Allen Buchanan is the author of over 150 articles and 15 books. His most recent books include The Evolution of Moral Progress: A Biocultural Theory, coauthored with Russell Powell, and Our Moral Fate: Evolution and the Escape from Tribalism. Buchanan has served as a consultant or staff philosopher to all of the U.S. national bioethics commissions, as a consultant to the Secretary of Health and Human Services Advisory Committee on Genetic Testing, as staff philosopher to the President's Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Experiments, and as the only nonscientist member of the Advisory Council for the National Human Genome Research Project.
"There is no shortage of criticisms of governments' responses to Covid-19. Surely, we can respond better to the next pandemic. But how? What lessons for the future can we learn from responses to Covid-19? Some elements of adequate preparation for the next pandemic are straightforward and uncontroversial, such as adequate stockpiling of medical supplies, more vigorous efforts to encourage and coordinate vaccine research, improving healthcare infrastructures to function under the stress of a pandemic, developing capacity for vaccine production in less affluent countries, improving early reporting of the emergence of new infectious diseases, and providing more timely, more effective, and better coordinated aid to under-resourced countries. This book identifies institutional failures to explain the substantive flaws of Covid-19 pandemic policies, and then proposes institutional reforms that would reduce the risk that similar institutional failures will occur in the future. Preparation for the next pandemic requires significant institutional change at the national and international levels"--