TRACKING EMERGING VIRUSES – October 2, 2025 – COVID
“Among its many painful lessons, the COVID-19 pandemic taught us that America’s defenses against a devastating health crisis were far weaker than most had reason to expect. More than 1.2 million Americans lost their lives to COVID, the most of any country. It’s puzzling and frightening to watch the Trump Administration dismantle initiatives aimed at keeping us safe from another pandemic.
And let’s not kid ourselves; another pandemic is evolutionarily inevitable. We can’t say when it will strike or if it will be worse than COVID. (Deadly as it was, COVID proved to be far less fatal than others we’ve seen recently, like Ebola, Marburg, MERS and SARS.) But research has projected that there is about a 50 percent chance another COVID-like magnitude of a pandemic (>25 million global deaths) will hit us in the next 20 to 25 years.
These are not good odds, especially for something as life-and-death in scope as a pandemic. But, according to one expert analysis, U.S. funding for global health will decline by a staggering 67 percent this year alone, or more than $9 billion.
That’s a potentially seismic change when you consider that, far more than any country in the world, the U.S. has been the biggest financial contributor to global health and has had a central role in creating and implementing just about every consequential global health initiative since the end of World War II.
The U.S. has long helped lower- and middle-income countries build and sustain health systems that monitor newly emerging infectious diseases and snuff them out. In addition to funding, U.S. government expertise—much of it lost in the dissolution of USAID and the reductions in staff at the CDC—provided a valuable strategic and coordinating role that made global health programs successful. National Institutes of Health funding, now facing deep cuts, has supported research in other parts of the world that led to new, life-saving interventions.” (1)
“This month, Dr. Michael T. Osterholm, an internationally recognized expert on viral outbreaks and the founding director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy (CIDRAP) at the University of Minnesota, published The Big One: How We Must Prepare for Future Deadly Pandemics, with his coauthor, journalist Mark Olshaker.
Osterholm, who founded CIDRAP in 2001, played a role in helping fight the West African Ebola outbreak of 2014 and has spent years working to strengthen America’s pandemic preparedness infrastructure. Then came COVID-19. Public health experts were left “to figure all this out while painting the plane in midair,” as he puts it in The Big One.
The book convincingly argues that COVID-19 was potentially mild compared to what might come next. Though devastating, the 2020-era pandemic had a fatality rate of roughly 1%. The book posits an alarming but likely scenario, tracing what could happen if a coronavirus as infectious as SARS-CoV-2 but with the mortality rate of MERS—which started to spread in the Middle East by dromedaries in 2012 and had a fatality rate of 35%—comes along.
As President Donald Trump’s health secretary, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., takes aim at vaccines and purges expertise from America’s health agencies, Osterholm’s public role has shifted. In April, he helped launch the Vaccine Integrity Project to help safeguard vaccine use in the US. The effort has made Osterholm a leader of what can loosely be described as the medical resistance. Osterholm, who worked for George W. Bush–era HHS Secretary Tommy Thompson while the 9/11 Commission worked on its report, has frequently called for a similar, bipartisan effort to investigate the government’s response to COVID-19. (He’s not holding his breath.)” (2)
“You have some specific proposals for how we might avoid things like universal lockdowns, border closings, and mask mandates—which, in retrospect, turned out not to be very effective in controlling COVID-19. What are some of those strategies?
The No. 1 way to save lives if we don’t have a vaccine is to ensure that our health care system is not overrun. When hospitals are operating at 130% capacity, some people won’t get care, and those who do won’t get care that is sufficient to save their lives.
That’s where snow days come in. Imagine if we set up a system where every day, you knew the hospital census for the hospitals in your community. Once that capacity reached, let’s say, 85% or 95%, then the community could take action and say we need to shut down for a couple of days here and change what we’re doing to reduce the number of infections, and the number of people likely to need hospital care. This is all knowing that people will still get infected, but some will get infected in the first six months, others in the second six months, and others in the third six months. If the infections are spaced out enough, you can basically keep the health care system operational.
Communities would have to make a decision that their hospitals are overrun right now, so they need to back off. During such snow days, you don’t shut the entire system down, but some people may take a few extra days off work, or work from home, or schools may be canceled for a few days. These are all things that could beat down the virus and put the health care system in the best place to help people.” (3)
“Recognizing the specifics of transmission was one of the greatest points of contention that arose during the COVID pandemic. And of all the aspects of our COVID response that went wrong, I maintain that the most consequential failure of the public health and medical establishments was not understanding, accepting, and promoting what we needed to do to effectively address the critical role of airborne transmission of SARS-CoV-2, meaning via both droplets and aerosols. (While many people think of spray cans of deodorant, air fresheners, and similar products when they hear the word “aerosol,” in science and public health, an aerosol is any particle, regardless of size, that is suspended in the air.) Smoke, fumes, rainy mist, even dust from a volcano eruption can be aerosolized. Smoke from a large forest fire can travel hundreds of miles through the air, as we in the northern United States saw in the summer of 2023 when our air quality was affected by wildfires in Canada.
