Future Security Forum, New America and Arizona State University
Wednesday, September 13
10:00AM – 5:30PM EDT
ONLINE
RSVP
New America and Arizona State University are pleased to invite you to the 2023 Future Security Forum, which will be held online September 13, 2023.
The Forum is the premier annual event of New America and Arizona State University’s Future Security project—a research, education, and policy partnership that develops new paradigms for understanding and addressing new and emerging global challenges. Forum sessions ask the questions:
What Systemic Shifts Will Shape the Future of Conflict?
What Will the Future of AI Look Like?
What New Political Trends Will Shape the Future?
What Technologies Will Shape the Future of Warfare?
In What New Domains Will Conflict Occur?
What Does the Future of Security Look Like in Latin America?
What Are the Lessons of the War in Ukraine?
How Are Special Operations Forces Preparing for the Future?
Follow the conversation online using #FutureSecurityForum and follow us at @NewAmerica and @ASU.
I asked intelligence experts to decode Trump’s top secret documents. Here’s what they said, CNN.com
Editor’s Note: Peter Bergen is CNN’s national security analyst, a vice president at New America, a professor of practice at Arizona State University, and the host of the Audible podcast “In the Room with Peter Bergen” also on Apple and Spotify. The opinions expressed in this commentary are his own. View more opinion at CNN.
CNN —
At the heart of the case of “United States of America v. Donald J. Trump and Waltine Nauta” are 31 classified documents that former President Donald Trump kept at his Mar-a-Lago club, each briefly described in the indictment against him.
Trump has pleaded not guilty to the charges and given a variety of defenses for his handling of the documents.
Those 31 documents are alluded to in the indictment using an intelligence shorthand, such as one labeled: “TOP SECRET//[redacted]/[redacted]// ORCON/NOFORN” that is followed by a brief description: “Document dated June 2020 concerning nuclear capabilities of a foreign country.”
To decipher the intelligence markings of the classified documents and how sensitive the intelligence they contain might be, I turned to two of the United States’ leading experts on intelligence.
Douglas London is a retired, 34-year veteran of the CIA’s Clandestine Service with multiple postings in the Middle East, Africa and Asia, who spent much of his career recruiting agents in foreign countries and who has written a very interesting book about his experiences, “The Recruiter: Spying and the Lost Art of American Intelligence,” along with frequent contributions to CNN Opinion.
I also spoke to Mark Stout, a historian who has written or co-edited several books about intelligence and who also served for more than a decade as an intelligence analyst at the State Department and the CIA.
London and Stout walked me through what can be learned about the documents in the indictment. (You can hear excerpts of my conversations with them on my podcast, ”Decoding the Trump Indictment”) So, let’s start with the one I just mentioned, “TOP SECRET//[redacted]/[redacted]// ORCON/NOFORN. Document dated June 2020 concerning nuclear capabilities of a foreign country.”
London points out that this document about the nuclear program of a foreign country is so sensitive that even two of the codenames related to the document “have been redacted because of their sensitivity.”
The category of this document, “TOP SECRET,” is the highest category of classification, which means that releasing the intelligence in the document would do “exceptionally grave damage to the national security” of the US.
Further underlining the sensitivity of the intelligence in this document about the nuclear program of a foreign country is the notation “ORCON,” which is short for “Originator Control,” meaning that whichever US intelligence agency produced this document would need to approve before the document could be shared with any other agency within the US government, according to London. And “NOFORN” is almost self-explanatory: The document can’t be shared with foreigners.
I asked London about another document labeled “TOP SECRET//HCS-P/SI//ORCON-USGOV/NOFORN” which is described as an “Undated document concerning military activity of a foreign country.”
Having spent decades recruiting foreigners to betray their secrets to the CIA, London quickly pointed out that “HCS-P” means “Human Control System,” which is intelligence acquired from a human source, while the “P” refers to “Product.”
In other words, intelligence in the document seems to have come from a well-placed spy working for the CIA, while the “SI” in this document refers to Signals Intelligence, so the intelligence also likely involved some signals interception by the US government, for instance, from an electronic source such as a cell phone.
London said a document about the “military capabilities of a foreign country” from January 2020 marked “TOP SECRET//[redacted]/TK//ORCON/IMCON/NOFORN” once again had a classified code word which was itself so secret that it had been redacted, while the notation “TK” is short for “Talent Keyhole,” which means that the intelligence was derived by overhead imagery of some sort, likely from satellite systems.
