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“You cannot go around saying to people that there’s 100 per cent chance that they’re going to die. You know? It’s just nuts.”
— Meryl Streep as President Orlean in Don’t Look Up
Nobody likes a doomsayer. But I’m going to be that guy — once more, with feeling.
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The Macro
The most alarming aspect of the arrival of COVID-19 was the almost simultaneous realization that scientists and medical professionals had been warning that a pandemic of this exact type was going to occur within our lifetimes. And that we were woefully unprepared.
Non-governmental research bodies, United Nations agencies and the vast majority of the epidemiological community were all warning us that we needed to amass more supplies, develop more robust plans to combat a pandemic, and massively expand our vaccine-production capacity.
I won’t provide all the links to the warnings or go into much detail on the ravages of COVID-19 other than to say it’s still prevalent enough that it’s still considered a pandemic.
Oh, and the very conservative estimate is that it has killed more than seven million people worldwide.
“Yeah,” you are saying to me now, “but we managed to collect reams of new knowledge from fighting COVID-19 to ensure that we’re going to be fully prepared for next big pandemic.”
It’s a nice thought. It’s not true, though.
Just about every independent source of medical and scientific information available on the planet has issued a warning about how unprepared we are for the next one.
Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, director general of the World Health Organization, wrote this past March the WHO and countries “have worked hard to improve how we detect, prevent and respond to new health threats.”
“Based on lessons learned, often in real-time, new initiatives were developed and launched that strengthened our ability to respond to infectious disease outbreaks,” Ghebreyesus wrote.
However, he declared the world is still far off being “totally prepared.”
The world has not yet committed to a more comprehensive system for sharing information on infectious diseases, or in co-ordinating travel bans and social/economic restrictions. In short, we don’t have a global playbook, which means any country that can’t adopt best practices can end up as ground zero for another outbreak.
These concerns, when applied against new and developing threats, paint a very concerning picture.
Ryan Gray, Mary Wiktorowicz and Raphael de Souza Aguiar, all of the Dahdaleh Institute for Global Health Research at York University, wrote a commentary earlier this month urging Canada to adopt a “deep prevention” model for pandemic preparedness.
The authors’ argument is simple: there was so much focus on how to respond after an outbreak that research into how to prevent the next big one has suffered. In particular, the authors urge Canada to do more surveillance for “zoonotic pathogens” to ensure they are not transmitted from animals to humans.
The authors note that 70 per cent of emerging infectious diseases originate in animals.
“Just as SARS created momentum to establish the Public Health Agency of Canada in 2004, COVID-19 (SARS CoV-2) could hasten establishment of the one-health branch and strategy that is imperative to address risks on the horizon.
“A reorientation to a whole-of-government approach would address a key gap in Canadian public-health policy while strengthening the development and implementation of current priorities that better protect Canadians from future pandemics.”
Add conspiracy theories, deliberate misinformation and vaccine hesitancy to the rapidly expanding number of emerging pathogens, and you can see that while we might have Personal Protective Equipment stockpiled for the next pandemic, we don’t have a hot clue how to stop it from happening.
Will the world continue to ignore critically important warnings that could actually prevent pandemics from occurring? My best guess, lamentably, is yes.
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