What We Need to Do Now to Get Ready for the Next Pandemic

• Experts say there are things we can start doing now to prepare for the next pandemic after COVID-19.
• Among the items are vaccine research, strengthening our healthcare system, and ramping up on medical supplies.
• They add that developing consistent messaging to avoid confusion is also important.

Experts say we got lucky when it comes to the vaccines for COVID-19.

Lucky in the sense that a handful of scientists at the National Institutes of Health had been studying the coronavirus for a decade. It was how they were able to come up with a vaccine formula so quickly.

One of those scientists, Dr. Barney S. Graham, deputy director of the Vaccine Research Center at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), was warning his colleague of the need to start working on a vaccine for the next pandemic.

That was in 2017 — more than 2 years before COVID-19 began its worldwide circulation.

Graham wrote about what was then a theoretical approach in 2018. He predicted the research might be able to identify antibodies that block the viruses, even before they caused epidemics.

Now, Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the NIAID, said it’s time to put that idea into practice.

Fauci told the New York Times he’s proposing a project that would develop prototype vaccines for 20 families of viruses, any one of which could spark the next pandemic. It would cost billions of dollars, require lots of scientists, and it might take 5 years to get the first prototypes.