Can America Get Back on Its Feet?

• Author: Kern, Merilee
• Position: LIFE IN AMERICA

"The cost in human lives, as well as the growing economic fallout, from this COVID-19 contagion clearly illustrate the desperate need for a revised public health regime...." IF THERE IS anything that we have learned during the COVID-19 pandemic, it is that vaccines alone are not enough for widespread prevention. The world is in immediate need of effective interventions for infectious disease--those that can be formulated effectively and delivered in time to serve as a critical firebreak in the absence of vaccines, or natural herd immunity, while also working in conjunction with vaccines as they come online to provide levels of long-term protection that go beyond what immunity-inducing inoculations alone are able to achieve.

According to the Mayo Clinic, we still are at least a year away from developing and testing a SARS-CoV-2 vaccine in human clinical trials and, despite early positive evidence, it still is unknown whether developing a safe and effective vaccine for this disease even will be possible.

This is a gut-wrenching truth as COVID-19 continues to wreak havoc on the world, further exacerbated by findings clearly showing that the virus still is spreading and mutating, foreshadowing the emergence of novel strains. There is a clear and present need to be better prepared for public health crises, both ongoing and that inevitably will present in the future.

A fundamental part of the solution to this need is the development and implementation of a more agile and adaptive rapid response element of the public health model at large that can cohesively address, manage, and disable large-scale, fast-proliferating outbreaks and pandemics such as COVID-19.

"The cost in human lives, as well as the growing economic fallout, from this COVID-19 contagion clearly illustrate the desperate need for a revised public health regime--one that adds protective 'passive immunity' to augment and extend the 'active immunity' conferred by vaccines," urges Tim Starzl, president and cofounder of Starzl Research.

"Large scale--or population scale--passive immunity interventions can provide a rapid-response pharmaceutical 'firebreak' capable of arresting the worst effects of a pandemic within 30 to 60 days of a novel organism or strain being identified. This early intervention can be supplemented by the availability of vaccines as they are developed and disseminated.

"The need for rapid interventions could not be any clearer than it is right now, especially when it...