London then explained a point I hadn’t fully considered before: “Documents are classified to protect the sources so that we can continue collecting that information and protect the sources who are doing it. The sourcing and the collection technology is usually the most sensitive aspect, not the information itself. If you find out about Iranian war plans, Russian war plans, Chinese war plans, you know how many planes, tanks and where they might attack. But the way you collected it is what’s most sensitive.”
Those must be protected, not only because a spy for the CIA could possibly be executed but also because if a spy is uncovered or a particular technical intelligence collection method is revealed, an entire stream of important intelligence might dry up – preventing the US from learning much more about potential threats to national security.
I then asked the intelligence historian Mark Stout about six of the documents in the indictment, each of which is labeled in a similar manner as both “TOP SECRET” and “SPECIAL HANDLING,” and all of which are described as being about “White House intelligence briefing(s),” that took place on two dates in 2018, three dates in 2019 and one in 2020.
Stout says these are “almost certainly a reference to either the President’s Daily Brief or to documents given to or briefed to President Trump during the President’s Daily Brief.”
The President’s Daily Brief typically concerns an issue the president is interested in or doesn’t know about already, but is so significant that potentially “his hair is going to be on fire when you tell him,” according to Stout.
Stout explained that the President’s Daily Brief is among the US intelligence community’s crown jewels, “And you don’t want foreign powers to know what the intelligence community is telling the president in a very closed meeting in the Oval Office.“
Trump stored these classified documents in various locations, including a ballroom and a bathroom at Mar-a-Lago, a resort club where, according to the indictment, tens of thousands of guests visited after Trump had left the presidency.
The cavalier way that Trump stored some of the most sensitive secrets gathered by the US government, according to London and Stout, all of which were likely gathered at significant financial cost and possibly human risk by the US government, surely disqualifies him from once again being considered to be the commander in chief whose primary duty is to the nation’s security and to keep his fellow Americans safe.
The fiasco at Mar-a-Lago that is alleged in the indictment against him suggests that Trump could care less about this fundamental duty.
An earlier version of this article incorrectly said the “P” in HCS-P stands for “proprietary,” denoting that it comes from a particularly sensitive human source operation. In fact, it stands for “product,” meaning that it is a raw, not finally evaluated intelligence report.
A blistering indictment of the Trump-Biden legacy in Afghanistan, CNN.com
Editor’s Note: Peter Bergen is CNN’s national security analyst, a vice president at New America, a professor of practice at Arizona State University, and the host of the Audible podcast “In the Room” also on Apple and Spotify. The opinions expressed in this commentary are his own. View more opinion at CNN.
CNN —
The latest United Nations report on the Taliban published Friday is a blistering indictment of the delusions that surrounded the US withdrawal agreement with the Taliban that was negotiated by Donald Trump’s administration in 2020.
President Joe Biden followed through on that agreement almost two years ago when he withdrew all US troops from Afghanistan in a chaotic evacuation that marked the end of the US’ longest war.
The withdrawal agreement was supposed to be predicated on the Taliban negotiating with the elected Afghan government about some kind of power-sharing arrangement and cutting their ties to terrorist groups like al Qaeda. But none of that happened.
After Biden announced the impending withdrawal of all US troops, the chief negotiator with the Taliban for both Biden and Trump administrations, Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad, testified in May 2021 to the US House Foreign Affairs Committee that the Taliban “seek normalcy in terms of… removal from sanctions, not to remain a pariah.”
But international pariahs the Taliban have remained. Not a single country recognizes them as the legitimate Afghan government 21 months after they took over the country.
The belief by some US officials that the Taliban would become normal political actors as they attained more power was a classic case of falling into the trap of what intelligence analysts term “mirror-imaging” – which is the often erroneous assumption that American rivals will tend to act just like the United States would act.
In this case, the mirror-imaging error was the belief that as the Taliban gained power, they would abandon some of their most noxious policies, such as the exclusion of females from education after the age of 12 and their coddling of terrorist groups, so they could eventually secure recognition from countries around the world that they are the legitimate Afghan government.
But as the new 20-page UN report lays out in detail, the Taliban of today that were supposedly seeking “normalcy” are just as bad as the old Taliban, maybe worse.
The report notes that “promises made by the Taliban in August 2021 to be more inclusive, break with terrorist groups…and not pose a security threat to other countries seem increasingly hollow, if not plain false, in 2023.”
Indeed, approximately 20 terrorist groups are operating in Afghanistan, according to the UN, and “terrorist groups have greater freedom of maneuver” under the new Taliban regime. The report also indicates that the link between the Taliban and al Qaeda “remains strong and symbiotic.”
