Breakthrough: The Next Pandemic

Virus hunters around the globe are already bracing for the next contagion which they fear could prove even more destructive than Covid. These scientists and doctors, drawing from hard-learned lessons from the past, are determined to stop future pandemics even as the current one continues to rage.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
It's January nine and prime ministers, CEOs and celebrities are
gathering in the Swiss Alps for an annual summit. A
globalization backlash, growth in China and trade tensions are dominating
the agenda. Actor Matt Damon is also here talking about
the need to improve access to clean water. On the

(00:20):
sidelines of the World Economic Forum, an American doctor and
a British scientist are sounding the alarm about a different concern,
the specter of a pandemic. In a press conference, Richard
Hatchett highlights the mission of his organization, launched two years
earlier to combat infectious disease outbreaks with new vaccines. Sitting
beside two drug industry executives and the head of a

(00:43):
health charity, he says the risks are rising in our
hyper connected world. Epidemics have the potential to hop from
continent to continent, spreading far beyond the places where they emerge.
His group, the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations, is pushing
to speed development of exts means against a range of threats,
including a coronavirus that causes Middle East respiratory syndrome or mirrors.

(01:06):
And there's more to richard strategy. We have also announced
our first investments to tackle disease X, the disease we
don't know about, the emerging disease with the potential to
cause a pandemic. One investment is in a program at
Imperial College London led by Robin Shattuck. The research ames
to create vaccines that can be scaled up rapidly to
respond to outbreaks of those mysterious pathogens. Richard sees on

(01:30):
the horizon, the event in Davos is a prime opportunity
to address some of the planet's most prominent decision makers.
Robin sets the scene standing in front of a screen
with images of people walking along a bustling city sidewalk. Now,
imagine you're standing in any major city in the world
and as an outbreak of what we call disease X,

(01:51):
an unknown respiratory pathogen, how quickly could we respond. The
reality is that for most countries there's no regional mechanism
that could manufacture and distribute vaccines in a meaningful time frame.
Just think about that for a moment. But many people
are thinking about a deadly pandemic potentially triggered by avian

(02:13):
flu as a distant possibility, not an imminent one. Ebola
killed more than eleven thousand people in West Africa between,
but that virus and others like Stars, Mirrors and Zeka
had all faded from the headlines. Robin reflects on the
prevailing sentiment at the time. The scientific community is set
up pandemic is coming, It's coming. But having said that,

(02:36):
for at least ten years, people were getting very used
to the drumbeat and not actually really appreciating the threat.
So it isn't exactly a packed house when the Imperial
scientist warns of a novel and potentially dangerous virus that
could suddenly strike. There have been the experience with a bowler,

(02:57):
but that was still relatively geer graphically isolated and wasn't
a global phenomena. And so in Davos when we gave presentation,
I think there were about thirty people in the audience
um and none of them of particular levels of influence.
For years, scientists that issued warnings and urgent calls to

(03:20):
bolster our health defenses, and at times those red flags
captured the attention of global leaders. Richard's coalition known as
SEPPI is a testament to that. But when disease X
hits just months later. Many countries aren't ready. Despite success
in creating vaccines in record time, COVID nineteen exposes the

(03:41):
world's vulnerabilities, killing millions of people and triggering economic turmoil.
Two years in, the pandemic still is in over a
fast spreading and heavily mutated variant. Omicron is the latest twist.
But virus hunters are already planning for a future, a crisis,
one that could be just as bad, if not worse,

(04:04):
and they're pointing to lessons from the past. While a
number of pathogens are on their radar, the effort also
depends on anticipating threats they haven't seen before. I'm James Peyton,
a health journalist at Bloomberg News from the Prognosis podcast.
This is breakthrough. Richard Hatchett didn't set out to protect

(04:39):
the country from pandemics. At Vanderbilt University in the nineteen eighties,
he was an English major and a poet. Later, he
opted to go to medical school before focusing on treating cancer.
Then a turning point comes On a bright late summer
day in two thousand one, News outlets like CNN interrupt

(05:00):
their coverage this justin you were looking at obviously a
very disturbing live shot there. That is the World Trade Center,
and we have unconfirmed reports this morning that a plane
has crashed into one of the towers. A second hijacked
plane slams into the South Tower, and soon New York's
tallest buildings collapse. Thousands of people are feared dead. Richard,

(05:23):
an emergency room doctor a Memorial Slowe Kettering Cancer Center,
is determined to help the city respond to the September
eleventh attack. The next morning on Wednesday, he and other
volunteers hit your ride on the truck down the West
Side Highway and head to the smoldering ruins at ground zero.
It was really shocking there, obviously, was this just pulverized

