Attorney General Barr gave a substantial interview to Laura Ingraham on Thursday, April 8, 2020, and Fox News posted the portion of the interview that addressed the legal aspects of the government response to the Chinese Wuhan coronavirus. The politically hot portion, where Barr discussed the Durham investigation, is not posted publicly, requiring you to access the Fox website with a cable provider subscription. However, I was far more interested in the public segment, both for some reassurance about reestablishing our liberty and for the attorney general’s remarks about China and this virus. One remark struck a chord with my thinking about lessons learned from this shocking episode in our nation’s history.

I felt for a long time, as much as people talk about global warming, that the real threats to human beings are microbes, and being able to control disease. And that starts with controlling your border.

—AG Barr, April 8, 2020

There once was a federal agency whose whole business was precisely this, controlling microbes at the border. It was one of our oldest agencies, sadly it has long since been subordinated to other bureaucracies, its powers and mission fragmented across agencies and blurred. That agency is one of our uniformed services, armed not with guns and ammunition but with medical tools and supplies.

The history of the United States Public Health Service shows us how this agency lost focus:

For more than 200 years, men and women have served on the front lines of our nation’s public health in what is today called the Commissioned Corps of the U.S. Public Health Service. The Commissioned Corps traces its beginnings back to the U.S. Marine Hospital Service protecting against the spread of disease from sailors returning from foreign ports and maintaining the health of immigrants entering the country. Currently, Commissioned Corps officers are involved in health care delivery to underserved and vulnerable populations, disease control and prevention, biomedical research, food and drug regulation, mental health and drug abuse services, and response efforts for natural and man-made disasters as an essential component of the largest public health program in the world.

Until the advent of therapeutic drugs and vaccines, inspection and quarantine were understood as vital to our nation’s security. Since most serious infectious diseases can now be prevented or treated, we lost that understanding. Naturally, a useful group of medical professionals would be tasked out to all manner of other priorities.

Perhaps it is time to reorganize and refocus on emerging microbial threats. I suggest making the CDC support the USPHS, as the Defense Intelligence Agency supports the Department of Defense. Take the USPHS out from under HHS and put them under the Department of Homeland Security, while also making the four-star admiral a member of the Joint Chiefs, tying together planning, resourcing, and training in response to biological threats, both natural and human-caused. It makes little sense to have a Surgeon General, usually the public face of the organization, but then make that position two levels subordinate to the admiral whose formal title is that of a civilian political appointee, the Assistant Secretary for Health (ASH).

Clearly, from the bureaucracies and President Trump’s actions, the current formal organizational charts were not adequate. Look at the staff working group, the task force, he had to assemble on the fly. Look at the obvious need for the very highest level of logistics expertise, imported, loaned, from the Department of Defense both in the form of Rear Adm. John P. Polowczyk. We should capture these lessons and really learn from them so that we will be better prepared and will never again face such a destructive response to a bad bug.