The Coronavirus pandemic has changed the world by showing people what a pandemic can do in the
21st century, when we have vaccines antibiotics science--we still can have a very disruptive
infectious disease emergency something that many people didn't think was possible because the 2009
H1N1 influenza pandemic wasn't that severe but i think when you look back at SARS CoV-2 it really
shows how devastating a pandemic can be even with all the tools that we have.
The Coronavirus pandemic has changed the world by illustrating a number of inequities. These are social
economic as well as health inequities, not only globally but here in the United States.
They were always there and i think what happened with COVID is they essentially brought it to the
surface. It really indicated how much inequity we were already seeing but that we weren't really
fixing through structural interventions.
The Coronavirus pandemic changed the world
by reminding much of the world that infectious diseases remain a threat and are not just simply
something that happens to other people. The coronavirus pandemic has changed the world by
reminding us that we are interconnected and that it is important to address infectious diseases to
address health emergencies everywhere in order to protect individuals everywhere.
The Coronavirus pandemic has changed science by bringing together multiple domains within
the scientific effort to address a pressing human challenge. The number of lives that this virus has
has affected has been tremendous, but it has also catalyzed collaboration coordination
within the scientific community in really meaningful ways that hopefully we'll be able to
to maintain in years and decades to come. The Coronavirus pandemic has changed science by
illustrating the power of vaccines, in my opinion. And what i mean by that is that it's really
incredible that we were able to get a safe and an effective product to the market within about
a year. So it really shows i think the power of science and what can be done when we can put
investments in resources when there is a priority pandemic occurring. The Coronavirus pandemic has
changed science by showing how important it is to be fast, to be quick, to be able to get
countermeasures developed in a time that can actually change a trajectory of a pandemic. In the
past, when we thought about what would be the rate -limiting step in a pandemic it would be getting
the vaccines, but that's not the case now. We were able to get vaccines within a year, antivirals
within a year. All of that shows that science has really accelerated to the point where it can
provide tools at a breakneck speed. It's just now the issue of getting people to utilize those tools.
Our ability--and this is less science and more people--our ability to have an evidence-based
approach to taking on this pandemic was fraught. And that's not to say that
we needed to recognize that the virus was a threat and do x, y, and z. There is legitimate debate about
lots of issues, like how much you close the economy how much pain and suffering that's going to cause,
are you going to do more harm by what you do than what you don't do? Those are legitimate things but
you know, demonizing mask wearing, down playing vaccination, putting in place policies that fires
or penalizes people for trying to implement public health measures--you know things of that nature
have all emerged and they're just part of the current cultural and political climate in the US
certainly and we see it in other places, as well. So it's not unique to the United States--
in the way that something that is disruptive, that none of us want to have in our presence,
results in some people wanting to tackle it some people running away from it some people wanting
to deliberately ignore it so that other agenda can be fulfilled. Science just got entrained into all that.
It became another type of information that could be used by pundits or politicians
or policy makers or businesses to shape an agenda that they had. One thing that is i think troubling
for many of us that work in science is that there has been an increase in anti-science sentiment.
There have been changing public health recommendations, simply because they have reflected
the data. We see that as progress as scientists. I think the public sees that as scientists don't
know what they're doing. This has led to a distrust in health care systems, which is also impacted
vaccine uptake, as well. There's always been misinformation any time there's been an infectious
disease emergency. For example, during the the polio outbreaks in the 1940s there was
disinformation on the radio saying there was going to be kids in body bags if they got the polio
vaccine. So that's something that we've seen before, but what's different now is you've got this voice
what I call "the voice of the dark ages" utilizing the Internet, which is much faster than radio or
print or or just pamphlets. And that is really hard to combat. That information can spread very, very
quickly, very fast just like a virus does. And the general public has swallowed a lot using social
media that is very hard to untangle out of their minds. So in many ways, it's become more
frustrating at this stage of the pandemic because what we're seeing are self-inflicted illnesses.
They're all vaccine preventable illnesses. We're seeing people take actions that actually put their
own community hospitals into crisis. So that makes it much much different than when you're dealing
with it back in 2020 when there's no vaccine and everybody's sort of helpless trying to do the
best they can. Now we see this being willful, or at least I see it as being willful, where you've got
this great technology that that can save lives but people just choose not to take that technology, and
then also then choose to come to the hospital and crush the hospital. We've understood how the virus
spreads and we've learned a lot about the virus in a very short amount of time, however, we still
have a hard time in in modeling human behavior and and policies. I've always believed in the power of
public health and the importance of epidemiology. I've been frustrated over the last two years by
the response to science and the response to public health, however, it's only reinforced my resolve to
to focus on contributing to good science to helping to communicate good science and to
ultimately protecting the health of of individuals around the world.
