Next pandemic? Run Trump plan in reverse

“Allow me to say as I told her personally today, the governor of Oregon, Governor Kate Brown — her unilateral decision to send 140 ventilators … to New York, to me was in the very highest American tradition of loving your neighbor. And when I talked to Governor Cuomo, Mr. President, he said they never asked Oregon for the ventilators and Governor Brown hadn’t even called him to tell him that she was doing that. It really is remarkable.”
So spoke Vice President Mike Pence during a recent coronavirus briefing, and on one level, he’s right. With ventilators arguably the nation’s most precious piece of equipment, it was remarkable that a governor on the West Coast sent 140 of them to a state in dire need on the other side of the country. The next day, Washington Governor Jay Inslee returned more than 400 ventilators to the federal government so that they could be used in harder-hit states.
“I’ve said many times: We are all in this together,” Inslee said.
On another level, however, the fact that Brown and Inslee had to take it upon themselves to ship unused ventilators suggests something appalling: The federal government, which is the only entity with the resources and capacity to truly manage this crisis, is missing in action.
Yes, there are daily press briefings, in which some facts are conveyed and warnings issued (along with occasional misinformation from President Donald Trump), and they have some limited utility. But if this crisis were being managed properly, the federal government would know where every ventilator in the country was, and it would be able to quickly deploy them to the states where they were most needed.
To put it another way, what the Trump administration should’ve done in late January was to mobilise the entire federal government. That it still hasn’t done so is both inexplicable and shocking.
Federal mobilisation is common when disaster hits. Protocols have been in place for decades. After Hurricane Sandy, a half-dozen agencies, led by
the Federal Emergency Management Agency, worked together to help the hardest-hit areas recover. A similarly coordinated effort followed the outbreak of the H1N1 virus in 2009. What’s unusual about the current crisis is that it’s affecting all 50 states at once, rather than a single region ravaged by, say, a hurricane. But that’s all the more reason for the federal government to be running the show.
In fact, the government already has a plan in place for dealing with what we’re now facing. In 2005, according to ABC News, President George W Bush read an advance copy of John M Barry’s book about the 1918 flu pandemic, “The Great Influenza.” “This happens every hundred years,” he told other officials. “We need a national strategy.”
Over the next three years, prodded by the president, administration officials created
a detailed pandemic-response strategy. According to Fran Townsend, Bush’s homeland-security adviser, it included an outline for a global early-warning system, money for vaccine technology and the now-infamous national stockpile for protective equipment, ventilators and so on.
President Barack Obama’s administration confronted outbreaks of the Ebola, Zika and H1N1 viruses.
—Bloomberg

Joe Nocera is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering business. He has written business columns for Esquire, GQ and the New York Times, and is the former editorial director of Fortune. His latest project is the Bloomberg-Wondery podcast “The Shrink Next Door.”