Learning From Our Past Mistakes as We Ready Preparations for the Next Major Pandemic

A mea culpa made by Dr. Francis Collins, the former director of the National Institutes of Health, who took the rare step of acknowledging mistakes made by public health leaders in the first years of the pandemic, has gone viral and many criticize Collins for having failed to go far enough.

“If you’re a public-health person and you’re trying to make a decision, you have this very narrow view of what the right decision is, and that is something that will save a life,” he said at a conference this past summer for Braver Angels, an organization that aims to bridge political divides. A video surfaced in social media at the end of 2023.

“So you attach infinite value to stopping the disease and saving a life,” Dr. Collins continued. “You attach a zero value to whether this actually totally disrupts people’s lives, ruins the economy, and has many kids kept out of school in a way that they never quite recovered from.”

Dr. Collins explained that what he was describing “is a public-health mindset,” and given that there was no playbook for global pandemics of such magnitude, all public health officials were able to do was to use past experience in lesser situations as well as gut instinct.

There’s little doubt that Collins and other public health officials including Dr. Anthony Fauci, who played a major role in directing public health policy from the very beginning, were in a public-health mindset and were not fully considering the larger consequences of their policies.  But just as public-health officials can be criticized for viewing the pandemic through public-health-colored glasses, critics of Dr. Collins can be similarly criticized for dismissing his remorse.

In the 1980s, Dr. Fauci was a leading researcher and participated in trying to stem the emerging AIDS epidemic. A false claim was asserted by critics – this in the age before social media – that the majority of AIDS patients died from AZT, a medication developed under his leadership.

The claims that azidothymidine, or AZT as it’s more commonly known, killed more people than the virus itself are baseless, Dr. Fauci didn’t lead the team developing AZT, and AZT remains in use today as it has been shown to be effective at keeping HIV in check when used in combination with other medications.

No one plans for an emergency situation such as a pandemic to happen, it just occurs, but each time it does, we do learn from past experiences, including those of the Spanish Flu.

The microscopic killer encircled the entire globe in four months, taking the lives of more than 21 million people. The United States lost 675,000 people to the Spanish Flu in 1918 alone, a figure that is greater than the number of casualties in the First World War, Second World War, the Korean War and the Vietnam War combined.  By comparison, the global death toll as of the start of the fifth year of the coronavirus pandemic is 6.78 million. So maybe we did learn something after all, lest we forget that the World Health Organization recently warned of the possibility of a future pandemic that could be 20 times worse than the current one.

(Photo: Accura Media Group)