On the eve of the expiration date for the federally declared coronavirus public health emergencyWhite House Covid-19 response coordinator Ashish Jha warned that the pandemic is far from over.
“I don’t see this as an end to the pandemic or the fight against Covid,” Jha said Wednesday at a STAT event at the Boston Public Library. “I see this as a transition from this emergency phase to a completely different phase.”
While emergency policies that allow hospitals to take measures such as setting up beds in parking lots are no longer needed and the US has come a long way in pandemic preparedness, Jha said there is still more work to be done. “Are we better prepared? Yes,’ he said. “Are we where we need to be? No.”
Jha spoke as a member of the 2023 STATUS list, which recognized 46 leaders and newsmakers in the fields of health, medicine and science. The people who landed on the most recent annual list and attended the event ranged from Renee Wegrzyn, director of the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health, a newly formed federal life sciences organization, to Jesse Ehrenfeld, president-elect of the American Medical Association , and Toyin Ajayi, co-founder and CEO of health technology startup Cityblock Health.
Asked about the most surprising challenges the US has faced over the past three years of the pandemic, Jha cited the level of politicization surrounding the virus and the sheer amount of medical misinformation. For example, he noted that social media has drawn disproportionate attention to Covid rebound cases among people who had taken Paxlovid.
“I think there’s a huge amount of bad information out there,” Jha told STAT senior writer Matthew Herper. “How do you restore confidence in public health? How do you restore confidence in vaccines?”
Another unfortunate surprise, Jha said, is “how difficult it has been to drive the forces to do the things we know we can do to really get Covid under control.”
That includes building better vaccine platforms and investing in bringing faster tests to market, Jha said.
Jha is tight-lipped about his future after the White House finishes setting up the Office of Pandemic Preparedness and Response Policy that Congress mandated in December. But he noted that he has always had a wide variety of interests throughout his career.
“For three years I have thought of nothing but one virus,” said Jha. Now he looks forward to reflecting on the broader issues the pandemic has created, including the decline in US life expectancy and social determinants of health.
Many of the other STATUS List members at the event were similarly concerned about health inequalities. Daniel Dawes, executive director of the newly established Global Health Equity Institute at Meharry Medical College, spoke of the need for the medical community to focus more on “political determinants of health,” adding that for several vulnerable populations, “voices can make the difference between life and death.”
Epidemiologist Marc Lipsitch, scientific director of the CDC Center for Forecasting and Outbreak Analytics, lamented that despite a pandemic that has claimed the lives of more than 1 million Americans, there is still no large-scale movement to stop these kinds of disasters from happening. again.
Steven Pearson, founder and president of the nonprofit Institute for Clinical and Economic Review, noted that it is essential to keep access issues in mind when determining drug pricing. At a recent international meeting in Boston, he said, a prominent investor in the medical community asked, “What’s the harm in overestimating innovation and overpaying for it?” The damage, Pearson said, is that people who need those drugs end up being unable to afford rising health insurance and out-of-pocket costs. “If we pretend there are no real compromises, the people who are hurt are the most vulnerable in society.”
Supporting health professionals was another major concern for this year’s group of STATUS List members. Vanessa Grubbs, founder and president of Black Doc Village, noted that while there is a lot of debate about the importance of getting more black people in the pipeline to become doctors, “not enough people are talking about the fact that medicine is getting young black people turn off.” Although about 5% of the country’s medical residents are black, they are responsible for 20% of layoffs, Grubbs said.
The AMA’s Ehrenfeld also said there needs to be more discussion about the real dangers of a health care workforce shortage. “I think everyone recognizes the burnout we all feel,” he said. But unless changes are made, “we are about to run into a workforce wall at 90 miles per hour…which has huge implications for access and health equity.”
This story has been updated.