(05:45):
dust coating everything. There were cars and things that had
been abandoned. I mean, I think I remember seeing like
a baby carriage that was just completely coated in white
dust that it clearly, you know, the parent had picked
up the child and had fled on foot. It smelled
poisonous and toxic in a in a way that I've
never experienced before. Richard's group moves a few blocks north

(06:09):
to a field hospital set up at Stuyvesant High School.
With few survivors, nurses and doctors are providing medical support
to search and rescue workers. Richard is asked to take over.
Hundreds of volunteers arrive in the next twelve hours, and
the young physician is energized by the teamwork he witnesses.
That was obviously the personally transformative moment, very powerful, overwhelming

(06:33):
in some ways, experience also remarkable to work with the
medical volunteers, the nurses, the doctors who had shown up
very dedicated, self motivated, used to taking accountability. But he's
also frustrated by the lack of organization. Little prior thought
had gone into harnessing the skills and talents of civilians.

(06:55):
No one seems to have thought that anything like this
could happen. After three days, he hops on the subway uptown,
slowly making his way out into a new world. Along
the streets are photos of New Yorkers who are missing,
leaving Friday morning and emerging back into this shell shop
city that was just devastated and silent and had a

(07:20):
gaping wound in the skyline. I was inspired too, you know,
drawing the experience we had, but think about what would
we need in the future if something like this happened again.
How could we be better organized? How could we be
better integrated. Terrorism is now America's most urgent priority, but
the threat is changing shape quickly. When letters laced with

(07:42):
anthrax begin appearing in the mail, bio defense suddenly emerges
as another pressing concern. Richard is said to begin a
cancer fellowship at Duke University. After nine eleven, he changed
his course, devising a plan to form a network of
medical volunteers who can be mobilized swiftly in emergencies, not
just terrorism, but other health crises like epidemics. The concept

(08:06):
catches fire. Within weeks, he and his colleagues are briefing
the White House. President Bush's endorsement follows, and in early
two thousand two, Richard heads to Washington to help set
it up. I took a complete right turn in my
career at that point, you know, deviating from my plan
to complete an oncology fellowship and to go on and
practice medicine, to to do this odd thing that didn't

(08:29):
seem to build on anything that I've done before. What
Richard doesn't realize is that his idea, initially sparked by
fears of domestic terrorism would take on increased importance in
the coming years and put him on the ground floor
of global efforts to battle biological threats. When you decide

(08:51):
you need to prepare the country for a pandemic, how
do you make that happen? And how do you persuade
a complacent population to brace for a possible catastrophe? A
pivotal policy sixteen years ago starts with a book. It's
two thousand five and George W. Bush's worries are expanding.
Eleven had already been at defining moment. Hurricane Katrina is

(09:12):
another unexpected disaster. Anxieties over an avian flu strain spreading
in Asia are also running high. Then the President learns
about a pandemic almost ninety years earlier that killed tens
of millions of people worldwide. Richard is working at the
Infectious Disease Division of the National Institutes of Health. The
President happened to read John Barry's book The Great Influenza,

(09:35):
which was a history of the flu, and it, you know,
really scared him. And here was a natural threat that
had a potentially an impact that it was catastrophic beyond
anything that you know, Terrorists could do. Bush elevates the
issue to the top of his agenda, calling for a

(09:56):
national pandemic influenza strategy. Putting it together falls on the
shoulders of Regiev and Kayak, the President's adviser on biodefense.
Bush believes many parts of the government and economy aren't
focusing nearly enough on that kind of nightmare scenario. He
was regieve he didn't see that they were part of this,
and yet he knew that they would be affected. One

(10:18):
of the assumptions we made in pandemic planning is that
up to a third of your workforce could be out
of work at any given time because either they were
sick or at home taking care of somebody who's sick,
or because they're scared to come into work. Reggiev is
looking for backup, a strategic thinker with a medical background,
so he contacts the office of Tony Faucci, head of

(10:38):
the Infectious Disease Unit, and asked for Richard Reggieve knows
him from projects they'd worked on before what I asked
for and was allowed to pull together a team to
work on the implementation plan for the National Strategy for
pandemic influenza. He was one of the first people that
that came to mind, and we asked for him by name,
and so I had to make the difficult call and
request to Tony Fauci to get him to release Richard

