Dr. Anthony Fauci, the U.S. government’s top infectious disease specialist, warned in early 2017 that a “surprise outbreak” would occur during the Trump administration, and he said that more needed to be done to prepare for a pandemic. “There is no question that there will be a challenge to the coming administration in the arena of infectious diseases,” he said in a speech titled “Pandemic Preparedness in the Next Administration” at Georgetown University Medical Center. He delivered it just days before Trump was inaugurated on Jan. 20, 2017. Fauci, who has overseen the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) since 1984, warned that looming health challenges would involve both chronic diseases ― ones already ongoing ― as well as “a surprise outbreak.”

ASSOCIATED PRESS Doctor Anthony Fauci has served as the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases since 1984.

“No matter what, history has told us definitively that [outbreaks] will happen,” he said. “It is a perpetual challenge. It is not going to go away. The thing we’re extraordinarily confident about is that we are going to see this in the next few years.” Fauci ticked off a list of measures needed to prepare for such a crisis, including creating and strengthening global health surveillance systems, as well as public health and health care infrastructure; practicing transparency and honest communication with the public; coordinating and collaborating on both basic and clinical research, and developing universal platform technologies to better facilitate the development of vaccines. “The mistake that so many people have made … is a failure to look beyond our own borders in the issue of the globality of health issues, not only things that are there that will come here but surprises that we’ll have,” he said in his prescient remarks. Despite Fauci’s early warnings and calls for action, a report on Sunday analyzing the Trump administration’s response to the coronavirus pandemic found that federal agencies waited until the middle of last month to order vital medical supplies and equipment to fight the coronavirus, despite warnings about its pandemic potential being made in January. As the virus has spread across the country, reports persist of mass shortages of supplies in hospitals and medical centers.