The Excerpt podcast: Are we ready for the next pandemic? How scientists are preparing.

On Sunday's episode of The Excerpt podcast: It's been four years since COVID-19 hit, spreading like wildfire around the globe and taking millions of lives in the process. While safe and effective vaccines have given us back a sense of normalcy, we wanted to ask: are we any better prepared for the next one? What are the big takeaway lessons from the pandemic and are we confident that nationally and globally, we’re ready this time around? USA TODAY Health Reporter Karen Weintraub joins The Excerpt to discuss the important issues.

Hit play on the player below to hear the podcast and follow along with the transcript beneath it. This transcript was automatically generated, and then edited for clarity in its current form. There may be some differences between the audio and the text.

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Dana Taylor:

Hello and welcome to The Excerpt. I'm Dana Taylor. Today is Sunday, January 7th, 2024.

It's been four years since COVID-19 hit, spreading like wildfire around the globe and taking millions of lives in the process. While safe and effective vaccines have given us back a sense of normalcy, are we any better prepared for the next global pandemic? What are the big takeaway lessons from COVID? And are we confident that nationally and globally we're ready this time around? USA Today health reporter Karen Weintraub joins us to discuss the issues.

Karen, thanks for joining me.

Karen Weintraub:

Thanks for having me.

Dana Taylor:

Okay, so I want to start with the, so-called Elephant in the room. What's the likelihood of another global pandemic hitting within the next 25 years, the next 50 years?

Karen Weintraub:

So a recent study said that there's about a 2 to 3% chance every year for another pandemic of the same scale we just had. Which means that in the next 25 years there's a 50/50 chance. The comparison I drew was that by the time Taylor Swift is 60, there's a likelihood that there'll be another one, 50/50 chance there'll be another one.

Dana Taylor:

Okay. So let's pivot now to a question that's vexed scientists for four years now. Do we yet know for certain the origin of the virus? Was it a lab in China? Was it the animal market? And if we don't know, how can we really prevent the next virus from coming into existence?

Karen Weintraub:

Right. The answer is we do not know. And the answer is do everything to prevent the next one. Researchers have said, try to shut down animal markets. They are part of the culture in a number of parts of the world, so they're not so easy to shut down, but maybe do whatever we can to clean them up as much as we can. So the animals were stacked high, they were not in very clean conditions in this particular animal market. Maybe there's something that can be done about that, for instance. And then there were experiments that were going on in a lab that was not as safe as it should have been, and that needs to be stopped. So there are things that can be done even if we don't know the answer to where this particular virus originated.

Dana Taylor:

Well, nearly 7 million people die globally from COVID-19 as of the first week in January. The unequal distributions of vaccines has been blamed for a lot of the death we saw, particularly in less wealthy nations. But research and monitoring were also an issue for these nations. Have we come up with any systems to address both access to vaccines and also investment in research and monitoring.

Karen Weintraub:

So there's been some effort. There's an organization called Gavi, which has done tremendous work to spread vaccination around the world. The US, which did tremendous work to develop the vaccines, wanted first dibs on the vaccines. And so we got multiple shots in most arms before other countries got any in their highest risk people. Again, because we developed the vaccines we felt like we had dibs on that. Is that fair? Is that something we should do differently the next time? That's a global conversation to be had.

Dana Taylor:

Let's now talk about some of the tools that scientists have identified to help prevent the next global pandemic. Is the World Health Organization leading the charge? Who are the players here?

Karen Weintraub:

Yeah. The WHO is certainly involved, but it's a very kind of diffuse effort, which some researchers I spoke with said is a good thing. It's like the human immune system, they called it the global immune system. And they think that it's a good idea to have diverse people in different places involved, not a centralized system, because different people will see different things and have different strengths. So a group of scientists I spoke with, for instance, are setting up something, they're called the Global Alliance for Preventing Pandemics, and they are training people. So far they've worked in eight different countries to analyze the genomics of different viruses, to understand what they're dealing with when a patient comes in coughing or having symptoms to get some scans of those to sequence the genes of that pathogen and figure out what's going on.

