From left to right: Reed Tuckson, MD, FACP, cofounder of the Black Coalition Against Covid; Anthony Fauci, MD, former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.
The United States’ preparedness for Covid-19 fell into two buckets: a scientific bucket and a public health bucket, said Dr. Anthony Fauci, former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.
On the scientific front, the U.S. did “extraordinarily well,” Fauci said. It was able to make a vaccine in unprecedented time. But the country lagged on the public health front, and needs to improve in several areas for the next pandemic. He made these comments Tuesday at the AHIP 2023 conference in Portland.
In December of 2020, about a year after the Covid-19 virus broke out, the first American received a Covid-19 vaccine outside of a clinical trial.
“It was decades of investment in basic and clinical biomedical research that allowed us to have the platform technology of the mRNA vaccine, together with the structure base immunity design of the spike protein to give us a vaccine that is completely unprecedented in its effectiveness. … And the timeline is breathtaking,” Fauci said.
On the public health side of the pandemic, the U.S. was not as successful, Fauci went on to say.
“We didn’t do very well because of the … fractionation of the healthcare delivery system, where there is a disconnect between the federal health approach of the CDC and the local public health officials to the point where we had to have Zoom meetings with the Israelis, the South Africans and the people in the U.K. to find out in real time what was evolving with the outbreak because our data collection system wasn’t electronically connected,” he stated. “We were using fax machines to go back and forth.”
He said that for the next pandemic, there needs to be a more efficient way to collect data in order to better respond to the pandemic. In addition, there needs to be better “international transparency,” he added.
“It’s very, very clear that the word ‘pandemic’ by definition is global. That’s what ‘pan’ means: all, global,” Fauci said. “So we really need to get everybody to buy into the fact that we’ve got to be completely transparent. … We’ve got to share epidemiological data in real time, not when it comes out in the New England Journal of Medicine.”
Another challenge with the Covid-19 pandemic was the spread of disinformation, in which the wrong information is deliberately shared. To combat this, healthcare leaders need to step up to share the correct information.
“You want to make sure that you don’t get into the realm of deliberately muzzling the people who are giving the disinformation because then they say that you’re encroaching on their First Amendment right,” Fauci said. “The best way to do it is … have an army of people that can actually spread correct information.”
What’s going to happen with Covid-19? It likely won’t be going away, Fauci said. But “hopefully it will be at a low enough level” that it won’t “disturb the social order,” he stated.
Photo: Marissa Plescia
