THREAD: Was the coronavirus crisis unforeseen and unstoppable?

Four years ago, in Spring 2016, @DemJournal asked an all-star group to sketch out the possible foreign policy threats in the next administration.

Read what @RonaldKlain wrote: https://democracyjournal.org/magazine/40/confronting-the-pandemic-threat/

“Sometime during the next President’s term, her or his national security team may be summoned to the Oval Office to discuss a catastrophe of historic proportions: more than a million deaths in just a few weeks in a far corner of the world, sparking the fall of several governments

giving rise to a violent conflict over scarce resources, and unleashing a refugee crisis as fleeing victims encounter closed borders at every turn. Worse still, the President will be told, there is an increasing risk that such death and disruption may soon arrive in the U.S.

The cause of such a crisis could be a series of terrorist dirty bombs, or a weather disaster (or famine) exacerbated by climate change, or a rogue state with biochemical or nuclear weapons. All of these are possible.

But the single most likely cause of such a nightmare scenario is not any of these oft-discussed security threats but an oft-overlooked one: pandemic illness.”

From there @RonaldKlain went out to describe specific, actionable steps the next president should take to be prepared for a pandemic and respond quickly when it strikes:
1. a new Pandemic Prevention Directorate in the NSC

2. a new Public Health Emergency Management Agency (PhEMA) to mobilize the response to a major outbreak in the United States
3. build on the domestic preparedness investments made during the Ebola epidemic
4. finish the job on WHO reform and build a multilateral response force

5. we need a global system to quickly determine which new vaccines and treatments are safe to use, and to compensate any patients injured by these medicines
6. the next President must fund a continuation of President Obama’s Global Health Security Agenda