Estimated reading time: 11 minutes
Welcome to Citizen Jack’s Mud Creek Chronicles. In this post, I continue the discussion of COVID with a focus on what the country must do to prepare for the next pandemic. COVID-19 revealed how public-health crises often begin quietly, with respiratory illnesses, unexplained clusters, and pathogens that are not immediately identifiable. It also revealed the cost of delay: more than one million Americans died.
The United States had warnings, plans, and expertise. What it lacked was leadership willing to act on them.
Some public officials seem more interested in discrediting scientists than preserving the lessons those scientists helped the country learn. With that in mind, let’s examine what the United States is doing now to prepare for the next pandemic.
Key Takeaways
- COVID taught us that pandemics can emerge suddenly, and early detection is crucial for response.
- The U.S. had frameworks in place before COVID, but political leaders often failed to act on scientific advice.
- Institutional memory is vital; experienced scientists like Anthony Fauci helped navigate crises with accumulated knowledge.
- Pandemic preparedness transcends health; it involves education, infrastructure, and community resilience.
- As the U.S. restructures public health, we must not lose the lessons learned or the knowledge gained from past crises.
The First Signal
A physician in the Pacific Northwest pauses over a chart that does not quite make sense.
Three patients in one week arrive with severe respiratory illness. None test positive for influenza, RSV, or the usual seasonal suspects. None have recently traveled. One is a schoolteacher who had been well just days earlier. Another is a warehouse worker who thought it was “just a bad cold.” The third is a teenager whose symptoms escalated overnight.
At first, the cases seem like coincidence—an unfortunate cluster in a busy hospital system.
But then a laboratory technician runs genomic sequencing on the samples.
The result does not match anything in the reference databases.
Within hours, the data are uploaded into federal surveillance systems. A quiet flag appears in the background of public-health dashboards: unidentified respiratory pathogen—further investigation required.
That is how pandemics begin. Not with declarations, but fragments. Not with certainty, but signals that only later become impossible to ignore.
The question isn’t whether another outbreak like this is possible.
It is whether we learned enough from COVID-19 to respond differently next time.
Another Pandemic Is Not Science Fiction
COVID should have permanently ended the idea that pandemics are freak events.
Humans, animals, goods, and pathogens move continuously around the planet. A virus emerging in one region can reach another continent within days. A mutation that increases transmission can circulate silently before scientists recognize it.
In The Trump Files, I discussed warnings from scientists about zoonotic spillover—the movement of pathogens from animals into human populations. The expansion of human activity into wildlife habitats creates additional opportunities for that exchange.
The precise origin of SARS-CoV-2 remains contested. But the lesson for preparedness does not depend upon resolving that controversy.
New pathogens will emerge.
The question is whether we will find them before they find us.
America Didn’t Enter COVID Unprepared
We sometimes remember January 2020 as though the United States suddenly encountered a danger nobody had imagined.
That isn’t true.
Figure 2 shows a timeline of America’s pandemic preparedness, from the Obama administration through Trump’s second term. The timeline matters because COVID did not arrive in a vacuum; it tested systems, plans, and expertise that already existed.
The Obama administration had developed a playbook that future administrations could use to respond to emerging diseases. The Trump administration inherited that preparation, along with a robust CDC and experts who had dealt with earlier pandemics, but failed to use that knowledge effectively when COVID ravaged the United States.
Previous administrations had confronted HIV/AIDS, SARS, H1N1 influenza, Ebola, Zika, and other infectious-disease threats. Each crisis strengthened America’s public-health infrastructure.
After the 2014 Ebola outbreak, the Obama administration strengthened pandemic preparedness inside the National Security Council. In 2016, it produced a detailed federal playbook for responding to high-consequence emerging infectious diseases and left it for the Trump administration. Trump abandoned the plan and did not use it when COVID ravaged the United States.
The principle was straightforward: detect danger early, determine which agencies are responsible, get those agencies communicating, and provide the president with reliable scientific information before an outbreak becomes a catastrophe.
The federal government also possessed formidable institutions.
- The Department of Health and Human Services sat at the center.
- CDC detected and investigated outbreaks and worked with state and local health departments.
