Written by Gavin Yamey, director of the Center for Policy Impact in Global Health and a professor of the practice of global health and public policy, the op-ed criticized the Trump administration’s 2018 decision to scale back investments for pandemic prevention and response. Yamey suggested a need to ramp up pandemic prevention efforts and warned of severe economic losses if a pandemic were to occur. Although it’s difficult to prove direct causation, he said that scaling back on global health investments in 2018 may have played a role in COVID-19 becoming this great of a crisis in the U.S.