We will get into the details of the latest NIH Pandemic policy and the 8 reasons why it is so utterly batshit crazy shortly.
What is inevitable is that at some point there will be another Pandemic. We don’t know when and we don’t know how lethal. All we know is that at some point it will emerge.
For COVID we thankfully managed to rapidly create a vaccine, and even before that was widely available we did the lockdowns and masking. Without those the death rate would have been far higher.
We know that there were 1,228,289 confirmed deaths from COVID in the US. That’s a number so high few can truly grasp the real impact at an individual level.
What we also know is that crass stupidity prevailed and still prevails even more so. As confirmed by the 2023 study, at least 232,000 of those COVID deaths could have been prevented if they been vaccinated with at least a primary series.
Beyond those core numbers we can very clearly see the results of ignoring the scientific guidance. With the entire issue becoming politicised, we can see that in red states that pushed back against sensible health policies the death rates were higher – The politics of COVID-19: Differences between U.S. red and blue states in COVID-19 regulations and deaths.
Via the above paper:
- Political party-affiliation has shaped response efforts to the COVID-19 pandemic.
- Red states had higher COVID-19 infection rates and deaths in 2021 compared to blue states.
- Red states implemented fewer political decisions to mitigate COVID-19 than blue states.
- Biological factors such as age and obesity predicted deaths only in red states.
- Vaccination rates predicted fewer deaths in blue states.
Politics be damed – These are the empirical facts.
What is also a fact is that we live in a time where this reality does not matter. That’s because we have incompetent clowns now in charge and responsible for making life and death decisions, and an information ecosystem that pumps out a constant torrent of misinformation and outright lies.
The new NIH Playbook
On Nov 13, the NIH Directors published their proposal for a new pandemic playbook. It is basically crass stupidity incarnate. The foundation it rests upon is ignorance, and lies.
Before we get into the details, let’s briefly work one example. Here is the opening claim …
Over the past two decades, scientists developed a pandemic preparedness playbook that has failed catastrophically. It grew out of the fears aroused by the global emergence of highly pathogenic avian influenza in 2003 and the swine flu pandemic of 2009. The U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH)—which we now lead—made massive investments that failed to cope with the Covid pandemic. Worse, the playbook itself may have caused it.
That claim is simply not true, or to give it a more technical term, it’s a lie.
However, let’s put that aside for a moment and ask ourselves this – what is their new policy?
It is a pathway to death on a vast scale, and they argue it like this …
Sweden, without lockdown or school closures, was the best in the world at protecting human life during the Covid pandemic. It had the lowest level of age-adjusted, all-cause excess deaths in the world between March 2020 and December 2024. Sweden succeeded in part because its people are relatively metabolically healthy. By contrast, the U.S. chronic-disease crisis all but guaranteed that Americans would have one of the highest mortality rates in the world.
The above claim is not supported by the best available evidence.
Sweden did not have the lowest age-adjusted all-cause excess mortality in the world. It often looks decent compared with some Western countries but was worse than some neighboring countries that had stricter measures.
The claim is deeply misleading.
That’s because there are many factors beyond lockdown policy such as timing of waves, older-adult care quality, demographics, and reporting differences that strongly influence excess death figures.
It is true that the US experienced high excess deaths during and after the pandemic. But that’s mostly driven by the US having fragmented health care access, unequal vaccination coverage, and varied policies across states.
The new Pandemic policy is this lunacy …
Ultimately, public health agencies encouraging people to take whatever steps they can to improve their health will have a dramatic effect during the next pandemic. Whether simply by stopping smoking, controlling hypertension or diabetes, or getting up and walking more, anything that makes the population healthier will prepare us better for the next pandemic.
The best pandemic preparedness playbook for the United States is making America healthy again.
I’m not suggesting that encouraging people to be far more healthy is a bad idea.
Get your exercise, stop smoking, and go eat your fruit and veg, etc… are all very sensible things to encourage people to do.
Unfortunately, the lunacy and stupidity in play here is that there are pathogens that don’t check how healthy your lifestyle is before they infect you. HIV, Hepatitis A and B and C, Coronavirus, Influenza, and Measles will all infect regardless of how good your lifestyle actually is.
OK, I did promise eight reasons what their new pandemic playbook is BS, so let’s do that now.
There are eight fundamental reasons why the new NIH Pandemic Playbook is complete bullshit
For easy access, you can find this new NIH proposal here.