- NIH financed and conducted biomedical research.
- The National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases specialized in infectious diseases.
- FDA evaluated vaccines, diagnostic tests, and treatments.
The machinery wasn’t perfect.
But it existed.
More importantly, so did the people who knew how to operate it.
The People Who Remember the Last Crisis
Pandemic preparedness is usually measured in laboratories, surveillance systems, vaccines, ventilators, masks, and emergency stockpiles.
There is another form of preparedness that is harder to measure:
institutional memory.
Anthony Fauci embodied it.
Fauci directed the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases for thirty-eight years, from 1984 through 2022. He advised seven presidents and participated in the government’s scientific response to HIV/AIDS, pandemic influenza, Ebola, Zika, and COVID-19.
By the time SARS-CoV-2 appeared, Fauci wasn’t a scientist suddenly recruited to confront an unfamiliar emergency.
He carried decades of experience from one epidemic to another and from one administration to another.
Presidents came and went.
The scientists remained.
When Donald Trump entered the White House in 2017, he inherited more than laboratories and emergency plans. He inherited scientists, epidemiologists, physicians, and administrators carrying knowledge accumulated across previous crises. He also had access to the Obama-era pandemic playbook, but did not use it when COVID struck.
That distinction matters.
The United States did not enter COVID-19 without expertise, warnings, or plans.
But institutions do not act by themselves.
Political leaders have to listen to them.
During Trump’s first presidency, the relationship between scientific expertise and presidential authority became increasingly strained. Fauci could explain what scientists knew. CDC officials could recommend public-health measures. National-security officials could warn that the virus represented a grave threat.
None could compel the president to act.
- Scientists can identify a pathogen.
- Epidemiologists can measure its spread.
- Researchers can develop a vaccine.
- Public-health officials can recommend ways to reduce transmission.
Political leaders decide what the government does with that knowledge.
That was one of COVID’s fundamental lessons.
American Science Worked, Leadership Failed
American science demonstrated extraordinary capacity. America’s political system did not measure up.
The COVID vaccines were not created from scratch in a few months. They emerged from decades of research in molecular biology, immunology, coronaviruses, and vaccine technology. Operation Warp Speed then brought government and private industry together to accelerate development and manufacturing.
Today we possess additional advantages.
Genomic sequencing can identify and track pathogens rapidly. Wastewater surveillance can reveal community transmission without waiting for individual patients to enter hospitals. Vaccine platforms can be adapted once researchers obtain the genetic sequence of a pathogen.
If the mysterious respiratory virus in our opening scenario appeared tomorrow, scientists would probably identify and sequence it faster than they could have in January 2020.
They might begin developing a vaccine faster as well.
That is genuine progress.
But scientific capability describes only one part of preparedness: our ability to see the problem.
It does not guarantee that we can respond to it.
American leadership failed in a different way. Political appointees with little scientific expertise interfered with public-health communication, while partisan politics distorted decisions that should have been guided by evidence.
In The Trump Files, I wrote about how the CDC was undermined during COVID-19, with top scientists pushed aside or told not to report findings that conflicted with the Trump administration’s policies. Here are several examples of how the Trump administration interfered with the CDC’s COVID-19 decision-making and public communication.
- Senior CDC staff describe waging battles protecting science from the White House as protecting the public from COVID-19.
- White House officials with no public health experience meddled in important CDC meetings on COVID-19, including Trump’s daughter Ivanka, Stephen Miller, and “protégés of Jared Kushner, wearing blue suits with red ties and beards.”
- Faith in CDC director Dr. Robert Redfield waned.
- Veteran CDC specialists with global reputations were marginalized, silenced, or reassigned. If these top scientists spoke out, they disappeared.
- Trump appropriated the CDC, a public enterprise, and turned it into a propaganda regime.
In an important paper1, “The Trump Administration and the COVID-19 crisis: Exploring the warning-response problems and missed opportunities of a public health emergency,” Charles F. Parker and Eric K. Stern examine the Trump administration’s inability to mount a timely and effective response to the COVID-19 outbreak despite ample warning. They ask why the administration was unable or unwilling to respond vigilantly to a long-forecasted pandemic, despite widespread awareness of the general threat and credible advanced warning about the specific COVID-19 outbreak.
