regardless of who was president, whether a Democrat or a Republican, career federal health bureaucrats ignored America’s unpreparedness, while pouring resources into their favorite global projects. They committed billions to fighting Ebola, building health labs and medical training systems on other continents, and conducting disease-fighting programs in forty-nine countries.
In 2015, the Obama administration even sent $3.7 million of taxpayer money to fund the Wuhan Virology Institute.
While globalism prevailed, preparedness at home faltered.
So here’s the message to Washington, DC: No more commissions and televised hearings are needed. It’s time to act. This Broadside is a road map for how to battle the next pandemic without a shutdown. It’s based on real-time facts on the ground, as the battle against the virus continues.
Many of the steps toward national preparedness listed here are already being taken. The rest are within reach, thanks to the burst of scientific innovation the crisis has inspired.
America ignored the warnings from SARS (severe acute respiratory syndrome), MERS (Middle East respiratory syndrome), the avian flu, and the swine flu. But for the next pandemic, we can be prepared.
STOCK THE STOCKPILES, RETIRE THE RATIONERS
During the pandemic, working-age people have been worried about missing paychecks, caring for kids home from school, paying for groceries, and cancelling plans. But people in their fifties, sixties, and older have had bigger worries. Many have been lying awake wondering if this is how they’re going to die.
At its most severe, coronavirus attacks the lungs, making it impossible to breathe without a ventilator. Landing in the hospital on a ventilator is bad. But worse is being told you can’t have one.
When it looked like hospitals in New York were going to run short, Governor Andrew Cuomo complained, “You can’t find available ventilators no matter how much you’re willing to pay right now because there is literally a global run on ventilators.”
It’s a little late. Several years ago, after learning that the state’s stockpile of medical equipment had 16,000 fewer ventilators than the 18,000 that people living in New York would need in a severe pandemic, Cuomo and state health leaders came to a fork in the road. They could have chosen to buy more ventilators to back up the supplies hospitals maintain. Instead, Cuomo’s health commissioner, Howard Zucker, assembled a task force for rationing the ventilators they already had.
Regardless of whether we had a Democrat or a Republican president, career federal health bureaucrats ignored America’s unpreparedness.
In 2015, that task force came up with rules that would be imposed when ventilators ran short. Patients assigned a red code would have highest access, and other patients would be assigned a green, yellow, or blue (the worst) code depending on the decision of a “triage officer.” In truth, a death officer. Let’s not sugarcoat it. The decision isn’t up to your own doctor.
In 2015, Cuomo could have purchased the additional 16,000 ventilators needed for $36,000 apiece, or a total of $576 million. That’s a lot of money, but in hindsight, spending one-half of 1 percent of the budget to prepare for a pandemic would have been the right thing to do.
To be fair, many state governments made the same mistake, and stockpiled few or no ventilators. And yes, they also wrote ghoulish plans for who would get one, either then or when the pandemic arrived.
The federal Strategic National Stockpile was also undersupplied with ventilators to meet the coronavirus emergency.
Then the pandemic arrived. Noted rationer Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel, once an advisor to President Obama, cowrote an article in the New England Journal of Medicine putting forward his concept of fairness.
New York City’s deputy commissioner for disease control, Demetre Daskalakis, said he anticipated “some very serious difficult decisions.”
Arthur Caplan, a bioethicist at NYU Langone Medical Center, said there is no single “right” answer about who gets a ventilator. With all due respect, there is a right answer: Everyone who needs one.
In Wuhan, China, doctors recently faced the grim arithmetic of 1,000 patients needing ventilators and only 600 ventilators being available. Italy is rationing ventilators, too.
But in the United States of America, rationing ventilators should be unnecessary. State and local hospitals knew of the shortage, had the money, and should have bought the lifesaving equipment, instead of making a plan on who would live and die.
Lesson to the bioethicists in universities across this country who like to write rationing rules: Americans don’t want their government holding back on the things they need to stay alive.
That’s a lesson everyone – except the bioethicists – agreed on when the pandemic arrived. Even Cuomo said he found it abhorrent to deny any single person a ventilator.
Fortunately, the Trump administration did something about it, swinging into action to marshal the private sector to ramp up ventilator production. “There’s been no American that has needed a ventilator that has not received one,” announced Adam Boehler, CEO of the US International Development Finance Corporation, in mid-April.
In the year prior to the pandemic, according to administration figures, the United States produced 30,000 ventilators. In 2020, it’s going to produce 200,000.