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How prepared are we for all that? Not very. To its credit, this Administration has struggled to get ahead of the curve. Former Health and Human Services Secretary Tommy Thompson considered influenza among his highest priorities. In his last speech as Secretary, he called it his gravest concern. Under him, funding for influenza increased 1,000% despite opposition from House Republicans, who took the threat seriously only after last year's vaccine debacle, when almost half the nation's supply became unavailable because of contamination.
That problem highlighted a weakness in the vaccine-production infrastructure, which, as public-health expert Michael Osterholm says, "is our levee system against a catastrophic event." But even in a perfect world, virtually no vaccine would be available for the first six months of a pandemic. And the Administration has left huge holes in our preparedness. After years of delays, a pandemic plan still needs to be finished.
Yet the clearest lesson from Katrina is that plans are not enough. They must be put into practice. Preparation matters. Even in the chaos of 1918, people who knew what to expect and had been trained did their duty, often in heroic fashion. San Francisco was the only major city in which the local leadership told the truth about the disease. It organized emergency hospitals, volunteer ambulance drivers, soup kitchens and the like in advance. There, although fear certainly showed itself, it did not paralyze. If we prepare well enough, we won't need heroes; we'll just need people doing their jobs.
Barry is visiting scholar at the Tulane-Xavier Center for Bioenvironmental Research and the author of The Great Influenza