaths" but had "devastating effects on economies" and caused "numerous social ills." We must face these studies and understand whether these lockdown policies were only understandable on a short-term basis; were entirely right and proper; should have been tougher; should have been more lenient; were a bad idea from the beginning; or some other conclusion altogether.

It's time to have a final reckoning on the public health response to COVID-19. The PHE ending should      mark the beginning of a healthy public discussion on the lessons we've learned from the pandemic. We should celebrate the good and face the mistakes.

We know this for certain: following the science produced good health outcomes but following the scientists (when they posed as politicians) proved detrimental to our lives and our economy. Let's set the record straight and work to get It right in the future.