That symbiotic relationship was underlined last summer when the leader of al Qaeda, Ayman al Zawahiri, was killed in a US drone strike in downtown Kabul. Zawahiri was living in Kabul with the “awareness” of Taliban officials, according to a Biden senior administration official.
The UN estimates 400 al Qaeda fighters live in Afghanistan and says some members of the terrorist group have received appointments in the Taliban administration as well as monthly “welfare payments.”
Nothing says you are breaking with al Qaeda like providing a safe haven to their leader and giving members of the terrorist group jobs and money handouts.
Worrisomely, al Qaeda is “covertly rebuilding its external operations capability,” according to the UN, i.e., its ability to launch attacks outside of Afghanistan.
The local branch of ISIS in Afghanistan, known as ISIS-K, is estimated to consist of 4,000 to 6,000 fighters, including family members, per the report. While the Taliban and ISIS-K have sometimes clashed, the Taliban have proven incapable of removing this ISIS affiliate from their territory.
The Pakistani Taliban continue to base themselves in Afghanistan with an estimated 4,000 to 6,000 fighters and have launched over a hundred attacks against Pakistan since November 2022, according to the report.
Meanwhile, Afghanistan – until the summer of 2021, a flawed elective democracy – is now a theocratic dictatorship led by the Taliban’s clerical leader, Hibatullah Akhundzada. Known as “the Commander of the Faithful” and rarely seen in public, the Taliban leader lives in the southern Afghan city of Kandahar, where he issues “ever more conservative” edicts, the UN report explains.
Some of these edicts include banning women from working for UN organizations that provide essential services for millions of Afghans and banning girls from being educated after the age of 12.
Emphasizing the Taliban’s’ estrangement from the rest of the world, 58 Taliban officials are sanctioned by the UN. Of these, an astonishing 35 hold cabinet-level positions in the de facto Afghan government, according to the report.
Edmund Fitton-Brown, the former coordinator of the UN team that monitors the Taliban, told me that a key takeaway of the new report is the extent to which some senior Taliban remain involved in the drug trade. The Taliban’s production of opium and methamphetamine is lucrative. “Total profits made by all those involved in the drug trade are about $1.2 billion,” said Fitton-Brown. For comparison, total Taliban revenues from official sources are estimated at $2.2 billion, according to the UN report. The continuing scale of the drug trade is despite a decree last year from the Taliban’s leader that banned drug production.
Fitton-Brown, a senior fellow at the think tank New America, also told me that the report underlines that the Taliban look “worse today than they did a year ago” because they are led by an “inaccessible, inflexible, religious leader.” They are also not living up to their agreements with the US when they inked the 2020 withdrawal agreement, particularly regarding the continuing presence of multiple terrorist groups on their soil, such as al Qaeda and the Pakistani Taliban.
And the Taliban are today armed to the teeth thanks to the stockpile of arms that was left behind as the US and other NATO forces withdrew from Afghanistan. That arsenal consists of 70,000 armored vehicles, 20 assault aircraft, more than 100 helicopters and around half a million rounds of ammunition, according to the UN, and is worth an estimated $8.5 billion – more than the defense budgets of many European countries.
In sum, “debacle” seems almost too kind a word to describe the Trump-Biden legacy in Afghanistan.
Episode 4 CIA Secret Museum
Tucked away deep inside the intelligence agency’s headquarters in Langley, VA is a museum most of us will never see. It chronicles the organization’s history—including some of its most important missions and greatest failures. The public isn’t allowed in, but in this episode you get a peek inside.
GHOSTS OF BEIRUT: SHOWTIME
Peter Bergen was a producer
Can You Trust the Pentagon About UFOs?
A media frenzy erupted when a Chinese spy balloon crossed the skies above the United States, but that was hardly the first UFO to violate American airspace. U.S. warplanes have shot down multiple UFOs this year and the government has reported over 150 more mysterious sightings in recent years that it can’t explain. Pilots and former Pentagon officials say it’s time for the U.S. government to study the issue seriously and tell the public what it knows. But the Pentagon’s bizarre history of stifling — and stoking — UFO panic makes it hard to know how out-there the truth will turn out to be.
What Keeps General David Petraeus Up at Night?
The celebrated American general takes you on a world tour of hotspots, sizes up the threats posed by China and Russia, assesses the risk of a military coup in the U.S., discusses a future where AI-powered machines are doing most of the war-fighting, and explains why he thinks the most apt metaphor for the challenges facing America in the current global landscape is…a very tricky circus act
Will Vladimir Putin Get Away with War Crimes?