Yes, I’ve already covered some of this, so you can new see what is coming up. Let’s take this step by step.
1. The pandemic preparedness “playbook” did not fail catastrophically
This claim (as mentioned above), is the opening:
Over the past two decades, scientists developed a pandemic preparedness playbook that has failed catastrophically.
It is true that pandemic preparedness did not prevent COVID-19. That is not the same thing as catastrophic failure.
Preparedness is not a guarantee against emergence; it is a strategy for damage reduction once emergence occurs. Preparedness worked unevenly, not catastrophically.
We all saw how vaccines were developed, tested, manufactured, and deployed at unprecedented speed, preventing millions of deaths globally.
We rapidly adapted. Antivirals, oxygen protocols, steroids, and ICU practices rapidly improved survival.
We also tracked what was going on. Genomic surveillance identified variants early enough to adapt responses. We live in a world with decades of prior virology, immunology, mRNA research. Without the existing global surveillance we would not have produced vaccines in under a year. What NIH now proposes to do is to abandon that surveillance. (Yes really …
We must stop wasting money on the traditional playbook. We do not need to find and create new pathogens that could cause future outbreaks.
This is just nuts.
What did fail most clearly was the political coordination, communication, equity, and trust, not the scientific foundations of preparedness.
By any credible measure the scientific response has not “failed catastrophically“, but what does now set us on the path for certain catastrophic failure is this new “do more or less nothing” strategy that involves abandoning all that previously worked.
2. Pathogen surveillance did not “cause” the pandemic
They claim this …
Worse, the playbook itself may have caused it.
The claim that cataloging viruses or sampling wildlife may have caused the pandemic is speculative and unsupported by any evidence. There is no evidence that SARS-CoV-2 emerged because scientists were collecting viruses. The available evidence points to multiple transmissions from wildlife at a market in Wuhan.
What is happening is that Zoonotic spillover is common and increasing. That’s because human encroachment into wildlife habitats has intensified, and also because the vast increase in global travel will rapidly amplify the spread of anything that emerges.
COVID was the first modern pandemic. Nearly all major pandemics predate modern virology: influenza, plague, cholera, smallpox. The idea that surveillance uniquely introduces risk ignores thousands of years of natural spillover events that have previously happened, and will continue to occur.
The infamous lab-leak claim generated a lot of hot air and friction, but no actual evidence. Yes, lab accidents are real and must be minimized—but asserting that surveillance itself is more dangerous than ignorance reverses basic risk logic. Detecting threats earlier reduces risk overall, even if it introduces small, managed hazards.
3. Gain-of-function research is mischaracterized
We have this lie being promoted …
Second, evaluate the risk of each pathogen infecting humans by testing its ability to penetrate human cells—and sometimes even genetically modifying it to make this more likely. The latter practice is now called dangerous gain-of-function (dGOF) research. This may seem crazy to the uninitiated, but it is a critical step in the playbook.
The above NIH claim conflates all laboratory work involving pathogens with “dangerous gain-of-function” research, implying reckless genetic manipulation is routine practice.
That’s a lie.
Most virology research involves attenuated, non-pandemic-capable strains. Experiments are reviewed, tiered by risk, and increasingly regulated. The overwhelming majority of lab incidents involve minor containment breaches, not population-level threats.
Using unwarranted fear like this is deeply dangerous for us all. Understanding how viruses interact with human cells is not optional if vaccines and therapeutics are to be developed at all.
The alternative that they now propose is to wait passively and blindly for outbreaks. That will guarantee a far slower, deadlier response.
4. A Crazy evolutionary argument misunderstands how countermeasures work
We have this claim …
Evolutionary processes are extremely hard to predict; indeed, the one thing we can say with confidence is that the pathogens with the capacity to cause outbreaks are unpredictable. We are left with well-prepared, expensive countermeasures that are unlikely to work.
The claim that pre-developed vaccines and therapeutics are “unlikely to work” because pathogens evolve is a deeply stupid claim to make. Those appointed to run the NIH should understand the reality, but they either don’t, or even worse, they do and are lying.
The countermeasures we create are platforms that put us in the right ball park. No only can mRNA vaccines be updated rapidly, but broadly neutralizing antibodies target conserved viral regions, and antivirals exploit replication mechanisms shared across may variants
You can see this yourself. COVID vaccines did not “fail” because variants emerged; they dramatically reduced death and severe disease even as the virus evolved .
