Episode 231: Mark Woolhouse
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Pandemics and Public Health
In February 2020, Mark Woolhouse, a UK epidemiologist, called the Chief Medical Officer of Scotland. Mark wanted to talk to the leader about what the country was doing to prepare for the inevitable arrival of a virus that was spreading through China. Thus began Mark’s engagement with what would be 2 years of advising and critiquing the COVID policy response in the UK.
On this episode of unSILOed, Greg and Mark discuss some of lessons learned about pandemic preparedness and response and how epidemiologists, journalists and politicians can communicate better during moments of public health emergencies.
Mark Woolhouse is a Professor of Infectious Disease Epidemiology at the University of Edinburgh. His latest book is The Year The World Went Mad: A Scientific Memoir.
Episode Quotes:
On the failings on the pandemic response
57:38: It's very hard to pin the failings of the pandemic response in the US and the UK and elsewhere on a single section of that overall response community, as it were. It's not just the scientist's fault. It's not just the advisor's fault. It's not just the civil service's fault, the politician's fault. It's not just the healthcare worker's fault. All of us were at fault in some ways. So I described that as a system failure. Our system was challenged with this particular event, which wasn't that different from what we planned for; it wasn't massively different from pandemic influenza, but it was different enough that it flew threw our system into complete disarray.
04:03: There's a lot of humility needed in the public health and scientific community to try and understand that preparedness and vulnerability are different things, and they're different things to a virus.
Lockdowns should be implemented with greater caution
21:22: We better take a long, hard, critical look about the evidence, strengths, and weaknesses of the lockdown approach before we wholeheartedly embrace it as part of the next generation of pandemic preparedness plans. I think there's a real big danger there that we'll just jump into lockdown again the next time anything comes along to threaten us.
Doesn't lockdown protect everybody?
37:30: There was this rather naive argument that, well, doesn't lockdown protect everybody? Well, it's true to a degree. But it demonstrably doesn't protect all of those vulnerable people…(37:56) So whether you are against lockdown or somewhere on the fence, clearly, we needed other strategies, ones that did a better job of protecting the people who were most vulnerable.
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