At the
City Journal NIH director Jay Bhattacharya and his deputy Matthew Memoli discussed pandemic preparedness. "We should learn from recent example: a metabolically healthy population, physically active and eating nutritious food, will cope far better in the face of a novel pathogen than a population facing a severe chronic-disease crisis. Sweden, without lockdown or school closures, was the best in the world at protecting human life during the Covid pandemic. It had the
lowest level of age-adjusted, all-cause excess deaths in the world between March 2020 and December 2024. Sweden succeeded in part because its people are relatively metabolically healthy. By contrast, the U.S. chronic-disease crisis all but guaranteed that Americans would have one of the highest mortality rates in the world...The best pandemic preparedness playbook for the United States is making America healthy again."