A new initiative will help governors and local leaders fight the next pandemic

No one knows when the next pandemic will sweep across the United States. It could be bird flu, or an as-yet unknown infection.

But after living through the Covid-19 pandemic, which claimed more than 1 million American lives, left more than 300,000 children orphaned, and shut down workplaces and schools, U.S. citizens should demand that the nation does better next time. This can happen only if, in addition to understanding the well-known narrative of national failure and loss, they also understand the stories of what worked in states, localities and tribes.

As governors of two very different states, Arkansas (A.H.) and Massachusetts (D.P.), each of us managed complex crises that threatened the health and ways of life of our constituents. We learned hard lessons from those experiences about how to manage a crisis, balance multiple and sometimes conflicting interests, and maintain the trust of those we serve.

In a national emergency, federal support is essential and federal partnership should be a priority. But states and localities generally bear the operational responsibility for the response and must balance a wide range of interests from individual freedom to community-wide safety. Governors, mayors, county commissioners, and tribal leaders are best positioned to consider the health, economic, educational, and civic impacts of decisions about how to respond and should collaborate with each other and with federal partners to apply the best strategies to keep people safe.

Leadership is essential in a crisis. In a health emergency, governors should designate a response coordinator — an incident commander — with proven operational expertise and establish a 24/7 command structure that cuts across agencies, silos, and sectors.

There were many forms of this during the Covid-19 pandemic, from ad hoc collaborations to fusion cells, connecting decision-makers at every level of government and response. Key people need to meet at least daily to share information, coordinate action, and bridge divides, as happened in Arkansas during the pandemic and in Massachusetts following the Boston Marathon bombing. We didn’t always get it right, but we always made decisions and adjusted together.

Crisis response requires effective coordination. During the Boston Marathon bombing, local, state, federal law enforcement, and intelligence agencies worked together to to secure and process the crime scene, respond to calls identifying suspicious activity or packages, and conduct the investigation. But during the pandemic, state and local leaders across the nation were stymied early on by scarce supplies and a federal government that was an unreliable shipping clerk, forcing them to compete in a “pandemic Hunger Games” for personal protective equipment for health care and other emergency workers, for Covid-19 tests, and for other essential supplies. Going forward, the federal government should designate a permanent National Pandemic Supply Coordinator.

Pandemic polarization has taught leaders the lesson that effective communication begins with listening to meet people where they are. Governors and other leaders drew on surveys of Americans, including by age, race, ethnicity, and geography, to understand, for example, the causes of vaccine hesitancy to increase the effectiveness of our messaging and messengers. Such efforts enabled state and local leaders to prioritize the vulnerable and target the response. Another lesson: crisis communication must be regular. Arkansas held more than 200 press briefings throughout the pandemic, communicating clearly about what was known about Covid-19 — and what wasn’t.

Policy failures often left pandemic decision-makers with blunt, divisive, binary options — open up or shut down, protect health or protect jobs, get vaccinated or be shut out. This forced leaders to improvise with more nuanced and surgical approaches to open schools and businesses.

Across the Covid Collaborative, a diverse team of leading experts in health, education, and the economy promoted a policy to “get vaccinated or get regular testing” to give Americans choice, while safeguarding the public. Arkansas didn’t impose a state mandate for vaccines and didn’t issue an order “to shelter in place,” but did stress the importance of vaccines and provide information to its citizens.

Going forward, the country needs more flexible pandemic playbooks that adapt to local contexts and respect both individual freedom and the common good.

Actionable data is the most valuable commodity in a health or security crisis. Without it, state and local leaders are flying blind, without the situational awareness to target the response to vulnerable populations, avert hospital system collapse, or safely reopen schools and businesses. The U.S. needs a bipartisan effort to create a one-stop shop for timely, actionable recommendations based on good data and designate a group of politically diverse experts, across sectors, to lead it.

In today’s highly polarized environment, we have no illusions about how difficult it will be to turn these lessons into reality. Innovations and accompanying recommendations are part of the American Democracy and Health Security Initiative, which launched yesterday, to focus attention on what worked at the state and local levels and provide specific recommendations for action, informed by these innovations, so that in the next health emergency, America responds effectively.

Although one of us was often described as the Republican governor of Arkansas and the other as the Democratic governor of Massachusetts, each of us ran to be governor of everyone in our states. Americans and their leaders must work together across red, blue, and purple divides to ensure that in the next pandemic — and there will surely be one — the response that is mounted is simply red, white, and blue.

Asa Hutchinson was the 46th governor of Arkansas, from 2015 to 2023, and a former chair of the National Governors Association. Deval Patrick was the 71st governor of Massachusetts, from 2007 to 2015, and is cochair of the Covid Collaborative which, together with the Pandemic Center at the Brown University School of Public Health and Center for Strategic and International Studies, is launching the American Democracy and Health Security Initiative.