In early 2018, my colleagues and I published The next plague and how science will stop it and the coronavirus was there, because there had already been two coronavirus pandemics, SARS and MERS, in this century.
No one anticipated that SARS-CoV-2 would break out in Wuhan, China, and be the worst pandemic since the 1950s, but one thing that had worried me for a long time was the CDC’s lack of preparedness. Thanks to the government becoming more lords and less public servants (sorry George Soros and friends, ‘not kings’ was a problem decades before President Trump was elected) and government employees spent their days chasing more money instead of helping anyone.(1)
CDC was more interested in seizing financial power for its fiefdom, and now few take it seriously. That’s why it’s more important than ever that we learn the lessons from the latest outbreak, so we don’t end up with something worse from the past, like the Spanish flu.
A new article outlines strategies to prepare for the next one. and there willpower be next. The next plague I understood that part well. Nature is out to kill us, only the most clueless environmentalist ever believed in the “balance of nature” myth, so pathogens will always be evolving. We have defeated some, such as smallpox and polio, but the coronavirus belongs to the same family as the common cold, these will always evolve, like other viruses, such as monkeypox, the authors highlight.
Epidemiology must also improve. Their brand was ruined during the pandemic: those who claimed that an unapproved miracle drug would not work for COVID-19 were ridiculed, while those who claimed that schools needed to be closed for a year were applauded, even though they were both different forms of the same stupid conjectures, but unless the next president comes along and starts throwing money at them again, the days of weekly promoting scary claims about miracle chemicals and foods are over.(2)
There are some qualifiers. The document invokes the usual verbiage about climate change. Apparently, you can’t get past Reviewer 2 today without realizing how climate change will make your advocacy issue worse; Viruses do not know this and it is not verifiable. It is also a systematic review using articles chosen using Methodi Ordinatio, which has its own problems, so this article is not science, it is EXPLORATORY.(3) Some of the recommendations are unworkable because Europe and the United States are paralyzed by activists. The authors would like there to be fewer apartment buildings in the city because close contact increases the risks, but environmentalists want everyone to live in dense housing so that nature cannot be touched by disgusting human hands. The lawyers are going to win that fight. But this is in a magazine called Cities so that was going to be the focus.
Those qualifiers aside, and with them the jargon about inclusion, they are right to recommend that mazes like the CDC are not the way to do better in the future. Stay small, maybe even the state level is too big, since the California government said people couldn’t get a haircut but could buy a marijuana brownie before getting a tattoo, according to their “science.” The county is probably the right size to manage mitigation efforts.(4)
Some of the recommendations are unworkable. There is no way to increase the “quality of life” in poor neighborhoods, any more than the government could tell us it will give every home an elite chef.(5) Ironically, what they oppose are one-size-fits-all recommendations, but almost half of their solutions are just that. It is pointless to tell poor countries to have better neighborhoods, just as it was pointless for the World Bank to tell them that they could only get loans for centralized energy if it was solar or wind. Remote bureaucracies block progress by doing that kind of thing.
There is no doubt that the tools have become smarter, but the bureaucrats remain the same, so being more prepared poses many challenges. Let’s hope some of the lessons from the last one carry over when the next one comes along.
Citation: Borhan Sepehri, Ayyoob Sharifi, Lessons from COVID-19 to improve urban resilience against Mpox and future pandemics, Cities, Volume 168, 2026, https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0264275125007474
GRADES:
(1) The CDC was good at manufacturing new epidemics, like vape and prediabetesbut somehow it took them six weeks to tell us that organic lettuce had Escherichia coli. That is not an agency that can help in a crisis. And COVID-19 proved him right. When COVID-19 first began to hit, career CDC bureaucrats who had long bristled at Donald Trump’s presidency stood so firm in their desire to cut off travel from China that they parroted the World Health Organization, who we now know was parroting… the communist government in China that desperately wanted to hide its role in the outbreak.
When hospitals began requesting tests, the CDC refused to send them unless the hospital, strangely, first proved that a patient had COVID-19. When the White House forced them to ship tests, they continued to sabotage and shipped tests with defective reagents, forcing the FDA to issue emergency authorizations to companies that knew what they were doing.
(2) Harvard could find every science graduate student for 200 years with interest on its endowment starting in a month, but its business is taking in cash, not spending it, so science has been the first out the door during the government review process.
(3) In a meeting with the NIH epidemiology group I requested that they require funded epidemiologists to put a watermark on the cover for journalists and they laughed. They know it’s an academic problem and that journalists often rewrite press releases, but they know there’s nothing they can do about it.
(4) The governor was photographed by outraged employees at The French Laundry in Napa eating with his friends, including two doctors, without a mask when he told the entire state to wear them when walking outdoors. His excuse was that Napa didn’t have much COVID-19, so he thought it was safe. A government employee who only thinks about his risk, and not that of others, should not be making one-size-fits-all decisions for all counties.
(5) You’ll end up with a very expensive Obamacare-style cook.
#plague #learn #COVID19
