Congress Is Already Botching the Next Pandemic

Be prepared. Photo: Steve Pfost/Newsday RM via Getty Images COVID caught the United States napping through a cacophony of shrieking alarms. When the novel coronavirus reached our shores, the CDC was spending only $500 million a year on programs aimed at tackling emerging diseases. The National Institutes of Health’s total budget for its program on infectious diseases, meanwhile, was roughly $5.5 billion, with only a small fraction of that sum going toward pandemic prevention.

Perhaps America could only have learned the hard way. Only after seeing a novel pathogen kill hundreds of thousands of its citizens, shutter its economy, and shred much of its social fabric would Congress finally see that spending a pittance on public health had significant downsides. The Senate’s bipartisan infrastructure bill includes no significant investment in public health. Meanwhile, Congressional Democrats are reportedly planning to scale back Joe Biden’s proposed investment in pandemic preparedness by more than 80 percent. Whereas the president called for spending $30 billion on fortifying the nation’s defenses against contagious diseases, Nancy Pelosi & Co. plan to dedicate just $5 billion — of their impending $3.

It’s plausible that Democrats could pass a large increase in pandemic funding on a bipartisan basis, as part of an omnibus budget bill. Or at least, Republicans would more plausibly support $25 billion in pandemic preparedness funding than a $25 billion investment in childcare. The $3.5 trillion reconciliation bill is Democrats’ only vehicle for moving partisan priorities.

By one estimate, COVID will cost our country more than $16 trillion. The true costs of the pandemic, however, cannot be fully quantified. The knock-on effects of prolonged shutdowns and premature deaths are vast.

EricLevitz Does not sound like a big deal:

EricLevitz Our elites are either very, very stupid, or they're genocidal. Which is it

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