It’s been five years this week since the World Health Organization declared the COVID-19 outbreak a global pandemic. Since then, over 103 million cases have been reported in the U.S., with over 1.2 million deaths nationwide as a result of the coronavirus.
Operation Warp Speed was launched by the Trump administration in April 2020 to expedite the development and production of COVID vaccines. Currently the U.S. has a total of five updated COVID vaccines available. The Food and Drug Administration has approved three for emergency use, while two others have been fully approved by the agency, which involves a more rigorous process that can take years.
The Department of Health and Human Services declared the COVID-19 public health emergency over on May 11, 2023. Meanwhile, the public’s trust in public health has diminished from 93% in 2023 to 85% as of January 2025, according to a recent Kaiser Family Foundation poll. “Trust in U.S. government health agencies declined during the COVID-19 pandemic, most notably following the rollout of the COVID-19 vaccines,” KFF notes.
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And as bird flu spreads across the country and there are current outbreaks of the highly contagious measles virus in Texas and New Mexico, many Americans may be wondering if the U.S. is prepared for another possible pandemic in the near future.
Yahoo News spoke with Dr. Ashish Jha, former White House COVID-19 response coordinator under the Biden administration, about what has gotten better and what needs to improve regarding pandemic preparedness. (His responses have been lightly edited for length and clarity.)
Is the U.S. prepared for another pandemic?
We are better prepared than we were five years ago. We are not as prepared as we need to be.
Preparedness is always an ongoing exercise. The U.S. military thinks a lot about preparedness, and they’re constantly exercising, they’re constantly updating. We need to have a very similar approach to thinking about health crises.
The next one may be a natural pandemic. The next one may be a biological agent that’s been man-made. We have got to be keeping on our toes.
What has improved since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic — and what needs to improve?
We have a pretty good wastewater surveillance system that can help us track the spread of viruses around the country in a way we did not five years ago; we built that. Now a majority of communities are tracking various viruses using wastewater.
What could be better is that we could expand that to more communities. We’ve got a majority, but we don’t have everybody, and we could do that better. What I worry about is that that’s going to get pulled back. A lot of that came originally from funding for COVID, and the current administration and their effort to cut everything may end up destroying our surveillance system, and that would be very, very bad.
The second thing that I think is better is we obviously have learned how to build vaccines very quickly. I think Operation Warp Speed was a huge success that taught us a lot about how to move vaccines forward.
I worry a lot about this administration’s commitment to vaccines, even though ironically it was President Trump who brought us Operation Warp Speed. But obviously we have a health secretary who undermines vaccines at every step. I think that the big challenge is: Are we going to be able to continue investing in a new generation of vaccines or not?
A third area where I think we made a lot of progress that makes us better is if we get a major threat, we have learned how we can build up treatments quickly, particularly monoclonal antibodies. We built those very rapidly during COVID. They’re going to be essential for the next pandemic, and we have to make sure we are investing in that platform.
Are there any foreseeable challenges the U.S. could face ahead of another pandemic?
Where I worry we may be worse off than we were five years ago is the sort of confidence in the scientific process. There has been such an active undermining of public health, of overplaying every mistake in public health. Now let’s be clear, public health officials, public health experts didn’t get it all right, we made mistakes, all of us did, and there is an active campaign to find every error, every mistake, and amplify it to try to discredit the entire public health enterprise. That means that if there is another crisis, it’s going to be very hard to build confidence in a science-based response. We’ve got a lot of work to do between now and whenever that next crisis happens to try to build up that confidence.
Should we be worried about bird flu?
Bird flu has been something that a lot of us have been worried about for 30 years.
It’s a virus that has a very high fatality rate. In the literature, about half the people who’ve gotten infected have died. That is obviously extraordinarily high, and we’ve all worried about it. We’ve always hoped that we would never see the day where we see a bird flu pandemic.
Unfortunately, I think what we’ve seen in the last couple of years is things kind of moving in the wrong direction. It used to be that we almost never saw mammal populations getting infected. It was almost all largely among birds with the occasional spillover to people. Now we’ve seen large mammal die-offs. We’ve seen cows get infected. Obviously, the spread among birds is very large, and all of this is just substantially increasing the risk.
So I think none of us knows if we’re going to see a bird flu pandemic in three months, three years or 30 years. … But the risk of it is very different now than it was five years ago, than even two years ago. When I say ‘different,’ I mean much higher, and we’ve got to start preparing with the concern that it might happen.
How about measles?
The problem is that if vaccination rates fall below 95% in the community, that community starts becoming vulnerable to the spread of measles. Let’s say somebody who’s unvaccinated comes from traveling abroad, brings measles back home or increasingly just gets it here, and if they go to a community with an 80% or 85% vaccination rate, you’re going to start seeing an outbreak because it’s so contagious.
Obviously, people who are not vaccinated are at risk. But I want to remind us that there are many people who are not vaccinated who wish they could be. You have immunocompromised kids who might be undergoing cancer therapy. They can’t get the vaccine, and they rely on everybody around them being vaccinated to protect them. If you’re in a community with low vaccination rates, those kids are very vulnerable.
Second is that the first dose of the measles vaccine isn’t given until 12 to 15 months.
And the CDC recommends that parents don’t travel to areas of measles outbreaks with kids less than 1 year of age until they’ve had their first shot.
Well, that’s a problem if the outbreak is in the community where you live. So you may be a parent who’s very committed to protecting your kids with vaccines, but you have a 4-month-old who can’t get a vaccine yet. And that kid is vulnerable if they get measles, and they can get quite sick, and there’s not much you can do about it, obviously, except avoiding being in contact with people with measles. But it’s so contagious that you can’t even reliably do that.
