COVID Emergency: Lessons Unlearned

May 11 marks the end of the COVID-19 federal public health emergency, which gave the U.S. government flexibility to expand access to testing, treatment and care for Americans in response to the pandemic. Robert Weissman, president of Public Citizen, has outlined four unlearned lessons from the COVID emergency and issued the following statement:

“Amid the devastation wreaked by COVID, we saw from positive and negative examples that We the People have the power to end ripoffs, ensure health care for all, share the benefits of innovation globally, proactively prevent the spread of disease and eliminate poverty. With the end of the COVID public health emergency, however, it appears we are poised tragically to leave those lessons unlearned.

“One pandemic failure was the inability to rein in corporate greed and profiteering in response to the crisis. Moderna is the poster child of such greed. Even though taxpayers provided almost all of the financing for the vaccine sold by Moderna, the company gouged taxpayers, with its executives becoming billionaires. Moderna even plans to quadruple COVID vaccine prices.

“Going forward, the government must impose contractual terms requiring recipients of federal biomedical research and development support to price their products reasonably and affordably.

“Another massive pandemic fiasco was gross vaccine inequality, marked by a failure to share and scale up mRNA vaccine technology and production globally. This made it more likely that new variants would emerge and that COVID would evolve into an endemic disease, which has in fact occurred. Going forward, the U.S. should fund and commit to sharing mRNA technology with the World Health Organization’s mRNA Technology Transfer Program.

“Despite its failures, there were important pandemic successes that must be carried over beyond the public health emergency. Federal government rules required states to keep people on Medicaid during the pandemic, expanding access to health care until the ‘continuous enrollment’ rule ended in March. Going forward, Medicaid should require states to adopt measures to keep eligible Medicaid persons enrolled.

“Beyond that, the United States should recognize that health care is a right and that everyone should be guaranteed quality health care through enacting Medicare for All.

“The pandemic also showed that we can and must cut child poverty. The American Rescue Plan extended and fixed gaps in the Child Tax Credit, leading to the lowest level of child poverty on record. There were especially large reductions in child poverty in Black and Latino families. Unfortunately, the expanded Child Tax Credit was allowed to lapse.”