Dr. Rich Besser: Not Ready For Next Pandemic

A major concern is that society and experts are not prepared for the next major pandemic, Robert Wood Johnson Foundation President and CEO Dr. Rich Besser told ABC News' "This Week with George Stephanopoulos" on Sunday.

Besser, who led preparedness and response at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention for four years, said, "What we tend to see after any major public health crisis is fatigue. And so our legislators, instead of enacting what needs to take place so that we're in better shape, spend most of their time figuring out who they want to blame for things that didn't go well. And there's a lot of room for blame to go around."

Besser said "there's a number of things that need to change" in order to do a better job for the next pandemic.

"We learned during the pandemic that if you give everyone health insurance they do better," he said. "And now as the public health emergency is ending, a lot of people who had health insurance are seeing that go away. A lot of people who had extra money for food are seeing that go away. A lot of people who had free access to COVID testing are seeing that go away."

When asked what it actually means that the public health emergency will be lifted on May 11, as per the Biden administration's decision, Besser said, "When a pandemic is declared — and that's declared by the World Health Organization — it's a statement that we are, in a sense, we are in global emergency. We are being overwhelmed by a new, infectious agent."

So, Besser went on, "what we're saying now and what the government will be saying here in May is not that COVID is over. It's not that there won't continue to be transmission, but the emergency status of that has changed so that our health care system can handle patients with this. COVID becomes another one of the infectious agents that we deal with all the time, and we're able to step back and say, 'OK, the emergency powers, the emergency situation of this has ended.'

"It doesn't mean that we don't need to continue to provide for people what they need to stay safe, to stay healthy," he continued. "But the way that's done becomes part of how we handle all the other infections that we face every day."

Besser said that even thought most people who had COVID recover fully, "there are millions of people in our country who has symptoms that don't go away right after the infection."

He said, "With any new infectious agent, what we don't know far exceeds what we do know. And what we're seeing with this infection, like quite a number of other infections, is that some people respond differently."

Besser said the National Institutes of Health is studying and "trying to understand, what are some of the triggers for this? What are the causes? Is it an immune reaction? Is it a direct effect from the infection itself? And, most importantly, what can be done to help people recover from this?"

He added, "Hopefully, the scientific community, the medical community will be able to help all these people who have symptoms that have persisted get back to their normal lives."

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