Two years before coronavirus, CDC warned of a coming pandemic

https://news.yahoo.com/two-years-before-coronavirus-cdc-warned-of-a-coming-pandemic-090054010.html

Alexander NazaryanNational Correspondent
,Yahoo News•April 2, 2020


Two years ago, some of the nation’s top public health officials gathered in an auditorium at Emory University in Atlanta to commemorate the 1918 influenza pandemic — also known as “the Spanish flu” — which had killed as many as 40 million people as it swept the globe.

Hosted by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the daylong conference on May 7, 2018, was supposed to mine a calamity from the past for lessons on the present and warnings for the future. There were sessions titled “Nature Against Man” and “Innovations for Pandemic Countermeasures.” Implicit was the understanding that while the 1918 pandemic was a singular catastrophe, conditions in the 21st century were ideal for another outbreak.

And since there are six billion more people on the planet today than there were in 1918, when the global population was only 1.8 billion, a pathogen that is a less efficient killer than the Spanish flu could nevertheless prove more deadly in absolute terms.

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Auerbach described conversations he’d had on Capitol Hill about pandemic preparedness, and the diminishing funds devoted to that end. “You know, don’t worry about that,” lawmakers were apparently telling him. “If we’re not funding that at the federal level, the governors and the local officials will increase the funding and compensate” for federal cuts, he was apparently assured.

Except that wasn’t true, Auerbach said, pointing to statistics that showed both states and local governments cutting public health funding, potentially leaving the nation without the necessary defenses at any level of government.

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Auerbach described conversations he’d had on Capitol Hill about pandemic preparedness, and the diminishing funds devoted to that end. “You know, don’t worry about that,” lawmakers were apparently telling him. “If we’re not funding that at the federal level, the governors and the local officials will increase the funding and compensate” for federal cuts, he was apparently assured.

Except that wasn’t true, Auerbach said, pointing to statistics that showed both states and local governments cutting public health funding, potentially leaving the nation without the necessary defenses at any level of government.

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President Trump has called the current coronavirus outbreak an “unforeseen enemy” that “came out of nowhere.” He is correct in the narrow sense that SARS-CoV-2, as the pathogen is formally known, is a novel coronavirus, which means that its precise genomic sequence — the blueprint for its proteins that batter the human body — have not been glimpsed before. Existing armor in the form of vaccines could therefore not protect against the assault.

But the coronavirus was hardly unforeseen. In fact, experts like Jernigan have been warning about a new pandemic for years.

Jernigan’s webinar — which was not delivered during the May 7 seminar, but on an unspecified later date — was co-hosted by Dr. Nancy Messonnier, director of the National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases. She is a member of Trump’s coronavirus task force, but her role was minimized after she made dire warnings about the pandemic.

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The prevalent finding at the May 7 symposium on the 1918 pandemic was that it would be far more costly to ignore the lessons of that catastrophe than to institute the necessary measures to keep a new outbreak at bay.

“We know what to do,” said former CDC director Dr. Julie Gerberding. “We just have to do it.”


https://www.cdc.gov/flu/pandemic-resources/1918-commemoration/agenda.htm

https://www.cdc.gov/flu/pandemic-resources/1918-commemoration/pdfs/1918-pandemic-webinar.pdf