As a leading expert on viruses, bacteria, fungi and parasites that make us sick, Michael Osterholm knows what happens when people underestimate infectious diseases. Osterholm, which is the director of the Center for Research and Policy of Infectious Diseases (CIDRAP) at the University of Minnesota, was a leading voice during the Covid-19 pandemic.
Now he is looking at the dismantling of US public health infrastructure with a sense of informed anxiety. New book Osterholma, BigEvals the reaction to the Covid-19 and distinguishes urgent lessons that we need, but did not learn to better cope with the next inevitable pandemia.
He speaks over time about why the world and the USA, in particular, can be even less prepared for pandemia than we were before the Covid-19.
This interview was condensed and edited for clarity.
You wrote other books about the dangers of infectious diseases. Why did you feel the need to write this about Covid-19?
We have never done a single type of what happened to the Covid-19, and for me we miss an incredible opportunity to find out what went correctly and what went wrong, non-partisan, not indicated at a party. What could we do better for the next pandemic?
Right now everything is about the direction of the finger. We are hanged in the question of what was the source of Covid-19- Laboratory leak or stream? We will never know the answer. We will never know this.
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Since I had the opportunity to be very involved in response Covid-19th was not just a distant witness, I tried to summarize the lessons that we had to learn and no.
What lessons did we not learn?
Given What happens in the current introduction with vaccinesI think we are in a free fall. Now we are in the worst form than literally before the pandemic Covid. No one in the White House is responsible for leading the country through a potential next blow of an infectious agent, which can be more deadly than if someone had started a physical war against us on our own shores.
You have some specific proposals about how we could avoid such things as universal blocking, closing the boundaries and mandates of the mask, which, in retrospect, were not very effective in managing the Covid-19. What are some of these strategies?
Method No. 1 to save life, if we do not have a vaccine, is that our healthcare system is not overflowing. When hospitals work 130%, some people will not get care, and those who do not get care is enough to save their lives.
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This is where snow days appear. Imagine that if we create a system where every day you knew hospitals for hospitals in your community. According to, as soon as this throughput reaches 85% or 95%, the community can take measures and say that we need to close for a couple of days here and change what we are doing to reduce the number of infections, and the number of people will probably need a hospital. All this knows that people will still be infected, but some will be infected for the first six months, others in the second six months, while others in the third six months. If infections are quite distributed, you can mainly maintain the work of the healthcare system.
The communities would have to decide that their hospitals are now filled, so they need to retreat. On such snowy days, you will not turn off the entire system, but some people can take on a few additional weekends or work from home, or schools can be canceled for several days. This is all that the virus can defeat and put a healthcare system in the best place to help people.
You also offer a more complex monitoring system, including medical identifiers to track infectious diseases.
This will require federal efforts. The idea of a medical identifier is to help track your information so that health officials can determine where and which populations will suffer greatly from an infectious disease. It would be useful to find out, so officials will know that they need to reduce what people do every day in order to reduce the number of new infections and, therefore, give hospitals the opportunity to catch up.
There are many opposition on the part of people who automatically say that they do not want the government to have more information, but they do not understand that the government already has a lot of information about us, including through our social security, Medicare and Medicaid.
State medical institutions now have Different recommendations for vaccines From some professional medical groups such as the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP). How should the public make sense of conflicting advice?
I was asked how to interpret AAP without following the recommendations of acip [the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, which makes recommendations to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC)]The field I say that you are asking the wrong question. The question is how ACIP got to the point that he scientifically does not correspond to the rest of the scientific world? The question should be: “What happened to ACIP?” Not “what happened to the AAP?”
Who can trust the public when it comes to health care information now?
The bottom line is that we cannot trust the Ministry of Health and Social Services (HHS) and CDC right now. It’s very difficult for me to say. CDC is a very important voice. The CDC still has very talented and highly qualified specialists, but what is happening with the leadership – in particular, the secretary of Kennedy and his colleagues – led to the fact that he cannot be trusted.
What does this mean for the health of Americans?
I have never seen [so many] Dangerous and potentially catastrophic decisions made by HHS, as I had in the last 10 weeks. We need MRNA technology for our influenza vaccines to have any hope for the presence of a sufficient amount of vaccines available during the first year and half the next possible flu pandemic. Now we can make enough vaccines for a quarter of the world's population during the first 15-18 months of the pandemic, with the culture of the chicken egg that we use today. This is an example of a very dangerous situation in which we could mainly remove the table if we had research and development invested in the MRNA technology.
I want to say that we cannot stop the pandemic. As soon as the virus took off, in fact, nothing can be done. When from animals to people in any part of the world there is a dive, when people travel, this virus can spread quickly. That is why we must prepare for this and minimize the influence of this distribution using vaccines, which we develop as quickly as possible to this particular virus. We need to do this a lot and bring it out, and MRNA is an important part of the ability to do this.
There was a lot of pandemia during and after Criticism of the World Health Organization (Who) and how it answered. How can I improve the reaction of organizations that will be improved?
Who is absolutely important, and it is very important that we have strong, some for such events. The task is that during the COVID-19 who was one of the real obstacles to obtaining good recommendations for the public about breathing protection. For me, this suggests that only because there are official state health authorities, this does not mean that they understand this correctly.
To solve this, we need to discuss the answer. The STO is used to making a hot washing of her answer. Why did it take almost two months to declare a pandemic? I released a document through Cidraph January 20, saying that this is a pandemic situation, and the world should cope with it. Why were they so slowly from the block?
We all did good things, and we all did some difficult things. Now it is important to ask: “What happened?” And use this information to improve in the future.
Which of the largest lessons extracted from the Covid-19, and actions that should not be repeated in the next pandemic?
We need to get together, not a finger point. We do not need to agree with what happened in Jun … But what we need to do is prevent something like that in the future. If this happens, how do we answer? Answering these questions, not one of them should be partisan. All this should just be that science tells us.
And we need to stop making borders. They are useless. We have no evidence that the closure of the border significantly affects any emerging pathogen that appears, but often politically what people think. And they are forced to confront them to look as if we don’t care what is not true at all.
What should we do [a better job of] In public healthcare it is understood that we are not the only answer that will be on the table. Social and political issues will also consider.
Are we now in the best position to meet the next “big”?
No. I would say that we are in the worst form. Now we do not have the opportunity to use tools such as MRNA, meaningful. If the pandemic begins to appear, we will divide into the camps to go to each other. Now we would have serious problems that unite people, and if there was ever a time when we needed to unite people against a common enemy – a virus – this is a virus – this is during the pandemic.
We need to do this. But we have nothing to support this. We must deal with all this now, play the situation and find out what we will do.
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