At the end of my Missouri Medicine March/April 2020 editorial on COVID-19, I asked rhetorically if we should have seen the pandemic coming (page 80–81). I quoted Bill Gates’ 2015 TED talk suggesting a pandemic was more likely than a nuclear war to cause millions of deaths in the next 10 years, and a 2007 scientific paper from Clinical Microbiology Review predicting the re-emergence of novel COVID viruses from China. A physician-researcher subscriber sent me this YouTube video in which President George W. Bush in 2005, during his address to the National Institutes of Health, predicted a future pandemic like COVID-19. View here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uSDC5L7qYUc.
Then President Bush called for $7 billion from Congress and future administrations to prepare for the inevitable pandemic. Bush called for: 1) world-wide monitoring for virulent viruses and early outbreak warning; 2) A national pandemic plan for the U.S. to protect citizens by stockpiling of essential materials, rapid vaccine development and deployment; and 3)coordinated plans of local, state, and federal governments to deal with social, health, and economic exigencies caused by the pandemic. Bush predicted the need for social distancing, and said the effects of a pandemic could last “for a year or more.” At that 2005 meeting, he announced a government website for information on pandemics at www.pandemicflu.gov (still up and running). Among the physicians and scientists attending (listening?) to President Bush was CDC head Anthony Fauci, MD.
It is worth your time to view the video. Odds are you will not see reference to President George W. Bush’s prescient, but ignored, admonitions on the national media. I thank the physician contacting me for adding this insight.