On the day President Biden was installed, the Advisory Committee of Health Experts, which advised him during the presidency, officially ceased to exist. But its members have quietly continued to meet regularly over Zoom, and their conversations have often turned to frustration over Mr Biden’s response to coronavirus.
Now, six of these former advisers have gone public with an extraordinary, albeit polite, critique – and a plea to be heard. In three opinion pieces published Thursday in the Journal of the American Medical Association, they call on Mr. Biden to adopt a whole new domestic pandemic strategy one who is geared to the “new normal” of living with the virus indefinitely, not of wiping it out.
The authors are all big names in American medicine; several, including Dr. Luciana Borio, a former Chief Research Officer at the Food and Drug Administration, and Dr. David Michaels, a former head of the Danish Working Environment Authority, has held senior government positions. The driving force behind the articles is Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel, an oncologist, medical ethicist and professor at the University of Pennsylvania who advised former President Barack Obama.
They say the first thing the administration needs to do is take a broader vision by acknowledging that Covid-19 is here to stay. In an article, Dr. Emanuel and two co-authors – Michael T. Osterholm, an epidemiologist at the University of Minnesota, and Dr. Celine Gounder, an expert in infectious diseases at New York University – sharply that Mr. The bite in July proclaimed that “we have taken over against this virus,” which in hindsight was clearly not the case.
Now that the Omicron variant is fueling a dramatic new rise, they write, the United States must avoid getting stuck in “an eternal state of emergency.” The first step, Drs. Emanuel, Osterholm and Gounder wrote, demand to recognize that coronavirus is one of several respiratory viruses circulating and develop policies to deal with them all.
To be better prepared for unavoidable outbreaks, they suggest that the administration set targets and specific benchmarks, including the number of hospitalizations and deaths from respiratory viruses, including coronavirus, that should trigger emergency measures.
“From a macro perspective, it feels like we’re always fighting yesterday’s crisis and not necessarily thinking about what needs to be done today to prepare for the next one,” said Dr. Borio in an interview.
Sir. Biden announced a pandemic strategy when he took office, and recently released a new winter strategy to combat coronavirus, just as the Omicron variant began to spread in the United States. Many of the steps the authors suggest – including faster development of vaccines and therapeutics; “comprehensive, digital, real-time” data collection by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention; and a corps of “public health workers” – is already part of his plans.
But the authors say the administration needs to recognize that Omicron may not be marking the end of the pandemic – and that planning a future, they admit, is unrecognizable. They also make it clear that the current rate of Covid hospitalizations and deaths is unacceptably high.
White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki told reporters Thursday that she had not read the articles and dismissed a question as to whether the president “will accept” that Covid-19 has come to stay.
“The president’s goal is to defeat the virus,” she said, adding, “The president’s focus and goal now is to save as many lives as possible.”
In the three articles – one suggests a new national plan, the other suggests improvements in testing, monitoring, vaccines and therapies – the authors also come up with more specific suggestions.
They call for every person in the United States to have access to cheap tests, and say the Biden administration’s purchase of 500 million quick tests is not enough; for the next generation of Covid vaccines that will target new varieties or perhaps take new forms, such as nasal sprays or skin patches; for a “universal coronavirus vaccine” that would fight all known coronavirus, and for major public health infrastructure upgrades.
The authors also said that vaccine mandates should be imposed more widely, including for school children, and that N95 masks should be made free and easily accessible to all Americans, as should oral treatments for Covid. (Mr. Biden has ordered several vaccine mandates for workers, but they are bound in court.) The authors also called for a broad “electronic vaccine certification platform” that Mr. Biden has resisted.
In interviews, the authors said they had made their views known to Biden officials, but sometimes they had felt unheard of. The articles reflect both their frustrations and their desire to help, they said. They also acknowledge that they have the luxury of taking a 30,000-foot view, while management experts knock it out in the trenches.
“But at the same time, we believe that a lot of work still needs to be done,” said Dr. Rick Bright, executive director of the Rockefeller Foundation’s Pandemic Prevention Institute, who headed a federal biomedical agency under the Trump administration and co-wrote two of the pieces.
Dr. Gounder said she has been disappointed with the administration’s “one-sided focus on vaccines” and with the declining emphasis on mask wearing. Dr. Borio said she has been “very frustrated” that there is no federal system linking testing to treatments so people who test positive and are at high risk for Covid complications can get prescriptions on the spot for new antiviral medicine.
Dr. Emanuel reiterated this sentiment, saying in an interview that if the distribution of new therapies were left to “the usual health care system”, only “rich, well-connected people” would have access.
The most surprising thing about the articles is that they are written at all and that the authors express their criticism so publicly. Several said in interviews that they were appalled that the administration seemed taken aback by the Delta and Omicron variants. Dr. Bright recalled the warning he issued when the Advisory Committee held its last meeting on 20 January 2021.
“The last thing I said,” he said, “is that our vaccines are getting weaker and eventually failing, we now have to prepare for variants, we need to put a plan in place to continually update our vaccines, our diagnostics and our genomics so we can catch this early because these variants will come. “
Adeel Hassan contributed with reporting.
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