With the COVID-19 public health emergency ending in two weeks, former Bush administration official Gary Edson worries that it will be erroneously hailed as a “Mission Accomplished” moment. So he hopes that a new book he worked on will be a wake-up call.
“Lessons From the COVID War,” published today after two years of work by several dozen experts, seeks to explain not just how the government responded to the pandemic, but why – why it made certain choices, and what the tradeoffs were. The authors hope it will prompt a “rethink” of how the U.S. approaches public health crises, and a collective look at what can be done to prepare better next time.
Why We Wrote This
Congress never formed a commission to evaluate the U.S. COVID response – including what went wrong and why. So this group of experts took it upon themselves.
A key finding is that the heightened polarization around the pandemic was not so much a cause of policy failures, as an effect of those failures – including a failure to communicate effectively.
“Because they don’t understand what happened, people then tend to turn the story into their own preferred cultural narrative,” says Philip Zelikow, the executive director of the 9/11 Commission, who spearheaded the book. “They have no idea – well, what else could you have done, other than what we did?”
On Jan. 6, 2021, Dr. Alexander Lazar was overseeing COVID-19 testing in the U.S. Capitol, and was just closing down the site when his cellphone started blowing up. There is an emergency, shelter in place.
At first, he wasn’t too concerned. As he headed up to the crypt, however, he saw people sitting on the ground, some of them bleeding. Rioters had breached the building. He identified himself as a doctor and began examining the injured. Later, a SWAT team evacuated him to the Senate side, where he set up a medical station and took care of people until 3:30 a.m.
In retrospect, he sees the outburst of violence on Jan. 6 as linked to the polarization around COVID-19 policies – with both symptomatic of growing distrust in government.
Why We Wrote This
Congress never formed a commission to evaluate the U.S. COVID response – including what went wrong and why. So this group of experts took it upon themselves.
“However you think about COVID – whether you think it was really bad and deadly, or nothing and all invented – regardless of which of those stories you believed, how we managed it was not good,” says Dr. Lazar, who served as biosecurity director for the Joint Congressional Committee on Inaugural Ceremonies. “People are really frustrated, they have a sense that government is not working for them.”
Now Dr. Lazar is part of a group that hopes to change that with a book they’re releasing today: “Lessons from the COVID War.” Led by Philip Zelikow, who oversaw the bipartisan 9/11 Commission report, the Covid Crisis Group sets out to examine not just how the U.S. government responded to the pandemic, but why – why it made certain choices, and what the tradeoffs were. More than three years after the pandemic shutdown began, they hope it will prompt a “rethink” of how the U.S. approaches public health crises, and a collective look at what can be done to prepare better next time.
The several dozen authors, drawn from fields ranging from history to economics to epidemiology, hope to fill in gaps in public understanding – and to help counteract some of the partisanship and distrust that complicated COVID-19 policymaking. Indeed, one of the group’s key conclusions is that the heightened polarization around the pandemic was not so much a cause of policy failures, as an effect of those failures – including a failure to communicate.
“Because they don’t understand what happened, people then tend to turn the story into their own preferred cultural narrative: ‘We didn’t do enough to protect the economy’; ‘We listened too much to Tony Fauci’; ‘We didn’t follow the science,’” says Mr. Zelikow. “They have no idea – well, what else could you have done, other than what we did?”
At the same time, because scientific assessments always have to be weighed against social, economic, and other impacts, pandemic response and mitigation are “inherently political,” argued fellow author Gary Edson at a pre-launch event at the National Academy of Sciences on April 24. Officials should be open about that – by giving the public clear information and laying out the various tradeoffs.
“We can’t simply pretend that the next time around we’re going to be better off if we could insulate the scientists at the CDC [Centers for Disease Control and Prevention] and public health officials from politics,” said Mr. Edson, president of the COVID Collaborative, a bipartisan group of political and scientific leaders. “We need to recognize that what we need to do is a better job of managing the inherently political nature of pandemic response and mitigation – this tension between individual freedom and collective responsibility.”
On May 11, the COVID-19 public health emergency will officially end. With everything that citizens and the government have been through over the past three years, many are fatigued and would like to declare victory and move on.
Ann Hermes/The Christian Science Monitor/File
“I’m afraid that will be a ‘Mission Accomplished’ moment, putting COVID and the very real threat of new variants or new pathogens firmly in the rear-view mirror,” says Mr. Edson, a former deputy national security adviser to President George W. Bush.
He and his co-authors are hoping their book will serve as “a wake-up call” and spark a renewed effort to understand what went wrong with the U.S. COVID-19 response – and make necessary course corrections.
A dispassionate report
In late 2020, former Google executive and Obama science adviser Eric Schmidt brought together a few foundations to sponsor what they hoped would be a national commission on COVID-19, similar to the one Congress established to look into the 9/11 attacks. They brought in Mr. Zelikow to lead the effort.
Bipartisan bills were introduced in both the House and Senate to create such a commission, but the measures languished. Eventually, the group decided to publish its findings on its own.
The book is dispassionate and straightforward, with relatable metaphors. Among them: The government during COVID-19 was like a symphony without a conductor. As a result, state and local officials did a lot of improvisation, sometimes in concert with the private sector, but the overall effect was at times dissonant.
A key example of that was the lack of a unified communications strategy to update the public and explain the rationale for protocols like social distancing. John Barry, a historian who wrote a definitive book on the 1918 Spanish flu pandemic and was brought in to help shape the 2005 National Strategy for Pandemic Influenza, recalls an exchange with a public health official who was shying away from giving a direct assessment out of fear of scaring the public.
“They’re not going to trust you if you don’t tell them the truth,” says Mr. Barry. “They’re going to figure it out if you try to sugarcoat things.”
K.C. Wilsey/FEMA/Reuters/File
Baruch Fischhoff, an expert on risk communication at Carnegie Mellon University, adds that it’s crucial for officials to be candid about what they don’t know. And he says it’s important to do at least minimal testing of their messaging – even if it’s just on office colleagues or family members.
“There’s been a catastrophic failure of our public health authorities,” he says in a Zoom interview. And that led to serious distrust, which can’t easily be won back: “At the national level, they have a big hole to dig themselves out of.”
There also was no senior member of government whose job it was to gather and regularly disseminate information to the public – a function he says should be separated by a firewall from “persuasive communication” meant to compel certain behaviors.
“One needs an independent office whose job is just to gather, analyze, and communicate the facts in tested formats,” he says, which establishes trust with the public through regular, straightforward updates. “If that function were fulfilled, it would be much easier to do the persuasive communication.”
The red-blue divide
Going forward, says Mr. Edson, pandemic response needs to involve more multistate collaboration, with public health officials acting in concert with elected officials, the private sector, faith communities, or civil society to help mitigate politicization.
Dr. Lazar saw the benefits of that while participating in a forum that held Zoom calls three times a week for officials from dozens of states to compare notes on operational challenges like setting up testing centers or reopening schools. People from red states wanted to talk to him about how Texas was reopening its schools – and people from blue states were curious, too.
As different as their states or communities were – whether red or blue, rural or urban, small or big, a lot of the on-the-ground struggles they faced were the same.
“It was like a common crucible that we were all being forged in,” he says.
On the margins of those calls, people would reach out individually to share cellphone numbers and arrange to follow up later.
“Each of us needs to take a deep look at ourself and think about: How are we participating in a system that is this dysfunctional?” he says. “It’s not always just the other guy – we need systemic change and we all need to be a part of that.”