(11:02):
to be a part of our pandemic flu efforts. And
of course Tony um saw the importance of it and
he agreed. Although I'm not sure gladly Bush's plan takes
shape quickly. In late two thousand five, he explains the
rationale and a speech televised on c SPAN proposing more
than seven billion dollars in spending. This moment, there is
no pandemic influenza in the United States or the world,

(11:27):
but if history is our guide, there is reason to
be concerned. The President is determined to pick up outbreaks earlier,
expand vaccine production, and boost readiness at the federal, state,
and local levels. Waiting until the lethal pathogen emerges could
have devastating consequences, and one day, many lives could be
needlessly lost because we failed to act today. By preparing now,

(11:51):
we can give our citizens some peace of mind knowing
that our nation is ready to act at the first
sign of danger. But the foresight isn't fully app ciated
at the time, and the US commitment to tackling those
looming pandemic risks, it's inconsistent. After the Bush years, Richard
continues to worry with roles on Bush's Homeland Security Council
and the National Security staff. Under Barack Obama in two

(12:14):
thousand nine, the new president is forced to contend with
the swine flu pandemic just months into his term. The
spread of hibola and Africa poses another test. The Obama
administration was quite good at learning from its experience and
adapting to the reality of the world that it lived in.
It and it and it did elevate global health security
as as one of its priorities. But I think it

(12:37):
was driven to do that by, you know, what happened
in the world, not not because it was a priority
from the beginning. Obama's team drafts a sixty nine page document,
a pandemic playbook, outlining how to respond to deadly viruses,
and leaves it behind for the Trump administration. Richard spends
several years at a US biomedical agency that works to
spur development of vaccines, drugs, and other countermeasures. Then, in

(13:01):
early seventeen, another door opens. The Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness
Innovations is launched and Richard is lured to run it.
SEPPI has influential backers. It began with almost half a
billion dollars in funds and support from a few governments
and big foundations like Gates and Welcome. But keeping pandemics
front and center proves difficult. Swine flu turns out to

(13:24):
be less deadly than people feared ebola, worries EBB. Much
of the focus is on the Trump election and Brexit.
Elected officials and governments probably discounted the threat when we
talked about the pandemic threat and talked about the huge
global cost of the pandemic. I think a lot of

(13:45):
a lot of people kind of secretly were like rolling
their eyes, thinking that we were just fearmongering. I don't
think that I'll have that problem going forward. At the end,
less than a year after that meeting in the Swiss Mountains,
officials in China begin investigating a pneumonia outbreak, an unknown

(14:08):
virus that's spreading fast. Within days, scores of researchers get
to work on potential vaccines to combat the pathogen. A
new Coronavirus Visor and its partnered bion tech Sprint out
of the Gates along with another company, Maderna, which has
been collaborating with the US government. Those drug makers are
betting on a technology called Messenger RNA. Richard has been

(14:33):
tracking progress in that field for years, so when he
receives an email from Maderna CEO Stefan ben Sell on January,
he doesn't need long to reply. The biotech company is
seeking funds to move its shot into human trials. I
think we basically made a decision in about seven minutes.
I Stefan's email was like, you know whatever, Diamond was

(14:54):
eight o'clock and it like eight oh seven. I was
responding saying, yeah, I think we should do this. Let's
for seed. But we knew the company, we needed the technology,
and we knew the urgency at that point. They sign
a contract just two days later and unveil it the
next morning back in Davos. And that was actually, I
believe a week before who even declared the outbreak of

(15:18):
public health emergency of International Concerned. That's how quickly we
were making decisions and moving. The vaccine race is on
and most people know how it plays out. In a
remarkable feat. Visor and Maderna create highly effective MR and
A shots within a year. The University of Oxford and
astras Eneka also crossed the finish line using a different technology,

(15:41):
building on work to develop a shot against MERS, the
other coronavirus threat, but gaps in surveillance and testing allowed
the virus to take off. Many governments respond to slowly
as cases climb. The Trump administration is blasted for ignoring
the pandemic strategy and inherited Here's Obama speaking of the
campaign rally in Philadelphia in October. We literally left this

(16:05):
White House a pandemic playbook that would have shown them
how to respond before the virus reached our shots. They
probably used it, I don't know, prop up a wobbly
table somewhere. We don't know where that playbook went. Wealthy nations. Meanwhile,
Russia had to snap up vaccine supplies, leaving poorer regions

(16:26):
behind and unprotected as the highly contagious delta variant spreads.
The inequity of the distribution of vaccine in particular, but
also the other countermeasures, oxygen and the therapeutics that we
have to me that's the central story of the pandemic.
It's also the central moral failure of humanity in our

