Why Didn’t Facing a Common Enemy Bring Us Together?

As I ran the National Institutes of Health during the pandemic, I learned that something deep within our culture is wrong. Can you remember the early months of COVID-19? We humans are wired somehow to suppress truly horrible memories. Unless I force myself to go back and look at notes or media reports from that year, I find it hard to remember just how awful it was. In many urban settings, hospital emergency rooms were overwhelmed with the sick and dying, ICUs were unable to handle the demand, and the morgues were overflowing. As director of the National Institutes of Health, it was my job to marshal all possible resources to focus on rapid development of vaccines, drug treatments, and diagnostic tests. Vaccines generally require many years to develop, so much of 2020 was fraught with uncertainty about what exactly was going to happen in our world. We assembled the world’s scientific experts; convinced partners in government, academia, and industry to drop their usual legalistic skepti

As I ran the National Institutes of Health during the pandemic, I learned that something deep within our culture is wrong. Can you remember the early months of COVID-19? We humans are wired somehow to suppress truly horrible memories. Unless I force myself to go back and look at notes or media reports from that year, I find it hard to remember just how awful it was. In many urban settings, hospital emergency rooms were overwhelmed with the sick and dying, ICUs were unable to handle the demand, and the morgues were overflowing. As director of the National Institutes of Health, it was my job to