‘We’re not ready’: US lags on pandemic preparedness after Covid, experts say

# ‘We’re not ready’: US lags on pandemic preparedness after Covid, experts say The small, localized hantavirus outbreak unfolding in the western United States is not, on its own, a cause for widespread alarm. The virus, spread through contact with the urine, droppings, or saliva of infected rodents, rarely sparks large-scale outbreaks, and human-to-human transmission is exceptionally rare. But the stumbles in the official response to this limited cluster have laid bare systemic failures that leave the country profoundly unprepared for far more severe infectious disease threats—failures policymakers promised to fix in the wake of COVID-19, and have since abandoned. The 2020 pandemic killed more than 1.1 million people in the U.S. and exposed decades of deliberate underinvestment in public health infrastructure. In its aftermath, lawmakers across the political spectrum publicly pledged to shore up the nation’s outbreak preparedness, from expanding testing capacity to rebuilding the depleted public health workforce. Those commitments have, for the most part, gone unfulfilled, per assessments from former government officials and independent public health researchers. Two interlocking failures have undermined progress since 2021. First, the $7.7 billion in emergency pandemic preparedness funding allocated by Congress in 2021 expired in 2023, triggering cuts to critical programs focused on rare pathogen testing, outbreak response training, and state and local public health staffing. Budget documents from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention confirm the agency’s Preparedness and Response portfolio saw a 15% reduction in funding between 2022 and 2025, eroding its ability to rapidly detect and respond to uncommon infectious disease threats before they can spread widely. The second, equally damaging failure is the erosion of public trust in public health institutions, a direct legacy of the rampant spread of false claims about COVID-19 vaccines, treatments, and the virus’s origins during the pandemic. Recent polling from the Pew Research Center finds just 42% of U.S. adults report having a great deal or quite a lot of confidence in the CDC, a steep 28-point drop from 70% in 2019. That distrust complicates every facet of outbreak response, from encouraging testing and vaccination to securing public compliance with isolation or quarantine measures when needed. Stephanie Psaki, who served as the White House’s global health security coordinator from 2021 to 2023, underscored that even a successfully contained hantavirus outbreak should not be misread as a sign of national readiness. “Assuming everything goes well in containing this outbreak, which I hope it does, the takeaway from that should not be ‘we’re fine,’” Psaki said in a recent statement. “We’re not ready for this type of threat.” The difficulties public health officials have faced scaling up hantavirus testing, tracing contacts of confirmed cases, and countering misinformation about the outbreak on social media are not unique to this low-risk pathogen. These are the exact weaknesses that would prove catastrophic in the event of a pandemic caused by a more transmissible respiratory virus, the type of threat experts have warned about for years. Yet legislative efforts to establish a permanent, dedicated stream of funding for pandemic preparedness have stalled in Congress for more than two years, with partisan disagreements over the scope of public health authority and vaccine requirements blocking consensus. Public health experts warn that without sustained, long-term investment and targeted efforts to rebuild public trust, the U.S. will remain vulnerable to the next large-scale infectious disease threat, regardless of how the current hantavirus cluster is resolved. The lessons of COVID-19 were supposed to spur lasting, systemic change. So far, those lessons have been ignored, and the country remains as exposed as it was when the first cases of the novel coronavirus landed on U.S. soil.