Is This the End of the CDC’s Global Leadership?

In a sharply critical editorial, The Lancet suggests it might be. The British medical journal, founded in 1823, has long been among the world’s most prominent publications in the field. It writes today that amid the Covid-19 crisis, the “US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) … has seen its role minimised and become an ineffective and nominal adviser in the response to contain the spread of the virus.”

The CDC’s current situation stands in contrast to the place it has occupied historically, the journal writes: “In the decades following its founding in 1946, the CDC became a national pillar of public health and globally respected. It trained cadres of applied epidemiologists to be deployed in the USA and abroad”—but over the decades, it has been “subject to conservative politics” that eroded it. The Trump administration has sidelined the CDC further during the Covid-19 pandemic, the journal writes, after the agency took a critical early misstep in developing faulty tests. Later, the director of the CDC’s National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases, Dr. Nancy Messonnier, would vanish from White House briefings after warning that citizens should prepare for serious disruptions.

Despite its mistakes, the journal argues, “punishing the agency by marginalising and hobbling it is not the solution.” The Trump administration has become “obsessed with magic bullets—vaccines, new medicines, or a hope that the virus will simply disappear,” the journal writes, instead of empowering an agency that until now has been a global leader.

Even if a Treatment Emerges, Production Is Still a Problem

As scientists seek to develop treatments that can mitigate the severity of Covid-19 infections, Heidi Ledford writes for Nature that even if we get lucky, and an effective drug emerges among the dozens being researched, producing enough of it will still be difficult. Research into the anti-viral drug remdesivir, for instance, is ongoing; Gilead, the company that makes it, has “been streamlining its manufacturing process—reducing the time to produce large batches of the drug from 9–12 months to 6–8 months,” which still sounds like a long time in the current climate. And still, Gilead has “warned that production of remdesivir relies on a complex chemical synthesis—with individual steps that can take weeks to perform—and could be derailed by shortages of key ingredients.”

Other treatments, like antibodies grown in animal cells, involve different processes but still need chemical reagents sourced to complex and vulnerable supply chains, Ledford writes—meaning that delivering a treatment for Covid-19 isn’t so simple as hitting a medical jackpot; production has to go smoothly, too.