Red Cross echoes Lisa McCormick's dire warning about poor preparedness

For several years, New Jersey Democrat Lisa McCormick has been sounding a clarion call for action in preparation for future health crises that are among the readily foreseeable consequences associated with increasingly likely climate-related disasters.

"A warmer planet is creating the risk of an explosion of new zoonotic pathogens from the likes of bats, mosquitoes, and ticks to cause deadly new diseases," said McCormick a few years ago with the added warning: "Ebola & Covid-19 are only the beginning."

"Climate change, deforestation, urbanization, wildlife trade, a population explosion, and dozens of other factors will reshape ecosystems and mutate the pathogens they harbor," said McCormick, who made the failure of world leaders to address preventable and predictable disasters a focal point in her 2018 challenge of US Senator Robert Menendez.

Despite her stunning performance in that campaign, major media outlets have routinely ignored McCormick's commentary on political issues and priorities, but now the world’s largest disaster response network—the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC)—is saying the same thing: The world remains “dangerously unprepared” for the next deadly pandemic.

Two groundbreaking reports released by the IFRC today, the World Disasters Report and the Everyone Counts Report, offer insights into successes and challenges over the past three years—and make recommendations for how leaders can mitigate tragedies of this magnitude in the future.

"No earthquake, drought or hurricane in recorded history has claimed more lives than the COVID-19 pandemic, according to the world’s largest disaster response network," said a release from the IFRC. "The shocking death toll—estimated at more than 6.5 million people—has inspired the humanitarian organization to take a deep dive into how countries can prepare for the next global health emergency."

Despite three brutal years of the COVID-19 pandemic, government preparedness systems are severely lacking, said the IFRC in its World Disasters Report 2022, which called on countries around the world to update their emergency response plans.

"In 2019, I tweeted 'predictable is preventable' but it is disheartening that Americans ignore the very real and present conditions that inspired the smartest people in the world to conclude that we are on the verge of self-destruction while elections are being decided on misinformation, manufactured crises and malice," said McCormick.

"We can save lives simply by being prepared. The next pandemic could possibly even be prevented," said McCormick. "Unfortunately, people, politicians and the press all seem to be ignoring alarms that are going off instead of reacting in a rational and reasonable manner, with the urgency that these expectations deserve."

The United States endured 18 billion-dollar disasters in 2022, with the total damages exceeding $165 billion, according to a recent report from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).

"Extreme weather events, fueled by human-caused climate change, are occurring at a higher frequency with an increased cost in dollars and lives —and such disasters are no more dramatic than the catastrophic than the silent pathogens whose invasion is every bit as deadly as an unlikely foreign military assault for which we are spending almost a trillion dollars to defend against," said McCormick.

"We learned that preparedness ahead of COVID-19 was inadequate, and now we should prevent those disaster we can while also acting to prepare more effectively for future any public health emergencies that we cannot stop in advance," said McCormick.

"Democracy is not a spectator sport," McCormick said. "Americans must rise up to the responsibility of citizenship if we are to prepare for the dangers that we know are coming."