Biden offers pandemic preparation blueprint

SANDUSKY — President Joe Biden's proposed infrastructure spending plan wouldn't just build roads and other traditional projects. The president's "American Jobs Plan," which suggests spending almost $2 trillion over 10 years, also proposes spending $30 billion over four years to prepare the U.S. if the country is threatened by another pandemic similar to COVID-19, including spending money to help the U.S. develop and manufacture new vaccines quickly. A White House fact sheet says the proposed measures include providing money to quickly develop prototype vaccines during emerging outbreaks, provide sufficient production capacity during an emergency and keep a large stock of active pharmaceutical ingredients on hand. Technologies would be tested that could allow for rapid scaling up of vaccine production. It's important for the U.S. to be more prepared next time, the fact sheet says. "COVID-19 has claimed over 500,000 American lives and cost trillions of dollars, demonstrating the devastating and increasing risk of pandemics and other biological threats. Over the past two decades, outbreaks of SARS, Ebola, influenza, Zika and others have cost billions in lost productivity," the sheet says. "The risk of catastrophic biological threats is increasing due to our interconnected world, heightened risk of spillover from animals to humans, ease of making and modifying pandemic agents, and an eroding norm against the development and use of biological weapons." The Register asked Alex Tabarrok, an economics professor at George Mason University, to comment on Biden's pandemic preparation proposals. Tabarrok has written and talked extensively in the past year on dealing with the pandemic threat, both at his popular "Marginal Revolution" blog and for publications such as the New York Times. Tabarrok replied that Biden's proposals are sensible, and added it would be helpful if politicians spent more time preparing for possible catastrophes as opposed to reacting to them. "The real problem is that humans aren't good at preparing for very low-probability, very bad events. Voters reward politicians more for spending to deal with an emergency than for spending to avoid an emergency," Tabarrok wrote in an email to the Register. "Thus, I worry that in a few years we will forget and our investments will deteriorate, as has happened in the past. "I also worry that we are fighting the last war when we should be using this warning to prepare for other potential disasters such as asteroid strikes and runaway AIs," he said. "That sounds crazy, of course, but so did the idea that a pandemic could kill millions of people and force billions of us onto Zoom for a year."