One of the top domestic policy challenges facing the incoming Trump administration is the fundamental reform of federal public health agencies.
President Donald Trump and his new team can draw upon a treasure trove of congressional findings. For example, the House subcommittee on oversight and investigations (a panel of the Energy and Commerce Committee) has recently released a remarkable report on the Biden-Harris administration’s $900 million public relations campaign to sell its scientifically defective COVID-19 policies.
No congressional panel, however, has done more to shine the light on these problems than the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic, chaired by Rep. Brad Wenstrup, R-Ohio. Subcommittee members have made commendable efforts to examine systemic failures over the past two years, and their investigations have also unveiled a troubling resistance on the part of federal officials to accept accountability for their actions, thus highlighting the need for serious institutional reforms. The select committee has done just that.
According to The Heritage Foundation’s nonpartisan Commission on China and COVID-19, chaired by former Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe, the recent pandemic was responsible for an estimated 28 million global “excess deaths,” including those of more than 1.1 million Americans, while inflicting devastating social and educational disruptions.
Beyond that, as the commission reported, America incurred a total economic cost of more than $18 trillion. Likewise, Heritage analysts also identified 13 specific areas where the federal government failed the American people—from mixed messaging on masking, to misleading information on vaccines and mandates—while outlining a framework for public health reform.
The Urgency of Early Warning
During the pandemic subcommittee’s Nov. 14 hearing, Wenstrup emphasized America’s need to beef up our capacity to get ahead of emerging pandemic threats by deploying U.S. personnel abroad to detect and quickly neutralize health threats at their source.
“This isn’t just about public health,” Wenstrup noted, “it’s a national security imperative.” Delays can be deadly, and our public health agencies must be ready to act quickly to save American lives.
Commenting on the subcommittee’s extensive hearings on the communist Chinese origins of COVID-19, Rep. Mariannette Miller-Meeks, R-Iowa, remarked: “It was necessary to investigate origins because that’s how we prepare for the next pandemic.” Going forward, the congresswoman, a physician, made it clear that the incoming Trump administration will need to ensure that our future defenses will require a stronger focus on lab safety and the adoption of more rigorous and ethical research practices, especially governing any future gain-of-function viral experiments that is taxpayer funded.
The good news is that the United States is already taking steps to bolster global security by expanding partnerships with other countries to facilitate surveillance and testing. Indeed, Wenstrup’s major recommendation, as a matter of national security, mirrors a key proposal of Heritage’s Commission on China and COVID-19: “The President should facilitate a public-private partnership centered around biothreat detection. The President should also attempt to globalize this network with the help of trusted allies and partners.”
Counterproductive Vaccine Policy
During the hearing, Wenstrup also called attention to the erosion of the patient-doctor relationship during the pandemic, evidenced by the backlash from the administration’s attempt to impose unprecedented federal vaccine mandates.
Vaccines are not and cannot be a blunt instrument. The risk-benefit calculation of the COVID-19 vaccines varied, depending on the age and medical condition of the recipients. The vaccine mandates were thus utterly inappropriate. As Wenstrup noted, “Your doctor, who knows you, should have been the primary partner on health and medical decisions. Instead, politicians, with no medical background, imposed mandates to follow or be fired.”
In a similar vein, Miller-Meeks emphasized that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention should be held accountable for the growth of vaccine hesitancy, a serious problem traceable to the agency’s failures to communicate to the public clearly and correctly about the risks and benefits of the COVID-19 vaccines.
During the hearing, she asked Dr. Henry Walke of the CDC whether the agency’s “forceful guidance” and lack of transparency about potential adverse effects, such as the concerning incidence of myocarditis (heart inflammation) in young men, contributed to public distrust.
In response, Walke, in an attempt to make the CDC’s actions milder, insisted that COVID-19 vaccines underwent rigorous safety monitoring.
For the congresswoman, that was an insufficient answer: “The purpose of vaccines is to confer immunity. So, what is the CDC doing on vaccine hesitancy?” The CDC, she said, should have given America’s doctors the green light to guide their patients, rather than promote an unprecedented mandate.
Beyond the dangerous growth of vaccine hesitancy, the federal government’s top-down COVID-19 mandates proved costly. Thousands of military personnel were dismissed, and many other Americans lost jobs or suffered discrimination because of their unwillingness to take the new vaccines.
Supply Chain Vulnerabilities
During the hearing, the problem of supply chain vulnerabilities also took center stage. For example, the nation’s Strategic National Stockpile of medical equipment and supplies was clearly insufficient, and the nation quickly ran out of vital materials.
In the event of the next national medical emergency, the nation will need an ample supply of such items as respirators, gloves and face masks, surgical gowns, and goggles, as well as antibiotics and antiviral therapeutics. The CDC had failed to maintain an adequate level, as Heritage Foundation analysts reported almost two years ago—and this problem spanned both Democratic and Republican administrations.
During the hearing, Dr. Hilary Marston, chief medical officer of the Food and Drug Administration, acknowledged weaknesses in producing critical supplies like sterile injectables, explaining that razor-thin profit margins hinder preparedness: “[T]he ability to have buffer stocks—all of these things cost money.”
She emphasized that federal officials need to monitor demand spikes and respond rapidly, but of course, a process for doing that should have been in place before the COVID-19 pandemic hit. The Government Accountability Office, among others, has noted that such a process for engaging manufacturers to respond quickly during a pandemic had not been developed.
In light of this deficiency, Wenstrup has proposed a “manufacturing reserve corps” to bolster the U.S. response to future emergencies. Under his proposal, federal officials would create a network of private companies ready to scale up production of critical supplies in a national medical emergency. The aim of such a program would be to avoid the chaos of early COVID-19 shortages.
To improve the public health response to a future pandemic, the incoming Trump administration has a heavy lift. As Wenstrup aptly noted, protecting public health requires the capacity to take strong and effective measures, but at the same time these measures must coexist with preservation of personal freedom and should strengthen, not weaken, public trust.
Public health officials must go beyond empty reassurances of their commitment to the public interest. Similarly, Congress must recognize that polite oversight alone is insufficient. Instead, it must implement tough structural reforms that ensure accountability, transparency, and an unwavering dedication to science—independent of political influence.