So the WHO might provide the hardware, the funding for the hardware for that sequencing device. But this GAPP organization will help analyze the data. And it'll work in times when there isn't a global pandemic. It'll help identify measles, polio, a host of other things. But if something new comes along, it'll raise a red flag and identify that as well.

Dana Taylor:

And does it look like more countries will adopt this surveillance system in the near future?

Karen Weintraub:

Yeah, that's the hope that it will spread worldwide and be used in country. It's not something that people from the US or Europe will parachute in and tell them what to do, but people will adopt within their own countries and use as they see fit within their countries. And so it'll be more ground up, I guess, than top down and hopefully that will make it more useful to people and more likely for them to keep using it.

Dana Taylor:

Karen, when scientists look back on the start of the pandemic, what kind of preventative methods do they wish they'd done?

Karen Weintraub:

Clearly they wish that the wet market had been closed. They wish there had been more caution in the labs, as we mentioned. There's a lot of second guessing going on. There had been a lot of focus at the time on trying to understand the pathogens in animals, and now the shift is trying to understand pathogens in people as opposed to animals. There's just too many different viruses and bacteria out there, and fungus. We can't possibly keep track of everything that's going on in the world. It's like keeping track of the stars in the sky, there's just too much going on out there. So now the focus is more on people on what's showing up in the patients, and I think there's more hope that that can be more productive than focusing on just the whole universe that's out there.

Dana Taylor:

Even though it's been only a few years, is there enough political will and funding to put more of these preventative measures in place? Your story mentioned a collective global amnesia. What's going on here?

Karen Weintraub:

Yeah, so there's a lot of concern about that in the public health community. Public health is one of those things that if you hear about it, it's probably not going well. The best public health is not seen. When it works, you don't notice it. So there is concern. There's always an up and down. People want public health when there's a crisis and don't pay attention to it when there isn't. So there is a lot of concern that funding and attention to public health is going away. Nobody wants to think about the pandemic anymore. We're all over it. We're all done. We want it in the past. But now is really a good time or the time to be thinking about preventing the next one.

Dana Taylor:

What technological advances are scientists crediting with being able to prevent disease spread, and how do they see that impacting how we fight diseases going forward?

Karen Weintraub:

Yeah, there's been tremendous scientific advances. So sequencing technology, for instance, we can now afford to, you go into a health clinic, you've got a weird cough or weird symptoms, they can sequence the genes of that for relatively little money, which was not feasible five or six years ago. And the computing ability to analyze that data, huge amounts of data, is tremendously advanced from where it was just a few years ago. Our understanding of viruses and the ability to build vaccines and make them quickly with mRNA is tremendously advanced.

So science is providing a lot more hope in these areas, and the science is moving very quickly. So that's where the optimism lies, I guess, right now is just the advances have been really tremendous.

Dana Taylor:

Well, how does the reality of climate change impact how scientists are planning for public health crises in the future?

Karen Weintraub:

We're coming into more contact, I guess, with a lot of these new novel pathogens. Things we haven't seen, or the human body hasn't seen before. As we cut down forests, as we come into more contact with animals that we haven't come into regular contact with before we're catching pathogens that we haven't seen before. And so that opens up a possibility for more of these so-called zoonotic diseases to jump from animals to people. And so there is concern that there's going to be another one of these in the next 5, 10, 25, 50 years, and that we really do need to be prepared. A few readers accused me of being a fear mongerer for writing this story. But to me, it's kind of like buying car insurance. You don't think about buying car insurance as being fear mongering. You do it in the off chance that something terrible happens and you pay relatively little today to prevent having to pay a lot more in the future, and that to me is what this is. It's prevention. It's paying a little bit now to avoid disaster in the future.

Dana Taylor:

So bottom line, Karen, are we in fact ready for the next one?

Karen Weintraub:

Not yet, but maybe we will be. Hopefully we will be more ready by the time it hits.

Dana Taylor:

Well, thanks for being on The Excerpt, Karen.

Karen Weintraub:

Thank you for having me.

Dana Taylor:

Thanks for our senior producer Shannon Rae Green for production assistance. Our executive producer is Laura Beatty. Let us know what you think of this episode by sending a note to [email protected]. Thanks for listening. I'm Dana Taylor. Taylor Wilson will be back tomorrow morning with another episode of The Excerpt.