(16:50):
response to the pandemic. Richards says a program known as
Kovac's is helping to right those wrongs. He was part
of early discussions that led to its creation. The initiative
aim to deliver vaccines fairly to every corner of the planet,
but it struggled to access doses and fallen short of
its goals. Wealthy governments and pharmaceutical companies have faced criticism

(17:12):
for not doing more to narrow the divide. Next time,
the world will need to spread vaccine technologies and manufacturing
capabilities more widely. Petro To Blanche is trying to make
that a reality. She directs a Cape Town based biotech
company called Afrogen Biologics and Vaccines. The business is working
with the w h O and other partners on an

(17:32):
m R and a hub to produce new shots and
train people from other countries to make them. They aim
to reproduce the Madurna vaccine, a product that's failed to
reach large parts of the globe, and have a candidate
ready for human trials in about a year. But they're
looking well beyond that project, hoping to put lower income
regions in a stronger position in the future. Here's tore blanche,

(17:54):
and it's part of a global initiative to ensure that
not in any industry short term, but in the long term,
low and middle income countries have access to m R
and A technology platforms, and at low and middle income
countries are able to sustainably manufactured at least a significant

(18:16):
portion of the vaccines that they are required to ensure
health security. This is not a one year program, This
is not a five year program. This is a fifteen
year program. A year after the first COVID inoculations arrived
in rich countries, many African nations have yet to fully
vaccinate ten percent of their people. The clearing access gap

(18:37):
during the COVID pandemic as fueled calls to boost manufacturing
and developing nations and help those regions become more self sufficient.
Africa imports more than of its vaccines. Petro says the
past couple of years have been painful, but she's optimistic
the new technologies and increased investment will have a lasting
impact beyond COVID. The bigginest lesson for us is that

(19:02):
you cannot rely on the rest of the world to
provide us with how security when the rest of the
world are in a pandemic um. It is the it's
the it's the selfish gene that you us never underestimate.
There's a route awakening that this, this, this can this
cannot be repeated ever. In the West African country of Senegal,

(19:25):
a new production plant is set to become part of
the solution as well. By the end of next year,
the proposed facility at the Institute Pasteur may start making
twenty five million vaccine doses a month, targeting COVID and
other diseases. It's backed by European countries, the US, the
World Bank, and others. Amadou Saw, the veteran virologist who
directs the institute in Senegal, says the plant could spurre

(19:48):
more investment and become a model for the continent. This
is not a project only about making vaccine, but also
it's a great opportunity to build a future and hope
that the younger generation won't have to face what we're
facing right now. Amado has spent decades urging people to
prepare for outbreaks. After the Ebola crisis, he received a

(20:11):
painting as a gift from his wife and children. On
one side, as a family shrouded in darkness, threatened by
looming virus. The other is filled with bright light, a
symbol of the science that will save them. He put
it on the wall of his office in downtown Dakar,
a reminder of his mission. We should be conscious that
we may have other covids. They may not be necessarily COVID,

(20:33):
that they may be influenza or another new disease, and
the world should be prepared for that. But people are
talking a lot about having a new normal, meaning that
we would have to cope with living under some condition
because the epidemic may be something very regular we have
to take into account. As Amadou says, Africa, along with

(20:54):
the rest of the world, will be tested again. Coronavirus
is influenza, and of other pathogens around scientists watch list.
Then there are diseases that aren't yet known to infect humans.
The next ones could be tougher targets. Scientists may not
be able to easily replicate the COVID success story, work
that benefited from previous investments in targeting coronaviruses. Despite decades

(21:17):
of work, there still is in a vaccine for HIV
as Imperials Robin Shattuck knows well. The danger is that
something new comes along on people expect it solved within
a year, and it may just be a bigger challenge
for the scientific community. Robbin's experience also underscores the complexities
of vaccine development. After falling behind, Imperial decided not to

(21:40):
go forward with a larger trial this year, lacking the
budget of a big farm a company. Instead, it's refocused
on variants, booster shots, and refining its approach. Their technology
may not play a role today, the hope is that
it will in the future. In September, a university spinoff
Robin co founded attracted astros Eneka as a partner. Imperial's method,

(22:03):
called self amplifying RNA shows potential and stimulating strong immune
responses with very small doses. Messenger RNA vaccines temporarily turned
the body cells into vaccine making factories. This could be
part of the next generation. If Robin's team can prove
it works, the technology could reduce manufacturing costs in a pandemic.