Being prepared does not demand a perfect match.
Stepping back and doing nothing is lunacy.
5. The Sweden claim is factually incorrect and rhetorically misleading
I opened with this one, but for completeness, let’s cover it off again in my list. The claim presented is this …
Sweden, without lockdown or school closures, was the best in the world at protecting human life during the Covid pandemic. It had the lowest level of age-adjusted, all-cause excess deaths in the world between March 2020 and December 2024.
The assertion that Sweden was “the best in the world at protecting human life” with “the lowest age-adjusted excess deaths” between 2020–2024 is a lie.
High-quality excess mortality analyses reveals that Sweden performed worse than Norway, Finland, Denmark, and Iceland, particularly early in the pandemic. Several countries (including New Zealand, Japan, South Korea, and others) had lower cumulative excess mortality
What is true is that Sweden’s outcomes improved later, but that reflects timing, immunity accumulation, and demographics—not proof of superior strategy.
Excess mortality results depend heavily on baselines and methods, and no reputable global dataset ranks Sweden as the best-performing country overall.
The claim they are making for Sweden is not supported by evidence.
6. Metabolic health matters—but it is not a substitute for preparedness
The strongest part of their argument is also the most overextended. Here is the claim …
a metabolically healthy population, physically active and eating nutritious food, will cope far better in the face of a novel pathogen than a population facing a severe chronic-disease crisis.
What is of course true are these two points …
- Obesity, diabetes, cardiovascular disease, and smoking increase vulnerability
- The U.S. chronic disease burden contributed to higher COVID mortality
But … (and this is really important) … this does not imply that population fitness can just replace vaccines, surveillance, or medical countermeasures.
Reminder:
- Healthy marathon runners died of COVID.
- Children and young adults suffered long COVID.
- Previously healthy people experienced organ damage.
A metabolically healthier population reduces risk—it does not eliminate it.
Using a strategy that involves increasing public health does not justify eliminating vaccines, surveillance, or medical countermeasures.
7. The “conflict of interest” narrative oversimplifies reality
The claim is this …
Furthermore, the playbook creates vested interests with incentives to overreact to new threats. It creates a group of well-funded scientists who benefit from scaring the public beyond what the evidence warrants and at the same time falsely minimizing the risk of lab accidents. These scientists make a living doing research for the traditional pandemic preparedness playbook—an extreme conflict of interest.
The idea that scientists systematically exaggerate threats for funding ignores inconvenient facts:
- Pandemic preparedness has been underfunded for years
- Early warnings were often ignored or politically suppressed
- Scientists who raise the alarm face harassment, threats, and burnout—not enrichment
Pharmaceutical companies did profit, but that does not invalidate the underlying science any more than aircraft manufacturers profit invalidates aviation safety research.
The solution to conflicts of interest is oversight and transparency, not dismantling preparedness entirely.
8. The proposed alternative is dangerously incomplete
The new Pandemic Playbook is this …
The best pandemic preparedness playbook for the United States is making America healthy again.
“Make America healthy again” is a worthy goal—but as the one and only pandemic strategy, it is totally crazy.
Let’s do it, and strive to improve our overall health baseline health, but remember that it will take takes decades to achieve.
What it will never do is to prevent prevent the emergence of new threats, nor does it protect against novel virulence, and will not not help when hospitals are overwhelmed.
A credible Pandemic preparedness must include theses rather obvious strategies …
- Surveillance
- Rapid diagnostics
- Vaccine platforms
- Stockpiles
- Clear communication
- Health system surge capacity
Health promotion complements preparedness; it cannot replace it.
Conclusion: Right Now we are totally F**ked
We will need to hold our collective breath and hope that nothing emerges in the next three years. (Yes Bird Flu we are thinking of you).
If something does happen, then a strategy of stepping back and letting it rip though the “healthier” population is simply not going to cut it.
The new NIH argument offers a comforting story: that pandemics result mainly from scientific hubris and unhealthy lifestyles, and that moral reform can substitute for institutional preparedness.
Reality is harsh, and right now we are rapidly hurtling towards that brick wall of that stark reality.
As we have seen over and over, when you put a clown into a palace, you don’t get a prince, but instead a circus. In this instance, the potential consequences we face involve a rather large body count.