Red Blinking Alarm!

An Even Worse Pandemic Looms

“The next major pandemic is coming.  It’s already on the horizon, and could be far worse, killing millions more people, than the last one.  We don’t yet know for certain what form it will take, just that its arrival, according to global health experts, is not just a possibility but a probability....  That’s horrific enough.  Even more terrifying is the fact that [the world has] so far done very little to prepare for it.”

While we have been consumed, understandably so, with the Middle East, Ukraine, Congressional dysfunction, and the dangers of World War III, there is another very major blinking, screaming “red alarm” we are ignoring at our great peril.

The terrible situation in Israel and Palestine, and the ongoing tragic war in Ukraine, should rather alert us to the importance of addressing matters before they spiral out of hand.  There is something else that recently took innumerable lives, and yet we have learned so little about the imperative to be prepared, that a dastardly recurrence is becoming more likely.

We too often consider ourselves helpless, and the events of the world inevitable.  Yet, millions of lives might have been saved, had even just our “Prescriptions” been heeded, at the time when we alerted that it was necessary.  Many tragedies are predictable and preventable—but only if we give our attention to science and scholarship.

Indeed, all of the events mentioned above could have and should have been prevented.  Different policies, different priorities, and different expenditures of funds, human resources, and talents could have prevented all.  From our perspective, we know what happened when mental health became the most relevant and critically needed expertise; we were aggressively and deliberately sidelined, by none other than the American Psychiatric Association, which was more concerned about its government funding than the public’s very safety and survival.