(22:25):
It could allow supplies to reach vast parts of the world.
If we can meet that challenge of very low doses,
it completely changes the productivity and will enhance global access.
So if you can make thirty two a hundred times
more vaccine, then you're going to have just way more

(22:47):
doses to to go around. Another goal is avoiding the
need to freeze or one day even refrigerate RNA vaccines
during shipping and storage. That could remove an obstacle for
immunization campaigns into heloping countries. The rollout in low and
middle income countries has been tragically slow, and we can't

(23:09):
continue to live with this kind of two phase approach
where rich countries get vaccinated very quickly and are already
thinking about boosters, where low income countries just have had
perishingly few vaccine doses. Richard now wants to draw on

(23:30):
those lessons. One part of the plan is creating a
library at prototype vaccines targeting up to two dozen viral
families that could provide a crucial head start in battling
future outbreaks when they arise. Scientists are also working on
experimental all in one vaccines that could offer broad protection
against multiple coronavirus is not just the one that causes COVID,

(23:52):
and Richard wants to move even faster on vaccines, potentially
developing them in just one days. A moonshot ambition we
can see a pathway and perhaps as little as as
ten years of focused work two radically reduce the risk
that these diseases present, you know, for the future. And

(24:15):
if we can do that, we will live in a
much safer world. Still, the next pandemic could happen sooner
than we think. Rising populations and increased travel can allow
viruses to spread quickly. Encroachment into natural habitats, swelling cities,
and wildlife trade raise the likelihood of diseases jumping from
animals to people, and researchers say climate change is expanding

(24:38):
the range of disease carrying insects like mosquitoes. There are
a number of trend lines that would increase the risk
of future emerging diseases, and all those trend lines are
long term trends, and they're all heading in the wrong direction.
So I think what we're dealing with is a a

(24:58):
category of of thread that has not been discharged because
we've now had a pandemic. That doesn't buy us another
hundred years of safety. Vaccines are just one tool, along
with expanded monitoring and sequencing to track mutations. Artificial intelligence
and data analysis are also critical. Sally Davies England's former

(25:20):
Chief Medical officer is on the front lines of that effort.
Last year, she formed the Trinity Challenge, a coalition that's
funding promising projects all over the world from Europe to Asia.
Technology companies Facebook, Google and Microsoft are members. We came
together saying never again. We asked people to engineer the

(25:42):
collision of data science with public health to answer the
questions by producing innovations that can be scaled, that can
become public goods affordable in loan middle income countries as well,
to really make a difference to can you pick up
spill over earlier? Can you clamp down on an outbreak?

(26:05):
Can we respond better? Can we recover better? One recipient
of Trinity funds in Thailand arms local farmers with an
app that allows them to quickly flag emerging diseases that
could pass from animals to humans. Another is using AI
to analyze billions of annual blood tests to try to
pick up epidemics early. Those initiatives could give governments an
edge and preventing local outbreaks from exploding into something far worse.

(26:30):
The former UK health official is focused on a number
of risks like influenza. She also worries about a different
kind of pandemic, one that's moving more slowly than COVID
but killing hundreds of thousands of people every year. I
am very concerned about anti microbial resistance, the superbugs, the
bugs that developed resistance to the treatments we use, whether

(26:50):
it's bacteria to antibiotics, viruses to anti virals, fungi to
their treatments, which is a slow and silent pandemic that's
rising steadily up. Money and expertise are important, but galvanizing
world leaders also requires tenacity. In Sally Davies pushed then

(27:10):
Prime Minister David Cameron to take on superbugs. Or my
husband once said, when I was Chief Medical Officer, the
senior people probably thought they'd appointed a doctor who would
tell them the evidence. Well, they didn't understand was they
got a campaigner who was a doctor who would tell

(27:31):
them the evidence. And the evidence on anti microbial resistance
is powerful. It wasn't strong enough. When I realized we
needed as a world to move on it, so I
went with our Cabinet secretary to see the then Prime
Minister Cameron. I said to him, it's as complex and

(27:51):
complicated as climate change. She and her colleagues moved the
issue out of the realm of technocrats, as she puts it,
and into the public eye. Report that came out of
this effort found that without any action, drug resistant diseases
by twenty fifty could cause up to ten million deaths
a year and have massive economic costs. It's not too late,

(28:11):
but we must take action. All there will be many
dead because you, the politicians haven't committed the money. You
the companies haven't made new drugs, We have not set
up surveillance systems. Here I am banging on still seven
eight years after I started. People tend to believe the

(28:33):
future will look like the past. So how do you
prepare for something you can't imagine? Here's regieve again. The
former Bush advisor now runs the vaccines business for Takeda,
the Japanese pharmaceutical company, and he's also on the board
of SEPPI. The swine flu or H one N one
pandemic should have been a warning instead, because the fallout
was limited, R. Jeeves says, it led people to relax.

(28:57):
This is a real concern that people's imagination will be
limited by their most recent experience. UH the H one
N one pandemic paradoxically probably drove a level of complacency
around influenza. Now, COVID will likely be seen as a

(29:19):
worst case scenario given the massive health and economic pain
it's caused, But we could see a similar story play
out again, and it's possible a future contagion could be
even more devastating, combining an ability to spread easily with
a higher fatality rate. The virus that causes COVID is
much less lethal than stars and mers. Another worry is

(29:40):
a disease that severely afflicts groups beyond the elderly and
those with underlying health conditions. Take the pandemic the one
that frightened President Bush. People between twenty and forty years
old were hit hard by that virus, as well as
younger and older populations. I see plenty of reasons why
COVID could be far from the worst UH pandemic that

(30:01):
we could face, and battling dangerous viruses could become more
difficult as governments and scientists confront distrust and it divided population. Frankly,
my biggest concern coming out of this pandemic is the
undermining of confidence in public health authorities and the scientific
community that we've seen driven by misinformation and disinformation, and

(30:24):
that is not something that's going to be corrected overnight.
Countries cannot afford to let that persist. We're going to
have to have a comprehensive strategy to deal with with misinformation,
because in the absence of that, we will have a
chaotic response, as we've seen in many parts of the US,
and that will ultimately lead to far more people getting

(30:45):
sick and dying as we're seeing today than necessary. Regieves says.
Health officials need to take advantage of the focus on
COVID to step up development of vaccines, therapies, and testing technology.
There's no guarantee that whatever we do is going to
eliminate the pandemic threat, to be clear, but there's a
lot that we could do to be more prepared, not

(31:07):
just for flu viruses and coronaviruses, but for viruses from
other families. One key is messenger RNA. It's a bright
spot amid the misery of the past two years that
bodes well for the future, bringing the benefits of speed
and flexibility, even if traditional methods will still be needed.
Nations also must brought in their efforts to keep up

(31:29):
with both old scourges as well as new enemies. Richard says,
Nipa and Hendra, the deadly paramix of viruses, are expanding
their global range, and they're just a couple of examples.
We got out of the gate like Hussain Bold in
terms of responding to coronaviruses, and we're not ready to
do that with other viral families. And there are many

(31:50):
other viral families that present concerns. We need to be
as ready for paramix of viruses and and for you know,
the other five viral families that are known to cause
human disease as we were for coronavirus. Is twenty years
after nine eleven, Richard again sees an opportunity in the

(32:11):
wake of a disaster. He envisions the world in which
pandemics are preventable in the same way famines are no
longer inevitable thanks to early warning efforts, but achieving that
will be a massive challenge. After COVID nineteen, I am
very concerned that in a sense, as as damaging and
disruptive as it has been, as many millions of people

(32:34):
as it has killed, and as much economic damage as
it has caused, which is in the tens of trillions
of dollars probably that COVID may just be a shot
across the bowl that there is ahead of us in
this century, a pandemic that would make COVID look like
a mild pandemic relative to what is possible For now.

(32:56):
The priority is getting COVID under control and grappling with
the risk posed by variants like amicron, taking advantage of
the innovation that emerges from the pandemic. Strengthening the w
h O and boosting funding are seen as important next steps.
That's spending to try to avert a future calamity. It
would be tiny compared with the potential cost. If we

(33:16):
stay focused and and leverage the political will that COVID
has generated. I think we can dramatically reduce or even
eliminate the risk of future pandemics if we want to,
and I think we have to, because I think they're
an existential threat to modern society. It's a message governments

(33:40):
have failed to heat in the past. Well the world
assume that this is a once in a century event
and let its guard down again when COVID finally recedes,
or will we see this pandemic as a wake up call?
The health and economic stakes couldn't be higher This episode

(34:14):
of Prognosis Breakthrough was written and reported by me. James
peyton To for Foreheads and Magnus Hendrickson are the senior producers.
Karl Kevin Robinson Jr. Is our associate producer. Our theme
music was composed and performed by Hannis Brown. Rick Shine
is our editor. Francesco Levy is the head of Bloomberg Podcast.
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