“There is a real reason for us to be scared,” President Obama’s Ebola czar said.
The next global epidemic is likely around the corner—and no amount of
U.S. retrenchment from globalization will halt that outbreak at the
U.S. border.
“There is a real reason for us to be scared of the
idea of facing this threat with Donald Trump in the White House,”said
Ron Klain, who served as President Obama’s Ebola czar, at the Aspen
Ideas Festival, which is cohosted by The Aspen Institute and The Atlantic. Klain said the “president is anti-science” and “trades in conspiracy theories.”
“All those things would lead to the loss of many lives in the event
of an epidemic in the United States where we need the public not to
trade in conspiracy theories, not to believe that the news was fake, but
to respect scientific expertise,” said Klain, a veteran Democratic
operative who served in both the Clinton and Obama administration.
Klain
added that Trump’s isolationist mindset has led to the U.S. pulling
back from its leadership role in global health crises, which, he said,
“is … going to be a serious threat to our security.” Klain called
Trump’s policies and views “xenophobic, if not racist,” leading to the
blaming of immigrants and foreigners for problems that need
public-health interventions.
Klain specifically cited Trump’s tweets in the midst of the Ebola
outbreak when he advocated that American healthcare workers who had
contracted the disease in Africa be barred from returning home. “People
that go to far away places to help out are great-but must suffer the
consequences!” https://twitter.com/realdonaldtrump/status/495379061972410369?lang=en" rel="nofollow - Trump tweeted at the time .
Global
health-emergency preparedness has traditionally always been a
bipartisan issue. Klain cited President George W. Bush’s much-lauded
PEPFAR initiative, which committed the U.S. to taking a leadership role
in tackling HIV/AIDS in Africa. During the 2014 Ebola outbreak, a
Republican-controlled Congress authorized more than $6 billion to fight
the outbreak.
“We
need leadership that is focused, that is pro-science, that doesn’t
traffic in conspiracies, that invests in these things,” Klain said.
Leadership “that doesn’t have these isolationist attitudes, [which] …
put us all at risk.”
Klain identified several large gaps in U.S. preparedness for the next global outbreak.
- A leadership gap. “There is no one at the White House right now who is in charge of this problem,” Klain said.
- A funding gap. “We’re underfunding, underinvesting” in preparedness, he said.
- A facilities and training gap. Klain said that
there was exhaustive training of first responders carried out right
after the Ebola outbreak in 2014. But there are other diseases for which
they are still unprepared. “Training needs to be renewed. People need
to be drilled,” he said. “Our first responders need to be trained. We
need better and more facilities.”
- A science gap. “We haven’t yet developed all the vaccines and the therapeutics we need,” Klain added.
- A policy gap. “The holes in American law
that we need to fill about licensing people in medical emergencies to
practice in other states or,” he said, “using the Stafford Act”—the
federal law that governs relief and emergency assistance for state and
local governments during a natural disaster—“to respond to
emergencies.”
But the biggest gap, he said, is the global gap: “We can’t be
safe here in America when there’s a risk of pandemics around the world,”
Klain said. “The world’s just too small. Diseases spread too quickly. …
There is no wall we can build that is high enough to keep viruses and
the disease threat out of the United States. We have to engage in the
world.”
Source: https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2018/06/the-next-epidemic/563546/" rel="nofollow - https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2018/06/the-next-epidemic/563546/