U.S. behind in several areas
Despite our self-image as the global leader in science and medicine, the United States stumbled badly in its response to the pandemic, with grave consequences both at home and abroad, experts say.
In a recent commentary in JAMA, Lawrence Gostin, JD, from Georgetown University, Washington, and Jennifer Nuzzo, DrPH, at Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, pointed to several critical shortfalls in the nation’s efforts to control the disease.
One such shortfall is public trust.
This news organization reported in June 2021 that a poll of its readers found that 44% said their trust in the CDC had waned during the pandemic, and 33% said their trust in the FDA had eroded as well.
Health care providers who responded to the poll lost trust as well. About half of the doctors and nurses who responded said they disagreed with the FDA’s decision-making during the pandemic. Nearly 60% of doctors and 65% of nurses said they disagreed with the CDC’s overall pandemic guidance.
Lack of trust can make people resist vaccines and efforts to fight the virus, the authors wrote.
“This will become really relevant when we have ample supply of Pfizer’s antiviral medication,” Mr. Gostin, who directs the O’Neill Institute for National and Global Health Law at Georgetown, told this news organization. “The next phase of the pandemic is not to link testing to contact tracing, because we’re way past that, but to link testing to treatment.”
Lack of regional manufacturing of products is also thwarting global progress.
“It is extraordinarily important that our pharmaceutical industry transfer technology in a pandemic,” Mr. Gostin said. “The most glaring failure to do that is the mRNA vaccines. We’ve got this enormously effective vaccine and the two manufacturers – Pfizer and Moderna – are refusing to share the technology with producers in other countries. That keeps coming back to haunt us.”
Another problem: When the vaccines are shared with other countries, they are being delivered close to the date they expire or arriving at a shipyards without warning, so even some of the doses that get delivered are going to waste, Mr. Gostin said.
“It’s one of the greatest moral failures of my lifetime,” he said.
Also a failure is the “jaw-dropping” state of testing 2 years into the pandemic, he said, as people continue to pay high prices for tests or endure long lines.
The U.S. government updated its calculations and ordered 1 billion tests for the general public. The COVIDtests.gov website to order the free tests is now live.
It’s a step in the right direction. Mr. Gostin and Dr. Nuzzo wrote that there is every reason to expect future epidemics that are as serious or more serious than COVID.
“Failure to address clearly observed weaknesses in the COVID-19 response will have preventable adverse health, social, and economic consequences when the next novel outbreak occurs,” they wrote.
WebMD.com
A version of this article first appeared on WebMD.com.