Donald Trump and his top officials failed to provide scientifically informed, normative leadership, resulting in fierce infighting between multiple power centers, blame-shifting, ambiguity regarding who was in charge, and a delayed, disorganized response to the pandemic2.
Two Hundred Unfinished Lessons
After COVID, the United States investigated what had gone wrong.
The Government Accountability Office produced more than 200 reports about the pandemic and made 484 recommendations to Congress and federal agencies.
By March 31, 2025, 200 remained open.
GAO concluded that implementing those recommendations could improve the country’s ability to prepare for future emergencies. They include some of the unglamorous machinery upon which successful government depends: advance planning, clearly defined responsibilities, reliable data, resilient supply chains, communication, and coordination among agencies.
That number should bother us.
COVID killed more than a million Americans.
We investigated what happened.
We identified improvements.
Years later, hundreds remained unfinished.
The next pathogen will not wait for Washington to finish its paperwork.
Schools Taught Us Something Else
As an educator, I think one of COVID’s most important lessons occurred outside hospitals and laboratories.
It happened in schools.
When schools closed in 2020, education moved online almost overnight. Teachers reconstructed instruction while learning unfamiliar technologies. Children without adequate computers or reliable internet connections were immediately disadvantaged. Parents became supervisors of schooling while simultaneously trying to keep their jobs.
When schools reopened, conflicts over masks, distancing, sports, and acceptable risk transformed public-health decisions into political and cultural battles.
COVID revealed something we should not forget:
Pandemic preparedness is not merely a medical problem. It is a whole-society problem.
Preparedness includes practical conditions that determine whether families, schools, and workers can withstand a public-health crisis:
- School ventilation.
- Broadband access.
- Paid sick leave.
- Childcare.
- Hospital capacity.
- Protection for essential workers.
- Plans for continuing education.
- And communication that families trust.
A country isn’t prepared merely because its laboratories are ready.
It is prepared when its institutions can absorb a crisis without coming apart.
The Most Important Thing We Learned
There is a temptation after every catastrophe to prepare for the catastrophe that just happened.
We stockpile the equipment we lacked.
We rewrite emergency plans.
And we improve testing.
We build better surveillance systems.
All of that matters.
But the deepest lesson of COVID is larger.
A country is prepared for a pandemic when knowledge accumulated during the last crisis survives long enough to protect us during the next one.
Scientists retire. Presidents leave office. Administrations change. But pathogens don’t begin again from zero. Neither should we.
The lesson, then, is not simply that the United States should prepare for another virus. It is that preparation depends on preserving the people, institutions, habits, and public trust that make a response possible when the first signal appears.
That brings us to a troubling question: what has the country done with COVID’s lessons since then?
Beginning in 2025, the United States embarked on another experiment — not in a laboratory, but in government. Operating through May 2025 under Musk’s tenure as a special government employee, the initiative aimed to slash federal spending, cut regulations, and shrink the federal workforce before being formally disbanded on July 4, 2026.
Nearly 9% of the total workforce was eliminated. At least 350,000 federal workers were fired, resigned, or took a buyout. USAID was eliminated, with more than 10,000 staffers placed on leave or targeted for removal. Those losses mattered because pandemic preparedness depends not only on plans, but on trained people who know how to carry them out. Millions of children and families around the world suffered as programs and support systems were disrupted.
Experienced scientists left federal agencies. Public-health institutions underwent major restructuring. Federal vaccine policy changed. Some investments in mRNA vaccine development were curtailed, and the United States withdrew from the World Health Organization.
Those making these changes argue that they are reforming a bloated, ineffective public-health establishment. Perhaps some reforms will make the system stronger. But reform is not the same as amnesia.
But what happens if, in rebuilding the system, we discard the knowledge and capacity accumulated through HIV/AIDS, SARS, H1N1, Ebola, Zika, and COVID?
That is the question the next outbreak will force us to answer:
Are we strengthening America’s pandemic defenses — or dismantling the people and institutions that make those defenses work?
Footnotes
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