Eric Lander has an oped in the Washington Post on what we need to do now to prepare for the next pandemic. He knows what he is talking about. He was director of the Broad Institute (MIT/Harvard) and is now Biden’s science adviser and head of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/08/04/bad-covid-19-has-been-future-pandemic-could-be-worse-unless-we-act-now/
The capability to design, test and approve safe and effective vaccines within 100 days of detecting a pandemic threat (for covid-19, that would have meant May 2020); manufacture enough doses to supply the world within 200 days; and speed vaccination campaigns by replacing sterile injections with skin patches.
Diagnostics simple and cheap enough for daily home testing to limit spread and target medical care.
Early-warning systems to spot new biological threats anywhere in the world soon after they emerge and monitor them thereafter.
We desperately need to strengthen our public health system — from expanding the workforce to modernizing labs and data systems — including to ensure that vulnerable populations are protected.
And we need to coordinate actions with our international partners, because pandemics know no borders.
It is imperative that we take the current and the next pandemic seriously and are prepared. He argues that we kind of lucked out in this pandemic which is caused by a virus that was relatively well understood and we had technologies in place that were able to quickly produce a vaccine.
[edit] It appears that Landers recommendations will be the basis for the Biden’s administrations policies going forward.