The price of failure is high. Covid has killed more than one million Americans so far, yielding untold misery. Cases, hospitalizations and deaths are all falling, but Covid was the third leading cause of death in the United States in 2021 and seems likely to keep killing Americans for years.
Monkeypox is spreading more slowly now, and has never posed a challenge of Covid’s magnitude. But the United States has reported more monkeypox cases than any other country — 25,000, about 40 percent of the global total — and the virus is likely to persist as a constant, low-grade threat.
Both outbreaks have revealed deep fissures in the nation’s framework for containing epidemics. Add to that plummeting public trust, rampant misinformation and deep schisms — between health officials and those treating patients, and between the federal government and states. A muddled response to future outbreaks seems almost inevitable.
“We really are poorly, poorly prepared,” said Larry O. Gostin, director of the O’Neill Institute for National and Global Health Law at Georgetown University.
New infectious threats are certainly on the way, mostly because of the twin rises in global travel and vaccine hesitancy, and the growing proximity of people and animals. From 2012 to 2022, for example, Africa saw a 63 percent increase in outbreaks of pathogens that jump to people from animals, compared with the period from 2001 to 2011.
New Infectious Threats Are Coming. The US Probably Won’t Contain Them.
