Beyond all the political posturing — both Democratic accusations of Trump administration failures and equally fervent Trump administration declarations of triumph and blame-shifting — one thing has largely been overlooked. It wouldn’t have mattered who was in charge when it became clear we were beginning a prolonged health crisis early in 2020.

The failures to adequately respond began years ago and continued through three administrations, both Republican and Democratic.

Failure to Respond: The Early Years

In 2005, Health and Human Services Secretary Mike Leavitt was initially unimpressed with some early warnings of a possible pandemic. Then, he began consulting with experts at the Center for Disease Control and reading the scientific literature on viral transmission. Soon, he became a convert.

The increasing interconnections between countries, businesses and individuals as the world shifted to global commerce and travel made it all but certain that sooner or later the U.S. would be faced with a serious viral pandemic ending thousands of lives and endangering millions more.

Leavitt took his concerns to President Bush. Bush listened and even delivered a speech outlining a national pandemic strategy. Even earlier, in 2003, the Strategic National Stockpile had been created to provide respirators, masks and other medical equipment needed when a pandemic hit. Clearly, some relatively high-ranking administration executives already understood the danger.

But despite the fact that there had already been the 2002 SARS epidemic and a new outbreak of the H5N1 “avian flu,” in 2003, overall, the U.S. response to Leavitt’s warnings, and then Bush’s, was more like Gable’s at the end of “Gone With the Wind” — we didn’t give a damn. Secretary Leavitt even became a figure of fun on the Jay Leno show, with Leno dismissing Leavitt’s urgings that Americans stockpile canned food for a prolonged viral emergency as unnecessary and even silly. “Powdered milk and canned tuna?” Leno laughed, saying he’d prefer bird flu.

Things Fall Apart: 2009 to 2019

In 2009, the promised viral outbreak occurred: the H1N1 swine flu. The government drew on the resources provided in the Strategic National Stockpile to deal with it. But instead of understanding that the predicted risks were real, with the swine flu as a demonstrated proof, following that outbreak, the depleted Stockpile was never completely replenished because funds to do so were never allocated. Bush persevered, however, and his administration began a project to assure there would be a stockpile of ventilators in the event of a pandemic.

The ventilator story is maddening. In 2009, the Obama administration contracted for 40,000 ventilators. Five years later, the company with the ventilator contract withdrew without having produced even one ventilator. Five more years of fumbling followed, and a new ventilator contract with a different company wasn’t signed until late 2019 — after COVID-19 had already begun in Wuhan, China.

One explanation for the government’s failure to respond to the viral threat is 9/11. From then on, the nation focused its attention on terrorism. In a classic case of misplaced priorities, from 1995 through 2016 the U.S. suffered a total of 3,393 deaths from terrorist attacks and, as of April 27, 55,429 deaths from COVID-19.

Lessons Learned?

The literature and outrage over the Trump administration’s faltering and tardy response to the crisis is already well-known. I won’t repeat it here because, for one thing, the real story is a little more complicated than “good Trump, bad Trump.” There’s plenty of blame to go around. The fact is, the only way we could have done an adequate job of responding to this would have required adequate supplies of ventilators, masks and other medical equipment from the Strategic National Stockpile.

We had the chance to replenish and expand that stockpile in 2009 and fluffed it. By 2019, it was already years too late. The critical question now is: how will respond to this costly lesson in unpreparedness once the current crisis has passed?

Will Americans overcome their widespread distrust of science and begin listening to medical experts who almost unanimously predict more outbreaks to come? Or will we choose to continue using the COVID-19 crisis as a political football? It really is time for Americans to give up their tribal antagonisms long enough to make and fund pandemic plans before the next outbreak occurs.