How America built the best pandemic response system in history – and threw it away

The Trump administration destroyed an infrastructure, built over two decades, that may have been humanity’s most powerful weapon against new diseases.

The islands of Qinghai Lake, more than 10,000 feet above sea level in north-western China, are well known to people who study pandemics.

Each year they provide a resting point for hundreds of thousands of birds as they migrate along the Central Asian and East Asian flyways.

Diseases brought here by birds can travel across these great migration routes, which join other flyways to span the globe.

Laurie Garrett had been at the…