The closest thing we have in this country to a pandemic plan is called the Pandemic Action Crisis Plan or PanCap. It remains the prevailing unclassified document. It posits stay-at-home orders, school closures, business shutdowns, office closures, travel restrictions, testing, track-and-trace, and the creation and distribution of countermeasures called vaccines.
This approach has no precedent in the history of public health. The old way was to keep calm, understand the illness, treat those affected, and use rational approaches to mitigate the impacts. The new way invented in the 21st century is about command and control, pretending to manage the microbial kingdom like an engineering project.
This is still the operational manual. If a pathogen should leak and the machine clicks into gear, this is what will happen. It will be profoundly disturbing to civil society. Like last time, the results will not be good. The medicine will be worse than the disease. We can say this based on the experience from 2020 to 2023. And yet the plan survives.
The existing plan is PanCap-Adapted, but it is supplemented by dozens of other documents that pertain to nearly every federal government agency and are expected to be followed by downstream agencies in states, counties, cities, and towns. This is what is called an all-of-government response.
This is not some conspiracy theory. We need only look at one related document, the Biological Incident Annex to the Response and Recovery Federal, Interagency Operational Plan as produced by FEMA. It is out of classification and available for anyone to observe. It comes into operation with any pathogen that is new, perhaps manufactured in a lab as many of them are.
Halfway through this document you find a presumption of business closures, transportation restrictions and disruptions, widespread commodities hoarding by the public, stay-at-home orders, a workforce shift to a virtual environment, school and childcare closures, restaurant closures, hotel closures, a reduced workforce, and plant closures.
This plan is still out there, waiting to be implemented under the right circumstances. The U.S. Constitution does not pertain. American expectations of liberty do not pertain. Law does not pertain. Even now, the idea that an emergency requires the end of all normal expectations for freedom is baked into all pandemic protocols.
At this point, you might already be asking the very obvious question. How could this be true in light of the last experience? The answer points to the core problem. We’ve never had a reckoning for the COVID-19 period. There has been no commission, no push for changes in underlying protocols, no fundamental shifts at the top other than new political appointees, and no real national statement that what happened was wrong and destructive.
In short, nothing has changed other than public opinion. That too is extremely malleable. People these days routinely say that they won’t comply. What they mean is that under similar circumstances, they won’t comply. But the circumstances will not be similar. A strain of Ebola, for example, could have an extremely high mortality rate that does not discriminate by age. With a 21-day latency period, anyone could have it. It’s the kind of pathogenic release that strikes terror in the hearts of the bravest men and women.
This high-level White House/Homeland Security Council document was driven by concerns over the H5N1 avian influenza outbreak in Asia. It outlined a whole-of-society approach with three core pillars: It emphasized stopping/slowing the spread to the United States, limiting domestic impacts, and sustaining infrastructure/economy.
The document in question drops some hints. In this report you will find what you must do: be “prepared to follow public health guidance that may include limitation of attendance at public gatherings and non-essential travel for several days or weeks.” The government, meanwhile, will establish “contingency systems to maintain delivery of essential goods and services during times of significant and sustained worker absenteeism.”
Sounds ominous.
Then came the 2006 National Strategy Implementation Plan with 300-plus specific actions across federal agencies, states, and the private sector. Then came the 2008 Biological Incident Annex to the National Response Framework, which integrated biological threats into broader disaster response.
These days, we have the Office of Pandemic Preparedness and Response Policy, which was created for ongoing coordination. The people who inhabit this office are different from what they were a few years back. They are less convinced of the use of force. They are more sophisticated in their understanding of infectious disease and natural immunity.
We also have widespread public knowledge that broad lockdowns had massive collateral damage: excess non-COVID-19 deaths (delayed care, mental health, overdoses), learning loss (especially for kids), economic dislocation, supply chain breaks, and eroded trust. Sweden’s lighter-touch approach (no full school closures, no strict lockdowns) had comparable or better outcomes on mortality when adjusted for demographics, with far less disruption.
The problem is that these 20-year-old protocols are all still in place. If you understand how government works, once a document and protocol are in gear, there is no dialing it back. Bureaucrats are risk averse and do what they are told. That is how the system works.
This is great in normal times but less so during an emergency. If the presumption is that force, the quarantine power, restrictions on civil liberties, censorship, and medical countermeasures are the way forward—essentially lockdown until vaccination—this will happen regardless of the individual volition of any political appointee.
All these documents need to be torn up. We need a complete reset of pandemic planning to what it was before 2005. This country dealt with uncountable numbers of disease outbreaks without wrecking civil society. The theory that society can be managed as a laboratory has proven extremely damaging. We desperately need the information that we learned most recently to be incorporated into the protocols.
That requires a complete public rethinking of everything with an aim toward clear statements from Congress and an initiative from the White House to map out straightforward principles and a new approach. This can happen only with a national commission on the topic convened at the highest levels and promoted by the national press with public testimony and a determination to change.
The time for this is now. With so many biolabs around the world working on infectious disease, not only examining viruses but also creating them along with the countermeasures, we are certain to face a leak in the future, likely one more terrifying than the last.
Underlying all of this is the problem of special interests. Government officials like to exercise power and pass out money. Pharmaceutical companies like to make products and distribute them. Tech companies like stay-at-home orders for obvious reasons. The national media loves an emergency because it gets eyes on screens.
It should alarm every American that, despite all of the best intentions of the change in White House leadership, the deeper bureaucracy still has the same plans in place for the next infectious disease outbreak. It’s too late to make changes in the thick of a crisis. The planning and rewriting of the regulations needs to begin now.
