After spending weeks asking leading health experts what is being done, and what can be learned now, to help us prepare for the next pandemic, an I-Team Investigation is reveling concerning answers as the U.S. passes more than 500,000 deaths.
Dr. Louis Profeta is an emergency room doctor in Indianapolis, IN and sounded the alarm years ago because he thought the country was not prepared to handle a pandemic.
“This had been something had been bothering me for years,” Dr. Profeta said.
He and other medical professionals believe this pandemic may not be the big one to watch for. Dr. Profeta says there are many things we should be doing now to prepare for another pandemic.
“We cannot have health care centers climbing over themselves, hoarding masks, or people stealing from them so we have to have the infrastructure in place,” Dr. Profeta said.
Taking a critical look at how equipped our healthcare industry is may be just one part of it.
Another may be found among the high pitched bat chirps near Montana State University’s campus.
Researchers believe bats were linked to the COVID-19 outbreak. Epidemiologist Raina Plowright and her team collect the bats in nets and take samples.
“We look at their immune status and their nutritional status. We look at many, many parameters that tell us what their health is and that allows us to know what are the factors driving the infectious cycles within the bats,” Plowright said. “Our work is focused very much on prevention, but to prevent spillover of pathogens from bats to humans, we have to understand how they circulate in bats and why they spill over from bats,” she said.
In Washington, former U.S. Senator Joe Lieberman and Tom Ridge, the first U.S. Secretary of Homeland Security, lead the biodefense commission. They are pushing for a program that would create vaccines and test stockpiles when a human cluster infectious disease is discovered.
“Some people will be infected by but it won’t be a pandemic, and it won’t be as painful as this year has been for America,” said Ridge.
Liberman echoed that.
“You’ve got to not walk away from this field once this pandemic ends,” he said.
The program has been presented to President Biden at a cost of $10 billion per year.
Cox Media Group
