(Bloomberg Opinion) -- In a rare moment of bipartisan comity in Washington, Democratic leaders are considering a supplemental appropriation bill to address public-health issues related to the omicron variant — and Republicans aren’t opposed to the idea. It’s an encouraging sign, but Congress should be focusing on the next pandemic, not the current one.
The speed at which omicron is moving — cases are already declining in New York — underscores the reality that backward-looking relief legislation is misguided. If Congress wants to take further action to address the pandemic, it ought to invest money in forward-looking ideas to prevent and contain future pandemics.
Last September the White House issued a report on how to improve what might be called America’s pandemic infrastructure. The full program, which tracks recommendations issued about a year ago by a bipartisan commission on an “Apollo Program for Biodefense,” is estimated to cost about $60 billion, which is a lot of money but trivial compared to what the U.S. has spent so far on Covid relief legislation, to say nothing of the even larger cost to the economy in terms of lost output, illness and death.
But the fight to take action on those recommendations has stalled.
The original $3.4 trillion version of Build Back Better included a $30 billion down payment on the pandemic infrastructure moonshot. But as the bill got scaled back to a $1.8 trillion, the biodefense element shrank to just $2 billion. And with Build Back Better stalled and all but certain to shrink further if it ever happens, the future of even that money is in doubt.
White House Science Adviser Eric Lander was, for a time, vocal about how short-sighted this is. Build Back Better in all of its forms includes about $500 billion for efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, for example — and while climate change is an important problem, it’s not 250 times more important than future pandemics. But Lander’s remonstrations were not well-received on the Hill or inside the administration, leading to this headline in Politico in November: “Biden’s Science Guy Is Driving Folks Mad.”
Congressional Democrats don’t necessarily oppose more spending on pandemic infrastructure. But they tend to view it as a high-minded idea that deserves bipartisan support, and they don’t want to waste fiscal space inside a reconciliation bill that’s dedicated to advancing partisan and ideological priorities. Frustrating as this may be to policy wonks, it’s the political reality.
Which brings us the possibility of an omicron supplemental bill. That would need to be bipartisan — and so it’s a good place to bring back Lander’s ideas. One major goal should be to build on the successes of Operation Warp Speed to spur the development of a super-vaccine that could protect against all members of the coronavirus family. Such a vaccine would be agile against multiple variants, would reduce the incidence of the common cold, and could protect people against the emergence of new fatal coronaviruses from the animal population.
As my Bloomberg Opinion colleague Lisa Jarvis explains, this appears to be scientifically realistic. The federal government should repeat what it did for the original Covid mRNA vaccines and make a commitment to purchase a billion or so doses of a pan-coronavirus vaccine if one becomes available.
There are also shorter-term, less speculative ideas worth funding.
At a recent hearing with CDC Director Rochelle Walensky, Senator John Hickenlooper of Colorado bragged about his home state’s relatively high capacity to do genetic sequencing of the Covid test samples available in local labs. Sequencing allows scientists to track the emergence and spread of new variants, but in some jurisdictions it’s only done sporadically. A significant financial investment in increasing sequencing capacity could make a real difference relatively quickly.
A related issue is wastewater surveillance, which some U.S. cities currently use to gather information about the prevalence of Covid in the population. More places should do this, and they should conduct broader surveillance not just for Covid but for other known and not-yet-known pathogens as a kind of early warning system.
Then there’s the question of tests.
Now that the omicron wave seems to be past its peak in Washington, where I live, rapid tests are reappearing on store shelves. With fewer people getting sick, many of these tests may go unsold — leading manufacturers to scale down production and raising the prospect of another cycle of scarcity the next time demand surges. That’s why the federal government should agree to act as a purchaser of last resort if test demand stumbles, preserving manufacturing capacity and stockpiling tests for a future demand surge.
As the U.S. moves into a post-pandemic world of “endemic” Covid, it would benefit from investing in ideas that could reduce the burden of respiratory disease more broadly. Now that it’s clear that these viruses spread primarily through the air, it would be good to have a clearer picture of what kind of air filters and HVAC systems are optimal for reducing the spread not just of Covid but of influenza and the common cold.
Getting people to strap masks on their face is more effective as a short-term policy intervention than pushing fundamental upgrades to the built environment. But for the longer term, the opposite is the case — and tackling both the infectious disease and pollution aspects of indoor air quality could greatly improve lives without the coercion and culture-war politics of the mask debate.
Most of all, the fact that omicron seems to have arrived and peaked too quickly for Congress to react shouldn’t be a reason for it to do nothing. The next variant might also come quickly — and could be more rather than less severe. America needs to act as quickly as possible on improving its response rather than waiting for the threat to emerge — by which time it will likely be too late.
More From Bloomberg Opinion:
- A Vaccine to Prevent All Covid Is Within Reach: Lisa Jarvis
- Omicron Is Pushing Small Businesses to the Brink: Timothy O’Brien
- Why China Can’t Loosen Up on Covid Zero Yet: Therese Raphael and Sam Fazeli
This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.
Matthew Yglesias is a columnist for Bloomberg Opinion and writes the Slow Boring blog and newsletter. A co-founder and former columnist for Vox, he is also the author, most recently, of "One Billion Americans."
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