When a newly-hired intern at the International Criminal Court was arrested and revealed to be a Russian spy, it begged the question: what was he up to? Now that Vladimir Putin has a warrant from this court for his arrest, it’s not hard to imagine the spy was planning to tell Moscow about evidence that is accumulating in the case against Russia for its atrocities in Ukraine. Turns out the evidence is abundant — and this may be the conflict that finally makes it hard to get away with war crimes.
“Soldiers Don’t Go Mad,” book event with Charles Glass, New America Online
[ONLINE] – Soldiers Don’t Go Mad
Brotherhood, Poetry, and Mental Illness During the First World War
EVENT
From the moment war broke out across Europe in 1914, the world entered a new, unparalleled era of modern warfare. Within the first four months of the war, the British Army recorded the nervous collapse of ten percent of its officers. In his new book Soldiers Don’t Go Mad, New America International Security Program Fellow Charles Glass draws upon rich source materials from World War One and his own deep understanding of trauma and war to tell the story of the soldiers and doctors who struggled with the effects of industrial warfare on the human psyche. Told through the lens of two soldier-poets during World War One, Soldiers Don’t Go Mad investigates the roots of what we now know as post-traumatic stress disorder. In doing so, Glass brings historical bearing to questions of how war affects mental health and how creative work can help people come to terms with even the darkest of times.
Join New America’s International Security Program for a discussion with Charles Glass, author of Soldiers Don’t Go Mad: A Story of Brotherhood, Poetry, and Mental Illness During the First World War. Glass is a fellow with New America’s International Security program and a writer, journalist, broadcaster and publisher, who has written on conflict in the Middle East, Africa and Europe for the past forty-five years.
Join the conversation online using #SoldiersDontGoMad and following @NewAmericaISP.
Participant:
Charles Glass
Author, Soldiers Don’t Go Mad
Fellow, New America International Security Program
Moderator:
Peter Bergen, @peterbergencnn
Vice President, New America
Co-Director, Center on the Future of War, ASU
Professor of Practice, ASU
The unnecessary price of Covid-19, CNN.com
Opinion by Peter Bergen
Published 2:24 PM EDT, Mon April 24, 2023
Editor’s Note: Peter Bergen is CNN’s national security analyst, a vice president at New America, and a professor of practice at Arizona State University. He is the author of “The Cost of Chaos: The Trump Administration and the World ” and was the founding editor of the Coronavirus Daily Brief. The opinions expressed in this commentary are his own. View more opinion at CNN.
CNN
—
According to a new report, half a million Americans may have died unnecessarily of Covid-19. At the same time, the US government spent trillions to deal with the pandemic when better preparedness could have saved many lives and much money. American schools were also closed for many months unnecessarily, with students paying the price.
The report, “Lessons from the Covid War,” by the Covid Crisis Group, is being published as a 347-page book Tuesday. It will likely stand as the most authoritative account of American policy failures and successes during the war against Covid-19.
The report makes for sobering reading, concluding that “no country’s performance was more disappointing than the United States.” The group came to that conclusion because, despite the great depth of scientific knowledge in the United States, American “excess deaths” during the pandemic were about 40% higher than the European death rate.
If the US had had a similar rate to Europe by the end of 2022, “probably” at least half a million Americans wouldn’t have died, according to the report. That’s a big number. The federal government also deployed $5 trillion to deal with the consequences of the pandemic. That is also a big number.
So how did the US get into this mess?
Given America’s hyper-partisanship, just about everything about the Covid-19 pandemic was deeply politicized – from the precise origins of the coronavirus in China, to lockdowns, mask-wearing, school closures, vaccines, and the best drugs for treatment.
As a result, there has been scant official reckoning over how the government fared during the pandemic and what lessons might be learned for the inevitable next pandemic.
A 2022 bipartisan bill seeking to establish a National Covid Commission never made it to the floor for a vote in the US Congress. This is astonishing when you consider that more Americans have died of Covid – around 1.1 million so far – than all the Americans who died in every US war going back to the American Revolution.
So, without a congressionally mandated inquiry like the 9/11 Commission, 34 American public health experts, physicians, and other policy experts decided to investigate what went right and wrong during the pandemic.
Starting their work in early 2021, the non-partisan Covid Crisis Group conducted “listening sessions” with 274 people who had played some role in responding to the pandemic or had been affected by it.