Respiratory transmission of dangerous microbes is not only among the most crucial considerations in all of epidemiology but also one of the most daunting. You can diet in an effort to lose weight. You can give up smoking to improve your lung function. You can exercise to strengthen your heart and enhance muscle tone. But you can’t stop breathing. And this means that when there’s a potentially deadly threat lurking invisibly in the air, each breath we take can be a pathway into our bodies—a route that is accessible to both droplets and aerosols.” (4)
“Heparin, a drug traditionally injected to treat blood clots, was tested in this study in an inhaled form, targeting the lungs directly. As well as acting as an anticoagulant, heparin has anti-inflammatory and pan-antiviral properties. Earlier research results showed breathing and oxygen levels improved in COVID-19 patients after they inhaled a course of heparin.” (5)
“COVID-19 vaccination during pregnancy provides significant protection for mothers and their babies with no associated increase in risk, according to data from more than 1.2 million pregnancies presented at the AAP’s annual meeting.
“COVID-19 vaccination reduced admission, mortality and pregnancy-specific complications,” Nikan Zargarzadeh, MD, a postdoctoral research fellow in the division of fetal medicine and surgery at Boston Children’s Hospital, told reporters on Saturday. “On the neonatal side, it reduced NICU admission.”
Data derived from Zargarzadeh N, et al. Safety and efficacy of maternal COVID-19 vaccination during pregnancy: Umbrella review and meta-analyses. Presented at: AAP National Conference & Exhibition; Sept. 26-30, 2025; Denver.
Recent federal efforts to overhaul COVID-19 vaccine recommendations have made it less clear who can and should get vaccinated. The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists continues to recommend COVID-19 vaccination during pregnancy, and the AAP recommends that all pregnant adolescents get one of the shots.” (6)
Post-COVID Smell Loss May Be More Widespread Than Recognize, https://www.medpagetoday.com/infectiousdisease/covid19/117703
Long Covid Risk for Children Doubles After a Second Infection, Study Finds, https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/30/health/long-covid-children.html
Scientists Finally Reveal Biological Basis of Long COVID Brain Fog, https://scitechdaily.com/scientists-finally-reveal-biological-basis-of-long-covid-brain-fog/
Kids’ Long COVID Risk Doubles After Second Infection, Researchers Say, https://www.usnews.com/news/health-news/articles/2025-10-02/kids-long-covid-risk-doubles-after-second-infection-researchers-say
Mosquito-Borne Illness Rarely Seen in U.S. Is Suspected on Long Island (Chikungunya), https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/25/nyregion/chikungunya-mosquito-illness-long-island.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare
Andrew Cuomo apologizes to Jewish New Yorkers for COVID-19 lockdowns, https://nypost.com/2025/10/01/us-news/andrew-cuomo-apologizes-to-jewish-new-yorkers-for-lockdowns-hours-before-yom-kippur/
1.Another Pandemic Is Inevitable. Trump Is Making It More Dangerous., by Seth Berkley, https://time.com/7320256/vaccines-trump-rfk-jr-global-health-covid/
2.Pandemic Expert Michael T. Osterholm Thinks a Future COVID Could Be So Much Worse, By Katherine Eban, https://www.vanityfair.com/news/story/pandemic-expert-thinks-a-future-covid-could-be-so-much-worse
3.We’re Even Less Prepared For the Next Pandemic After COVID-19, Expert Warns, by Alice Park, https://time.com/7321129/pandemic-preparedness-response-vaccine-public-health/
4.Everything You Wanted to Know (But Were Told Wrong), by Michael Osterholm and Mark Olshaker, https://www.skeptic.com/article/masks-covid-everything-you-wanted-to-know-but-were-told-wrong/
5.Doctors tested a common drug on COVID. The results are stunning, by Clive Page, https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2025/09/250928095616.htm
6.Large review shows benefits of maternal COVID-19 vaccination, By Sara Kellner, https://www.healio.com/news/pediatrics/20250928/large-review-shows-benefits-of-maternal-covid19-vaccination
curated by Jonathan M. Metsch, Dr.P.H.
Clinical Professor of Environmental Medicine, Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai