After COVID-19, We’re No Better Prepared For the Next Pandemic

As a leading expert on viruses, bacteria, fungi and parasites that make us sick, Michael Osterholm knows what happens when humans underestimate infectious diseases. Osterholm, who is director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy (CIDRAP) at the University of Minnesota, was a leading voice during the Pandemic COVID-19.

Now he looks at the dismantling of the United States’s public health infrastructure with an informed alarm. Osterholm’s new book, The bigEvaluates the answer to COVID-19 and highlights the urgent lessons we need, but we have not learned to better manage the next inevitable pandemic.

He explains that the time for the reasons why the world, and the United States in particular, can be even less prepared for a pandemic now than before Covid-19.

This interview was condensed and published for more clarity.

You have written other books on the dangers of infectious diseases. Why did you feel the need to write it on COVVI-19?

We have never been washing hot on what happened with COVID-19, and for me, we miss an incredible opportunity to learn what went well and what went wrong, in a non-partisan way and without finger. What could we do for the next pandemic?

Right now, everything concerns the finger. We are hung on the question of what was the source of COVID -19 – a laboratory leak or an overflow? We will never know the answer. We are never going to know.

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Since I had the opportunity to be very involved in the response of COVID -19 – I was not only a distant spectator – I tried to summarize the lessons that we should have learned and that we did not.

What are the lessons that we have not learned?

Given what is happening in the current administration with vaccines, I think we are in free fall. We are in worse form now that we were literally before the cocovio pandemic. No one at the White House is responsible for leading the country through the next potential hit of an infectious agent, which could be more deadly than if someone launched a physical war against us on our own coasts.

You have specific proposals on how we could avoid things such as universal locks, border closures and mask mandates – which, retrospectively, have not been very effective in controlling COVID -19. What are some of these strategies?

The way n ° 1 to save lives if we do not have a vaccine is to make sure that our health care system is not exceeded. When hospitals operate at a capacity of 130%, some people will not get care and those who will not receive care that is sufficient to save their lives.

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This is where snow days come in. Imagine that if we create a system where every day you know the hospital census for hospitals from your community. Once this capacity has reached, let’s say, 85% or 95%, the community could act and say that we have to close a few days here and change what we do to reduce the number of infections and the number of people likely to need hospital care. All this knows that people will always be infected, but some will be infected in the first six months, others in the six seconds and others in the six third months. If the infections are sufficiently spaced, you can mainly maintain the operational health care system.

Communities should make a decision that their hospitals are invaded at the moment, so they have to go back. For such snow days, you do not close the entire system, but some people can take a few additional days or work at home, or schools can be canceled for a few days. These are all things that could beat the virus and put the health care system in the best place to help people.

You also offer a more complete monitoring system, including medical identifiers, to keep track of infectious diseases.

It would take a federal effort. The idea of ​​a medical identity document is to help follow your information so that health officials can say where and the populations are hardly affected by an infectious disease. This would be useful to know, so that those responsible know that they have to go back on what people do every day to reduce the number of new infections and therefore give hospitals the opportunity to catch up.

There is a lot of opposition from people who automatically say that they do not want the government to have more information about them, but they do not realize that the government already has a lot of information on us, including through our social security, medicare and Medicaid figures.

Government health agencies now have various vaccine recommendations from certain professional medical groups such as the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP). How should the public give meaning to contradictory advice?

I was asked how to interpret the AAP not according to the recommendations of the ACIP [the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, which makes recommendations to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC)]. I say you ask the wrong question. The question is how the AIPI happened to the point where it is scientifically incompatible with all the rest of the scientific world? The question should be, “What happened to the AIPI?” Not “What happened to the AAP?”

Who can trust the public in health information now?

The main thing is that we cannot trust the Ministry of Health and Social Services (HHS) and the CDC at the moment. It’s a terribly difficult thing to say for me. The CDC is a very important voice. There are still very talented and highly qualified professionals at the CDC, but what happens to management – in particular secretary Kennedy and his colleagues – brought him to the point where we cannot trust.

What does that mean for the health of Americans?

I have never seen [so many] Dangerous and potentially catastrophic decisions taken by HHS as I did in the past 10 weeks. We need mRNA technology for our influenza vaccines to have a hope of having enough vaccines available for the first year by year and half of the next flu possible influenza pandemic. Now we can do enough vaccine against a quarter of the world’s population during the first 15 to 18 months of a pandemic, with the cultivation of chicken-egg that we use today. This is an example of a very dangerous situation that we could remove the table if we have invested research and development in mRNA technology.

My point is that we cannot stop a pandemic. Once a virus takes off, nothing can really be done. When a spill occurs from animals to humans in any part of the world, when people travel, this virus can quickly spread. This is why we must prepare for this and minimize the impact of this spread with the vaccines that we develop as quickly as possible to this specific virus. We have to do a lot and get it out, and mRNA is an important part to be able to do it.

During and after the pandemic, there have been a lot of criticism of the World Health Organization (WHO) and how it responded. How does the response of organizations as which can be improved?

The WHO is absolutely important, and it is absolutely essential that we have a fort which for these kinds of events. The challenge is that during COVID-19, WHO was one of the real obstacles to obtain good recommendations to the public on respiratory protection. For me, it said that simply because there are official government health organizations, that does not mean that they succeed.

To remedy this, we must have discussions on the answer. The WHO used to make a warm washing of its answer. Why did it take almost two months to declare a pandemic? I published a document via Cidrap on January 20 saying that it is a pandemic situation, and the world must face it. Why were they so slow block?

We have all done good things and we have all done difficult things. What is important now is to ask, “What happened?” And use this information to improve in the future.

What are the largest learned lessons from COVID-19 and actions that should not be repeated in the next pandemic?

We have to come together and not the point finger. We don’t have to agree on what happened in Wuhan … But what we have to do is prevent something similar from happening in the future. If this happens, how do we answer? By answering these questions, nothing should be a supporter. All this should simply be what science tells us.

And we have to stop doing border closures. They are useless. We have no evidence that the border closure considerably affects any emerging pathogenic that presents itself, but it is often politically what people think they are done. And oppose them gives the impression that we do not care about it, which is not true at all.

What we have to do [a better job of] In public health, it is understanding that we are not the only answer that will be on the table. There will also be social and political problems to consider.

Are we now in a better position to meet the next “big”?

No. I must say that we are in worse condition. We do not have the opportunity to use tools like mRNA now significantly. If a pandemic begins to emerge, we will divide into the camps to go against each other. We would currently have major challenges of gathering people, and if there was a time when we had to bring people together against a common enemy – a virus – it is during a pandemic.

We have to do this. But we have nothing at this stage to support this. We have to face all of this now, to play the situation and determine what we would do.