Rep. Torres: Fully Fund Pandemic Preparedness
By Congressman Ritchie Torres
Long before the novel coronavirus brought the world to a grinding halt, the Nobel Laureate Joshua Lederberg sounded the alarm: “the single greatest threat to man’s continued dominance of the planet is the virus.” The painful truth of these words have been powerfully felt during COVID-19, which has exacted a death toll of more than 600,000 Americans and a cost of sixteen trillion dollars. The one thing that threatens us more than a future pandemic, which could be closer than we imagine, is the lack of pandemic preparedness, which we ignore at our own peril.
When it comes to pandemic preparedness, we are our own worst enemy. For proof, look no further than Washington DC, where short-sighted "sausage-makers" have quietly taken a hatchet to funding for pandemic preparedness, cutting the 30 billion dollars proposed by President Biden down to a mere five billion. What could be more dangerously myopic and misguided than defunding pandemic preparedness in the midst of a pandemic, one that has cost the world millions of lives and trillions of dollars? If the cataclysm of COVID-19 cannot move the political establishment to prioritize pandemic preparedness with the urgency it deserves, then nothing ever will. The whims of Congress are in danger of dooming us all to reliving a history whose repeat we cannot afford.
As the Congressman for the South Bronx (NY15), which has long been ground zero for racially concentrated poverty in the United States, I know first-hand that pandemic preparedness is as much about racial justice as it is about public health. Communities of color are the first to be hit the hardest by a pandemic and the last to recover from its devastating cost. In New York City, during the peak of the pandemic, neighborhoods of color had the highest rates of infection and hospitalization, as well as the highest levels of morbidity and mortality. The Bronx alone, which became an apocalyptic scene of overflowing emergency rooms and mass burials, lost more than five thousand residents—higher than the combined death toll of 9/11 and Pearl Harbor.
At a cost of only 30 billion, which is less than 1 percent of the 3.5 trillion dollar reconciliation proposal, the United States would have the capability to develop and distribute a vaccine within a 100 days of a new pandemic threat. According to Guarding Against Pandemics, there are about 20 families of known viruses that could pose a pandemic threat. A 30 billion dollar investment would lead to prototype vaccines for multiple families of known viruses with pandemic potential.
In addition to preventing pandemics, the 30 billion dollar investment would replenish the Strategic National Stockpile and support the domestic manufacturing of personal protective equipment (PPE) and active pharmaceutical ingredients (APIs) so that the United States is no longer at the mercy of a disrupted global supply chain or vulnerable to economic sabotage by a hostile nation state. It would enable rapid testing, which was especially hard to come by in the earliest months of the pandemic. It would encourage the development of not only vaccines but also therapeutics like antivirals and monoclonal antibodies. The benefits are endless, exceeded only by the cost of cutting corners and doing too little.
Ask yourself a simple question: should the United States dedicate at least 1 percent of the reconciliation budget to preventing the next pandemic? The answer should be so obvious as to render the question rhetorical.
The American people — Democrats, Republicans, and Independents — clearly think so. According to a recent poll from Data for Progress, a staggering 71 percent of Americans support investing $30 billion in pandemic preparedness. The Biden plan is both good public health and good politics, and should be kept intact for the sake of every American’s health and safety.
We in Congress can be forgiven for failing to foresee the catastrophe of COVID-19, which is unlike anything we have ever seen in recent memory. But if we repeat the pandemic history that we have all been painfully living for the last year and half, then the blame and shame should fall squarely on us.
Congressman Ritchie Torres (@RepRitchie) represents New York’s 15th Congressional District in the House of Representatives, where he serves as Vice Chair of the House Committee on Homeland Security and on the House Committee on Financial Services.