Via STAT, Helen Branswell interviews Mike Ryan, head of WHO's health emergencies program: WHO official weighs in on Covid, vaccines, and mistakes that were made. This excerpt is a key part of an interview you should read in its entirety:
Are there things you wish the world had done differently from the jump? Where did we make our biggest mistakes?
This interview could go on for a while.
The biggest collective failing has been that we’ve underestimated this microbe. We’ve always made judgments assuming the best-case scenario. And I’m not one for assuming the worst-case scenarios as a modus operandi, because otherwise, you can strangle society. But I think at every opportunity we’ve seem to have taken the best-case scenario as the basis for our policy. And this virus, I think, has sequentially exploited that.
In the end, the virus doesn’t have a brain. It’s just, from an evolutionary point of view, exploiting opportunities. And we seem to have consistently and persistently given it the opportunity.
There’s been tremendous social, economic, and political pressure to go back to normal.
Time and time again governments have tried to get back to normal and have overshot that runway by opening up too early. Releasing restrictions too early. They haven’t really convinced people or empowered people to continue with these basic measures to reduce the risk of infection. I think that’s been a problem, the whole way through the pandemic.
I don’t mean getting rid of lockdowns. To me lockdowns have been last resort measures in most cases. Many countries in the East have managed to forgo lockdowns. But they’ve maintained quite strict measures in terms of mask wearing, in terms of crowds, in terms of testing and other stuff. So they’ve taken a much more comprehensive, layered strategy. They’ve maintained an intensity of control measures without ever going for full lockdown, without ever going for full open. They’ve taken the corner without under- or over-steering. They’ve gotten people to buy into the idea that it’s going to take a long time and it’s going to have to be a sustained effort. I think if everyone had done that maybe we’d be in a better place.
But I think for me just personally as a public health physician, the biggest tragedy has been the vaccine equity issue. It really has been horrific. Horrific. The world just has not ever come to terms with the fact that vaccinating the most vulnerable people first would have been a better bet, not only epidemiologically but just from an equity perspective.
The idea of coherence and coordination and solidarity — these are all lovely words. But it’s very hard to deliver that in societies that don’t trust governments, [don’t buy into] that social contract, that inherent trust that a community should have in its government to say, “Yes, you are there to protect me.”
What’s shocked me most in this pandemic has been that absence or loss of trust.
It’s staggering to read about public health personnel quitting their jobs, being subjected to death threats during a pandemic. They’re facing hatred and vitriol from the people they’re trying to protect.
It’s tragic. And it’s tragic to think that there are millions of people right now in the Northern Hemisphere who are not vaccinated because they don’t believe their government. Whatever the reasons for that are, whether it’s because governments perform poorly in building that trust, or whether they’ve been actively undermined by misinformation and by other things, historians and social historians will be talking about that one for decades.
If we’re looking at pandemic preparedness for the future it’s not all going to be about technology and the machines that go ping and surveillance systems and AI and all of this stuff. We need a social solution for future pandemics, much more than we need a technological solution. Because we’re dealing with a fractured world, fractured communities. We’re dealing with a breach and prolonged breakdown in trust.
I shudder to think of going into a more severe pandemic with that level of community distrust. It has had a real negative impact on people’s awareness and willingness to sustain measures. Because they can constantly find lots of material and reasons not to do what they’re being asked to do, because there’s so much out there telling them that what’s going on there is a government conspiracy, what’s happening is hurting them.
