SCOTT SIMON, HOST:
Monday marks five years since the U.S. recorded its first case of COVID-19. Well over a million Americans died over the next few years. The virus is still with us, of course, and there are new pandemic threats, including bird flu. NPR's Will Stone joins us. Will, thank you for being with us.
WILL STONE, HOST:
Sure thing, Scott.
SIMON: You were in Seattle when that first COVID case, January 2020, in the U.S., was confirmed, weren't you?
STONE: I was. This was a man in his 30s who'd come back from Wuhan, China. And at the time, the message from public health was that the risk of human-to-human spread was low. It wasn't actually until the next month that it became clear the virus was spreading in the community here in Seattle and elsewhere in the country.
SIMON: And five years later, how well prepared is the U.S. for another crisis like COVID?
STONE: It's a mixed picture. Certainly, there's a lot of disillusionment in public health and medicine. You'd hope that after a big pandemic, the country would be better off. But Dr. Andrew Pavia at the University of Utah told me it just doesn't look that way to him.
ANDREW PAVIA: We've not done a really good job of changing the things that need to be changed. There's so much fatigue. There's so much trauma from the COVID pandemic.
STONE: The medical profession saw an exodus of nurses and doctors. The same trend is true in the public health workforce. Meanwhile, trust in public health and government agencies has fallen - misinformation, fights over masking, school closures. Lots of things could have played a role. And a recent survey from Harvard found trust in doctors and hospitals dipped from 70% in 2020 to less than 50% as of early 2024.
SIMON: And what could some of the consequences of that be?
STONE: Yeah. It's hard to overstate the implication, Scott. I spoke to Lauren Sauer about this. She's an expert on pandemic preparedness at the University of Nebraska Medical Center.
LAUREN SAUER: People have to participate in public health, right? The public is the most important part. Unless we really spend a lot of time building the trust in public health back, we could build all the systems in the world, and they won't work.
STONE: And along with that, funding is under threat. There was an infusion of money during COVID, but there have been proposals from House Republicans to slash funding for public health programs, including the CDC. And it's possible that it will gain momentum when President-elect Trump is sworn in on Monday.
SIMON: Are there some notes of hope when it comes to pandemic preparedness?
STONE: Yes, there are some advances. Our ability to do wastewater surveillance to track the spread of disease. That's one example brought up by Caitlin Rivers. She's at Johns Hopkins and recently authored a book on fighting outbreaks called "Crisis Averted."
CAITLIN RIVERS: Technology really stands out as a realm where we've seen some great successes. I think there's a lot of emphasis right now on diagnostic testing and also around vaccination. The MRNA platform has been very successful, gives us a new tool to develop vaccines quickly for the next pandemic pathogen.
STONE: And public health experts say having vaccines ready to go will be key for bird flu. That's why the government is stockpiling existing vaccines and developing new MRNA shots in case the outbreak escalates.
SIMON: And what has the incoming administration said about bird flu?
STONE: Well, it's largely been silent. Certainly, Trump has the experience of Operation Warp Speed that produced the COVID vaccine. But scientists like Andrew Pavia at the University of Utah are concerned based on the track record of some of Trump's health picks. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. could lead the Department of Health and Human Services. For years, Kennedy led an advocacy group that's a big player in the anti-vaccine movement.
And Scott, yesterday, we learned that in the spring of 2021, Kennedy filed a citizen's petition on behalf of that advocacy group to the FDA. And in it, he requested the agency revoke the authorizations for the COVID vaccine for all demographic groups. Of course, the FDA denied this request, but Kennedy has an extensive history of making inaccurate and misleading statements on vaccines, and he has already made comments undermining trust in the existing bird flu vaccines. We reached out to the transition team for comment about their plans but did not hear back.
SIMON: NPR health correspondent Will Stone. Thanks so much.
STONE: Thank you. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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