University of Michigan public health and pandemic preparedness expert, Anand Parekh, advised federal policymakers on protecting the public from COVID-19 as the never-before-seen virus swept the globe and claimed millions of lives.
Parekh, a board-certified internal medicine physician, served as a deputy health secretary at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services and as chief medical advisor at the Bipartisan Policy Center from 2015-25. In that role he helped provide thought leadership that informed Congress and the White House on best practices for managing the pandemic.
As those decisions are called into question following the U.S. Senate hearing of Dr. Anthony Fauci, who served as former chief health advisor to President Donald Trump, Parekh offers his thoughts:
On policy priorities
Dr. Fauci & Sen. Rand Paul's long-standing argument about the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic ignores the fact that from a policy perspective what's most important is to both improve laboratory safety and to reduce zoonotic transmission- the transfer of infectious disease between humans and animals.
On historical accuracy
In all the revisionist discussion about the pandemic, there's little recognition that, one, most deaths were preventable, and, two, had the nation done nothing, millions more would have died.
The first is a reminder that so many more lives could have been saved had a few key public health interventions been embraced by the public. And the second is a reminder that the determination, innovation, and humanity of the American public limited the devastation of the pandemic.
On lockdowns
What one hears is a continued critique of lockdowns (there were time limited stay-home orders in the spring of 2020), and no recognition that masking recommendations and vaccine effectiveness changed as we learned more about modes of transmission and experienced new variants, respectively.
There were many lessons learned: leadership matters, crisis communication is critical, access to real-time data is imperative, and investments in tools and the workforce are essential.
On pandemic vulnerability
Unfortunately, these lessons are not being heeded; on the contrary, the current administration has effectively shuttered the White House pandemic office, cancelled mRNA vaccine research and actively dismantled the nation's public health infrastructure, not to mention ensuring COVID spillover effects create broader vaccine hesitancy. This isn't a way to build trust with the public; rather it leaves us more vulnerable to the next health emergency.
