GEOFF BENNETT: Today marks five years since the World Health Organization declared COVID-19 a global pandemic, the day everything changed.

In a quick succession of events, schools and businesses shut down, lockdowns were put in place, travel halted, and hospitals were overcapacity with sick Americans who hoped the virus would go away in a matter of weeks.

But it didn't.

Globally, COVID-19 has killed more than seven million people, including more than 1.2 million Americans, in the process leaving lasting marks on how we connect, work and live.

We're joined now by Dr. Ashish Jha, dean of Brown University School of Public Health.

He was the COVID response coordinator at the White House for former President Joe Biden.

Thanks for being with us.

We appreciate it.

DR. ASHISH JHA, Dean, Brown University School of Public Health: Thanks for having me back.

GEOFF BENNETT: It's so easy to think of COVID as something in the rearview, something that we have moved beyond.

And yet 6,500 Americans have died from COVID since the start of the year.

What questions remain about the disease, about the virus and effective treatment?

DR. ASHISH JHA: Yes, so we're certainly in a much, much better place than we were five years ago.

And while it continues to be around and affect us, right now, the population that's largely being affected by COVID are the elderly and the immunocompromised who are not staying up to date on their vaccine.

So I do think we have a strategy for how to manage this virus moving forward that leaves it not particularly disruptive and the one that doesn't have to cause a lot of serious illness and death.

GEOFF BENNETT: What about long COVID?

What progress has been made in treatment on that front?

DR. ASHISH JHA: Yes, I feel like this is something that we just have not made as much progress as we need to.

So let's talk about long COVID.

Most of the people who have long-term effects of COVID are people who got infected relatively early in the first or second year.

Thankfully, now people getting COVID infections are not likely or not very likely to end up with long COVID.

That's good news.

The problem, Geoff, is, we really have not figured out what is long COVID.

It's probably not one condition.

It's probably one of two or three different conditions.

And NIH, I think, has not done enough to test out treatments for these populations to really understand what we can do to help them get better.

GEOFF BENNETT: Five years on, when we think about what worked in terms of the response, what lessons carry forward, in your view?

DR. ASHISH JHA: Yes, what I look -- there's a lot of things that happened in the five years and a lot of things that we as a society got right, a lot of things we got wrong.

When I think about the big themes here, to me, when we leaned in on the scientific method and the scientific process, we did well.

We built a vaccine in very, very short time period.

President Trump deserves a lot of credit for that, and then got that -- those vaccines out to hundreds of millions of Americans.

President Biden deserves a lot of credit for that.

So we did that well.

We did therapeutics well.

We were -- clearly there were a substantial number of mistakes.

I think the way we handled schools was a disaster.

Most schools could have opened by the fall of 2020.

And they didn't.

And I think that it's going to have lasting impacts.

We have got to look back at this entire time period with a very clear eye about what went well, what went wrong, just so we make sure we do better next time.

GEOFF BENNETT: What about the vaccine mandates?

Was that the right approach?

DR. ASHISH JHA: I will be very honest, Geoff.

I thought initially they were.

I think it clearly saved lives in the short run.

We have very good data that, when mandates were put in, a lot more people got vaccinated.

It undoubtedly saved lives.

It also unfortunately sowed the seeds of distrust that we continue to see today.

And so, in retrospect, this is one of those things where I was very positive about that initially.

I have gone back and wondered, was that the right answer?

Was the long-term cost of those mandates worth it?

In the moment of the crisis, you want to save lives, and I understand why that was done.

I do think has had a lot of negative long-term effects as well.

GEOFF BENNETT: Yes, on that point, a Pew survey last month found big differences between Republicans and Democrats about how public health officials responded.

Just 35 percent of Republicans thought they did a good job.

Neither Presidents Trump or Biden received good ratings.

And then 55 percent of all adults felt the media exaggerated the risks.

What do you make of that?

Is the public trust broken for good?

How do we get it back?

DR. ASHISH JHA: Yes.

So, first of all, I hate the fact that it is has become partisan.

Public health has actually largely not been particularly partisan throughout American history.

So this is a this is an unwelcome change.

I do think we can get it back.

I think we get it back by, first of all, acknowledging mistakes that the public health officials made, public health experts made.

I think that's a really important start.

I also think we get it back by working in those communities to address the big public health issues of our time.

I think, if we work with trusted messengers, religious leaders, political leaders in those communities.

We can build back trust and convince people that public health has been this incredible boon for human longevity over the last 100 years.

It can and will be again.

GEOFF BENNETT: And yet there is the potential for a wider measles outbreak, worries about bird flu presenting in humans, the attitudes and approach of RFK Jr. as HHS secretary.

What are the stakes and what are the implications?

DR. ASHISH JHA: Yes.

I'm very, very worried about this.

I mean, Secretary Kennedy said he was pro-vaccines, and yet his, short tenure as the health secretary of our country has not been reassuring.

He has been incredibly -- I think the most generous thing we can say about the way he's talked about vaccines is that it's been confusing.

But the bottom line here is, we need a secretary who's really committed to modern medicine and vaccines to keep Americans safe.

GEOFF BENNETT: Dr. Ashish Jha, always a pleasure to speak with you.

Thanks for making time for us.