“We lost the war on COVID two months in, when we didn’t stop it from spreading outside of Wuhan,” Gabe Bankman-Fried, the founder and director of the advocacy group Guarding Against Pandemics, told me. “We’re already losing whatever the next war is, because it can take a few years to ramp up the technology and readiness … The time to panic about the next thing is now.” Bankman-Fried’s point is not that policy makers (or anyone) should run around like their hair is on fire, but that dealing with pandemics is about thinking long-term. Policy makers are focused on preparing for future pandemics—treating them as inevitable—rather than committing to preventing them from happening in the first place. Preventing them would mean doing much more to invest in testing, tracing, and developing early-warning systems.

In August 2021, my colleague Robinson Meyer reported that Congress had slashed pandemic-preparedness funding during negotiations over a potential reconciliation package. In his article he posed an important question:

What reforms, if any, will the federal government make to its public-health agencies after their significant failures over the past 16 months? After 2,977 people were murdered on September 11, 2001, Congress started a war and revised the country’s approach to policing, surveillance, and national security within six weeks; it opened a new federal agency and commissioned a bipartisan fact-finding panel within 14 months … Yet Congress has demonstrated little haste so far in determining what went wrong and how the country’s public-health institutions can prevent it from happening again.