You know, the question is how many more tricks does it have in its bag?
Can another variant emerge that's similarly dissimilar to everything else that's appeared
or has the virus fully explored that space and is only going to make
mild variants of omicron delta beta and alpha from now on, in which case our exposure to it is going
to confer a lot of protection and we could expect that it will be milder and milder going forward.
Or is something new and radical going to emerge again that's highly immune evasive the way omicron was
that we don't know. And that is going to determine whether or not in 2022 we're going to have another
two, three waves of this thing that are going to be disruptive again the way omicron is,
or it's going to settle into a pattern that's more benign and less disruptive.
That's the the question that we're trying to answer--you know, what is the endemic pattern
are we getting there how much more capacity and surprises does this virus have in store for us?
I think the path forward is ensuring that public health institutions, the healthcare system
acts in a way that really builds trust. There's several ways this can be done. I think the first is
being very clear and being much more communicative about what the response is including what we're
asking people to do. You know one I think misstep throughout this whole pandemic was the absence of
regular even daily types of briefings from the CDC or even the administration. I think that would have
gone a long way. So that's one. I think the second piece that we need to look at is thinking about
what are the different messengers that we can use to really promote the health of the public. We've
traditionally defaulted to clinicians or public health scientists to really deliver the message,
and the key thing that we've learned here during this pandemic, particularly in regards to reducing
disparities related to vaccine uptake, is that we need to leverage different messengers.
So that can be community leaders. Those can be religious leaders, for example, and other people
in the community that aren't necessarily connected to the public health or the health care system.
I think the third thing that we can do is kind of bring it back with regards to science literacy.
Figure out ways in which that we can use that within the educational system,
starting at a younger age so that people are more interested in science but are also
less fearful. I would say of science and that would also help I think, you know, in terms
of moving the needle forward, so that we are more transparent and that there's more trust
in public health, as well as the health care system. So the path forward is to teach people how to risk
calculate, and for too long during this pandemic we went to this abstinence-only approach. And,
from HIV from Hepatitis-C from injection drug use, we know that abstinence only doesn't work
because people will still take those risks and you need to do what's called harm reduction.
Now it's become increasingly easier with vaccines, monoclonal antibodies, rapid diagnostic tests,
anti-virals--all of that has made it easier to do. But the path forward has always been...
we have to adapt to this new threat we can't cease living. And i think that's something that was hard
for people to accept back in in march of 2020. But I think increasingly now they see that is the only
path forward, and we've seen the follies of going kind of going through COVID zero--that this wasn't
something that was a biologically plausible goal, and i think that stunted people's ability to risk
calculate. And that's why people are having a hard time now realizing with the Omicron variant that
this is the new normal, and I think if we would have articulated that I think we would have
be in a better situation where people understand that they're going to have to learn how to make
risk calculations. And I think that's the path forward--is using the tools that science
and medicine have given us to make this a much more manageable infection that people
can deal with in their everyday life the way they deal with other respiratory viruses. For me my path
forward is to continue doing this because there is not an end to pandemic threats.
I want to understand how other respiratory viruses circulate; what other respiratory viruses could be
pandemic threats; how to be more proactive with our medical countermeasure development; are there
ways to harness the knowledge we have of virus families to move medical countermeasures, drugs
vaccines, monoclonal antibodies, kind of pre-position them for the next pandemic?
The other aspect I'm really interested in is the fact that there was a great improvement in
our diagnostic capacity during COVID-19, one of which is home testing. We have home tests
now for COVID-19. Why don't we have home tests for flu and group-A strep? i envision this world
where people in their kitchen have kind of like a toaster oven device where they can put a swab
in it and know what virus they have. And then link to telemedicine so they can get a prescription for
Tamiflu or antibiotics because they've got Strep throat or a COVID antiviral. I think there is this
opportunity to really revolutionize medicine and epidemiology by using home tests, and i think we're
just on the cusp of that. And I think we've got to keep the momentum going. So I'm also going to
be working on trying to understand what the value is of home test and what what the future could be.