You can’t eliminate uncertainty — but you can prevent it from paralyzing you

You can’t eliminate uncertainty — but you can prevent it from paralyzing you View our Twitter (X) feedView our Youtube channelView our Instagram feedView our Substack feedView our Spotify feed You can’t eliminate uncertainty — but you can prevent it from paralyzing you Drawing on his experience leading the White House's pandemic preparedness effort, Raj Panjabi explains how COVID taught him to prepare for the unexpected. ResiliencePublic HealthCrisis ManagementPandemic ResponseGlobal Health Adapted from Safer — A Playbook: Turning Fear into Action and Crisis into Community by Raj Panjabi. Reprinted with permission from HarperOne, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers.

At the time of this writing, there is no consensus about how COVID started. My colleagues and I tried to harness that uncertainty as a strength. Rather than waiting for certainty to arrive, we began acting in its absence.

Not knowing the origins of COVID meant we were forced — as we readied the country and world for future unknown threats — to make ourselves safer from all potential causes: natural spillovers, lab accidents, and biological weapons. Through the fall 2022 and into 2023, we worked with more than 16 federal agencies, including the Departments of Defense and State, the USDA, CDC, and HHS, and intelligence agencies to develop and execute the White House’s pandemic prevention plan. Our plans were designed not just for the last crisis, but for the next one.

They didn’t assume the next threat would be familiar and accounted for naturally occurring pandemics, laboratory accidents, and deliberate biological attacks. Different causes with different pathways, but the same reality: We may not know what’s coming, when it will arrive, or what form it will take. We invested in policies, plans, funds, and institutions that work across many scenarios.

We scaled up genomic surveillance in our wastewater plants and in our airports. We created a pandemic radar to forecast the spread of infectious disease threats by establishing the CDC’s Center for Forecasting and Outbreak Analytics (CFA). We secured hundreds of millions of dollars to accelerate efforts to use mRNA technology that had powered COVID vaccines to bring us closer to our goal of developing a vaccine for pandemic influenza within 100 days.

We invested over $3.2 billion to hire epidemiologists, data specialists, and contact tracers in state and local health departments across all 50 states. We worked with Congress and President Biden to pass the 2022 PREVENT Pandemics Act and the Global Health Security and International Pandemic Prevention, Preparedness and Response Act. These bipartisan laws established a permanent White House office for pandemic preparedness and response policy, which we had negotiated with Democratic Senator Patty Murray and Republican Senator Richard Burr.