Future pandemics are existential. U.S. vaccine hesitancy will uniquely compromise adequate response.
Mazet et al. 23 [Jonna Mazet, Chancellor’s Leadership Professor of Epidemiology and Disease Ecology and founded the One Health Institute in the UC Davis School of Veterinary Medicine, *William Hanage, Associate Professor of Epidemiology at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, **Pardis Sabeti, Professor at the Department of Immunology and Infectious Disease at the Harvard School of Public Health, “Preparing for future pandemics: Learning from Covid-19” 11 July 2023, https://knowablemagazine.org/article/health-disease/2023/preparing-for-future-pandemics, Knowable Magazine. Accessed 15 July 2023]
Jonna Mazet: If you have the community with you and willing to mask and vaccinate and all of those things, you can have much better outcomes than many places where there was no pre-communication, no pre-planning, no pre-establishment of trust.
William Hanage: It’s kind of Pandemic 101, that you maintain confidence from the public, and trust in the information that they’re getting, and you have to earn that trust. It’s not something which you can take for granted. Now, what actually happened in the United States and other places — but the United States, in particular — is that that information became suddenly political. Whether or not you thought the virus was a problem became a badge of identity rather than a matter of scientific fact. And the people who have been trying to supply that information, they ended up being subjects of misinformation, basically — and misinformation which is still going on. I think that the social media companies, the Facebooks and the Twitters of the world, they bear a strong degree of responsibility for that kind of thing. And, as I keep saying, it’s not over yet.
Jonna Mazet: We need the whole world to come together and recognize that there are big unknowns that are existential threats to us, and we cause them, and we have the power to fix them, but only if we actually acknowledge them and work on them.
Pardis Sabeti: The interesting thing about an infectious disease is unlike any other existential threat to humanity, every single person matters. And because one person can launch a pandemic, one person can stop it. And so there was an opportunity to go out to the people and say, “You matter. Let’s get you prepared. OK, every single person, let’s go. OK? This is how diagnostic works. This is how contact tracing works.”
When are we ever going to get kids to understand genomics or diagnostics? This should have been… If I was the secretary of education, I would’ve said, “You know what? We’re scrapping all lesson plans this year. Lesson Plan 101 is figure out everything we can about an outbreak. Kids, let’s do this.” Group project, right? Because you have to know history. You have to know public health. You have to know mathematics, epidemiology, clinical medicine. We could have taught them a range of skills that would’ve prepared them, and we would’ve had them participate with us to identify cases to support each other.
And you also have to teach sociology and care and mental health, like every single thing we would’ve done. If it was my opportunity to make that, is to just make that the challenge and make it be a group collective project. And ultimately when the stakes are high and when it’s personal, it’s where all the brain cells turn on. And to me, it was just a real waste that we didn’t engage students around the country. And we didn’t do this thing where we say, “Let’s figure out how to do this and how to create circles of protection, how to protect Grandma and your community and your church.” I mean, that was sort of for me the opportunity that was lost.
Jonna Mazet: I worry that we keep thinking about the next surge and then the next influenza, and we should, but we can’t sit on our laurels while we do that and not think about disease X — the next one. We have five of these a year happening and they just don’t get out of control. If we don’t get ready for the next one to be way worse, more deadly, and more transmissible, if we let ourselves not be ready for that, the consequences will be much, much more severe even than this.
If we do nothing and just say, “Wow, that was terrible.” Human nature again — our enemy here. “I don’t want to think about that anymore. That was terrible. I just need a break. I need to get on with our lives.” And we’re seeing that even in our public health agencies and government counterparts. “Let’s just get back to business then, then we’ll think about that later.” We’re just sitting ducks for the next one.
William Hanage: When you consider that the evolution of the virus is going to be happening all the time, I think it’s easy to see that we’re not out of the woods yet and we’re not going to be out of the woods for quite some time. Exactly how long? That’s up to us on how we handle the virus.