In the latest City Journal, Peter Huber offers a must-read essay on our society’s acute and growing vulnerability to infectious disease. As he notes, it is a problem that many at the highest levels of government are downright obsessed with these days, and rightfully so.
In recent years, that obsession has been most evident in federal efforts to prepare for a potential epidemic of the “bird flu.” Avian influenza, we’ve been told, could be the next major global pandemic, on par with the deadly flu outbreak that killed tens of millions worldwide (including about 675,000 Americans) in 1918. Our government has devoted enormous energies and funds to the effort to prepare: undertaking exercises and “war-games,” producing a massive response plan, sending top officials to brief state and local leaders on what they would need to do in the event of an outbreak, and spending billions on the effort to stockpile both vaccines and treatments.
Among the key lessons of that process (a process in which I played a tiny part as a White House domestic-policy staffer) is one Huber does not address in his piece: the unprecedented vulnerability of our way of life to any disruption that causes large numbers of Americans to skip work. Staying home, especially if your job involves travel, is a logical reaction to an infectious disease outbreak, and public health officials are inclined to recommend doing so in the case of a serious epidemic.
