Congress fumbles on COVID hearing

Opinion editor’s note: Editorials represent the opinions of the Star Tribune Editorial Board, which operates independently from the newsroom.

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Four years after the COVID-19 virus upended normality, the nation has yet to convene a 9/11-style commission to soberly assess what worked and what didn’t, with lessons drawn for the next fight against a pandemic pathogen.

Those hoping that a U.S. House hearing on Monday would begin addressing these important questions and start the process of setting up such a panel were sorely disappointed.

The Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic commendably has numerous members who are physicians. The hearing could have been a valuable back-and-forth between them and Dr. Anthony Fauci, a longtime presidential medical adviser and director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.

Instead, the hearing narrowly focused on the origins of the COVID virus. That’s a legitimate topic, with a debate continuing over whether the virus escaped from a China-based research facility or whether it took a more traditional path: leaping from animals to humans.

But scientific underpinnings were too often abandoned during the hearing, with some members of Congress making dubious leaps of logic in an attempt to pin blame for the pandemic on Fauci.

It was, at best, a deeply unserious discussion. More important, it was a missed opportunity on multiple levels. The hearing shone no additional light on COVID’s origins. And, it failed to identify key lessons learned from this pandemic that will help mitigate ones in the future.

That last concern is particularly urgent. Pathogens don’t provide a grace period, so to speak, after a pandemic ends. Outbreaks continue, and even another pandemic could start at any time regardless of humans’ COVID fatigue.

The growing concerns about something called “highly pathogenic avian influenza” underscore this reality. It’s a flu that spreads quickly among poultry and has begun infecting cattle. As of Tuesday, 81 dairy herds in nine states (Minnesota is not one of them) have been affected, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

Alarmingly, this pathogen can make people sick, too. On May 31, the CDC reported a third human case linked to dairy cattle exposure, noting that this is “another instance of likely cow-to-person spread.” In the first two cases, the people infected only experienced conjunctivitis and made full recoveries. But in the third case, the person developed respiratory symptoms.

That hasn’t changed the CDC’s assessment that “bird flu is a low risk to the general public,” Reuters reported last month. Nor is there evidence of human-to-human transmission.

Still, caution is in order as medical experts monitor this pathogen’s spread. Among the questions that require an airing in the halls of Congress:

• Is there enough testing going on to detect spread in both cows and humans?

• Is financial assistance for the dairy industry adequate in the face of this outbreak? If biosecurity requires more staff or equipment, for example, are current programs enough to help dairy farmers grapple with this challenge?

Policies should be in place that reward those who step up to contain this latest disease threat. Congress should ensure these incentives are in place.

Elected officials also have an obligation to provide the oversight necessary to ensure the public health response is robust. So far, no congressional hearing has been held on the avian flu’s spread and the outbreak in dairy cattle, a lapse that requires urgent remedy.