The group was directed by Philp Zelikow, a leading historian and former senior State Department official in the George W. Bush administration who had also served as the Executive Director of the 9/11 Commission, which had set the gold standard for how to conduct a comprehensive examination of a major catastrophe and the lessons that could be learned from it.
Other members of the Covid Crisis Group included Michael Osterholm of the University of Minnesota who had been publicly warning of the emergence of a global pandemic for a decade and a half before Covid-19 first emerged; Dr. Margaret “Peggy” Hamburg, the former Commissioner of the US Food and Drug Administration and Dr. Ezekiel J. Emanuel, former chair of the Department of Bioethics at the National Institutes of Health.
Origins
The report examines both the “lab leak” theory that the coronavirus accidentally escaped from a research lab in Wuhan, China, and the natural transmission theory that the virus moved from a wild animal into humans. But the report doesn’t come down on the side of either theory, which seems fair enough given the inadequate evidence.
Dr. Drew Weissman and Katalin Karikó of the University of Pennsylvania
Opinion: Thought mRNA vaccines would end with the pandemic? Think again
The Chinese government’s penchant for secrecy was on full display in the early days of the outbreak. As a result, the origin issue may never be fully settled as it would have required considerable transparency by the government about what was happening in Wuhan at the beginning of the pandemic.
Yet, as the report points out, “both theories drive toward common urgent insights for action.” If the virus occurred because of animal transmission, that calls for improved surveillance for new viruses, using tools such as monitoring both work absenteeism and Internet searches that might indicate new viruses may be making the rounds, as well as increased biomedical surveillance.
And if it was a lab leak, better safeguards must be put in place for research on viruses worldwide given that “synthetic biology” will likely be one of the defining technologies of the 21st century.
The botched US response
The American health system is a patchwork of 2,800 state and local systems, according to the report. This would have made a coordinated national response to Covid-19 challenging to pull off in any administration, but the Trump administration’s response at the federal level “failed quickly.”
Some Trump officials did understand the likely dimensions of the Covid pandemic early on. Matthew Pottinger, a former Wall Street Journal reporter who spoke Mandarin and had covered the SARS outbreak in China, served as senior director for Asia at the National Security Council. Pottinger warned then-President Donald Trump in late January 2020 that the virus spread quickly from human to human, often without apparent symptoms.
A customer wears a face mask as they lift weights while working out inside a Planet Fitness Inc. gym as the location reopens after being closed due to the Covid-19 pandemic, on March 16, 2021 in Inglewood, California.
Opinion: Were masks useless? The deceptive interpretation of what science tells us
The Trump administration soon banned non-American travelers from China from arriving in the US. While that may have slowed the spread of the virus in the U.S. a bit right at the beginning of the pandemic, travel bans were not especially effective given that the coronavirus is so transmissible, often spreading without symptoms in an age of mass global travel.
A problem in the US government’s early response was the lack of effective tests for the virus during the first months of the pandemic. By contrast, South Korea, better prepared for the emergency, had tens of thousands of tests running daily by mid-February 2020, according to the report.
The report found that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) – despite its name suggesting that it is at the forefront of preventing the spread of disease – didn’t do operational pandemic preparedness, but instead acts as a quasi-academic institution that collects and analyzes data after an incident has happened. In a chilling finding, the report says when it came to tracking Covid-19 cases in the United States, researchers at The Atlantic magazine’s Covid Tracking Project did a better job in real-time than the CDC did.
There has been scant official reckoning over how the government fared during the pandemic and what lessons might be learned for the inevitable next pandemic.
Compounding the problem at the federal level was President Trump, who, as is well known, continuously played down the threat posed by the virus and refused to wear a mask when masking was one of the few tools that prevented the spread of the virus before vaccines. By April 2020, Trump had decided that Covid wasn’t much worse than the flu, and he wanted to “reopen” the economy as he was “deep into his reelection campaign,” according to the report.
As a result, the Covid Crisis Group concluded that “Trump was a co-morbidity” with Covid. Comorbidity is a medical term meaning that a patient suffers from two or more chronic diseases simultaneously.
With little in the way of federal executive leadership, the war against Covid-19 was left up to the governors of the 50 states and to local authorities. The conventional narrative that red states favored opening up for the economy’s sake and blue states favored shutting down to save lives is overly simplistic, according to the report.
Most states adopted more of a purple approach whether they were run by Republican or Democratic governors – they chose to begin to open up when the virus seemed to be abating, as it was in May 2020, and close back down again whenever the virus came roaring back, as it did in the winter of 2020-2021.
