How to Respond Better to the Next Pandemic

Remedying Institutional Failures

By Allen Buchanan
Contributions by Cécile Fabre, Paul Tucker

There is no shortage of criticisms of U.S. COVID-19 policy. This book argues that officials at the highest levels lied to the public or deliberately suppressed relevant information, shamelessly over-sold the efficacy of masks and vaccines, and enacted lock-down policies of unproven value that caused massive economic, educational, and psycho-social damage.

In How to Respond Better to the Next Pandemic Allen Buchanan argues that, contrary to widespread opinion, the primary cause of flawed COVID-19 policy was not defective leadership, but rather institutional failure. Decisions were made through processes that lacked the most basic safeguards against the large-institution “yes-man” and group-think phenomena and included virtually no provisions for holding decision makers accountable. More fundamentally, policy makers did not fulfill the crucial duty to provide plausible public justifications for their decisions. They disguised the fact that scientific opinion was divided on the appropriateness of the policies they endorsed and labeled those who disagreed with them as anti-scientific. In some cases, they responded to criticism, not by engaging it on the issues, but by branding their critics as quacks.

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Allen Buchanan is the author of over 150 articles and 15 books. His most recent books include The Evolution of Moral Progress: A Biocultural Theory, coauthored with Russell Powell, and Our Moral Fate: Evolution and the Escape from Tribalism. Buchanan has served as a consultant or staff philosopher to all of the U.S. national bioethics commissions, as a consultant to the Secretary of Health and Human Services Advisory Committee on Genetic Testing, as staff philosopher to the President’s Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Experiments, and as the only nonscientist member of the Advisory Council for the National Human Genome Research Project.

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Table of Contents:Table of Contents:
Foreword by Mark Matheson
Acknowledgments

Part I. The Tanner Lectures on Human Values by Allen Buchanan
1. Policy Failures
2. The Misrepresentation of Expertise
3. Pandemic Politics
4. The Need for National Institutional Reform
5. The Need for International Institutional Innovation
6. Public Health Ideology
7. Conclusion: Leadership and Institutions
Part II. Responses to Allen Buchanan
8. International Institutions and the Duty to Aid in a Pandemic: The Problem of Noncompliance
by Cécile Fabre
9. The Challenge of Incentives-Values Compatibility in International Cooperation by Sir Paul
Tucker

List of Contributors
Trustees of the Tanner Lectures on Human Values
Index