Sunday, January 09, 2022

This was published on Jan. 6, which was a day I was busy with something else, and I entirely forgot about it until this morning.

Former Biden Advisers Urge a Pandemic Strategy for the ‘New Normal’

In a striking critique, six prominent health experts who advised President Biden’s transition team called for an entirely new domestic coronavirus strategy.

...the advisory board of health experts who counseled [President-elect Biden] during his transition...have gone public with an extraordinary, albeit polite, critique — and a plea to be heard. In three opinion articles published on Thursday in The Journal of the American Medical Association, they called for Mr. Biden to adopt an entirely new domestic pandemic strategy geared to the “new normal” of living with the virus indefinitely, not to wiping it out.
...
The authors say they wrote them partly because they have not made headway talking directly to White House officials.

“From a macroperspective, it feels like we are always fighting yesterday’s crisis and not necessarily thinking what needs to be done today to prepare us for what comes next,” Dr. [Luciana] Borio [former acting chief scientist at the Food and Drug Administration] said.
...
... Several of the authors said in interviews they were dismayed that the administration seemed caught off guard by the Delta and Omicron variants. Dr. [Rick] Bright [chief executive of the Rockefeller Foundation’s Pandemic Prevention Institute], who helped write two of the pieces, recalled the warning he issued when the advisory board had its last meeting on Jan. 20, 2021.

“The last thing I said,” he recalled, “is that our vaccines are going to get weaker and eventually fail. We must now prepare for variants; we have to put a plan in place to continually update our vaccines, our diagnostics and our genomics so we can catch this early. Because the variants will come, and we should never be surprised and we should never underestimate this virus.”
...
Mr. Biden published a pandemic strategy when he came into office, and Dr. [Ezekiel] Emanuel, [an oncologist, medical ethicist and University of Pennsylvania professor who advised former President Barack Obama]...said the administration “executed very well on it through June,” until the Delta variant brought a new surge of cases.
...
Many of the steps the authors suggest — including faster development of vaccines...are already part of Mr. Biden’s plans.

Oh? I hadn't heard anything about that since the earliest days of Omicron.
...
In the three articles — one proposing a new national plan, the others suggesting improvements to testing, surveillance, vaccines and therapeutics — the authors also make more specific suggestions.

They call for next-generation Covid vaccines that would target new variants or perhaps take new forms, like nasal sprays or skin patches, that would be easier to distribute; for a “universal coronavirus vaccine” that would combat all known coronaviruses;...

Oh, so our vaccines are like one of James Franklin's defenses, "We prepared to stop their run game. How could we have known they would switch to passing?!"