Given the understandable angst that many Americans had over school closures, the report points to some fascinating data from UNESCO showing that in countries like France and Spain, schools closed or partly closed for only two weeks and 15 weeks, respectively. While in the US the average school closures lasted 77 weeks, which particularly affected children from disadvantaged communities and kids with disabilities. “Closed schools, even with remote education, failed many students, particularly those already most at risk for disrupted learning,” the report noted.
The UNESCO school data suggests that there must have been a more thoughtful way to manage American school closures. The report points to research about safe and smart ways to keep schools open that was undertaken by Covid Crisis Group member Danielle Allen of Harvard, Brown University, and the research institution, New America (where I work), as emblematic of an approach that could have been followed but wasn’t. It included developing infection prevention and control programs at each school.
Operation Warp Speed
The operation to develop workable vaccines was a true American success story. The report credits a framework outlined by Richard Danzig, a former US Secretary of the Navy with expertise in biowarfare, who wrote to an informal network of colleagues in late March 2020, advocating for “previously unthinkable government support” for vaccines financially and for expediting their laborious approval process.
Danzig also recommended invoking the Defense Production Act so that the manufacturing of the vaccines could be scaled up quickly. Danzig said that if the right resources were directed at developing a vaccine, it could be available as quickly as only six months, which would be an extraordinarily fast turnaround as typically effective vaccines take five to ten years to develop.
Danzig’s ideas helped germinate Operation Warp Speed, led on the Pentagon side by General Gustave Perna, an expert on logistics, and on the civilian side by a former Big Pharma executive, Dr. Moncef Slaoui. With political top cover provided by the president’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, who supported Operation Warp Speed, General Perna secured $26 billion to fund the operation, according to the report.
The vaccines that succeeded in Operation Warp Speed were based on messenger RNA (mRNA) rather than on a weakened or inactive form of the virus typical of many vaccines. Using mRNA, researchers made cells produce a protein that instigated the immune response against the coronavirus. The basic science of mRNA had been around for decades, but it had never been used in a workable vaccine.
Companies such as Pfizer and Moderna produced effective vaccines in just months. The government invested $1 billion in Moderna and placed another $1.5 billion order for 100 million vaccine doses. Pfizer didn’t take US government money during the research phase for its vaccine, but the government initially guaranteed to buy more than 100 million doses from Pfizer for $1.95 billion.
As Danzig had suggested, the Defense Production Act ensured that the materials needed to make the vaccines were quickly secured. At the same time, the government partnered with major American pharmacy chains to ensure that jabs got into arms quickly once they became available.
The report underlines how a perfect constellation of factors made Operation Warp Speed succeed, including the right leaders at the Pentagon and in the private sector harnessing existing, long-term basic research into mRNA. Operation Warp Speed was arguably the most significant achievement of President Trump and his administration.
You might have the best vaccines in the world, but that doesn’t do you much good if there are substantial percentages of your own population who are hesitant to be vaccinated.
A National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine panel co-chaired by Dr. Helene Gayle – who had led efforts to combat AIDS at the CDC – warned in October 2020 that the CDC needed to develop a campaign using behavioral science and social marketing techniques while partnering with hospitals, faith-based organizations, and community centers to help increase vaccination uptake. But as the report notes, “That didn’t happen.”
Vaccinations also became politicized; by July 2022, 90% of Democrats reported being vaccinated to some level, compared to only 69% of Republicans. It turns out that your politics, in this case, could literally kill you.
During the Delta wave of Covid-19 in 2021 and the Omicron wave of 2022, “the vast majority of hospitalized patients were unvaccinated,” according to the report. By early 2022, one study found that there were somewhere between 120,000 and more than 350,000 excess deaths in the US because of vaccine hesitancy.
What should be done?
The key to preparing for the next pandemic is, of course, preparedness. The Covid Crisis Group underlines how “time is everything” when managing a possible pandemic, as just one week can mean the difference between a mere outbreak and the emergence of a full-blown pandemic. That means creating “early warning radars” worldwide that can detect emerging threats and ensuring the most stringent controls at labs around the world doing “gain of function” research so manipulated viruses don’t escape into the outside world.
The Covid Crisis Group has performed a major public service with its comprehensive investigation of the pandemic, an investigation that the US political system proved largely incapable of doing. This itself points to a general failure of American governance that the report underlines on many of its pages.
Still, the publication of this report by a group of concerned experts is also a testament to the enduring strengths of American civil society, which Alexis de Tocqueville had noted in his travels around the United States almost two centuries ago.
