Why Didn't The World Listen To Experts Who Warned Of A Pandemic?

• Published date: 09 September 2020
• Subject Matter: Coronavirus (COVID-19), Government Measures, Reporting and Compliance
• Law Firm: Brahams Dutt Badrick French LLP
• Author: Brahams Dutt Badrick French LLP

The opening session of the Global Solutions Summit 2020 poignantly stated

Covid-19 pandemic demonstrates to us the value of freedom - the freedom to move, to be with those we love, to live in dignity and security - for ourselves and for those around us, from our loved ones to the refugees and the downtrodden. Above all, it shows us the importance of recognising the true purpose of all our businesses and economies, our political parties and governments, our local civic associations and our international organisations, our conventions and ideologies, and all our other systems: namely, to serve human needs and purposes.

Anyone who had listened to US President, Donald Trump in recent weeks would be forgiven for thinking that no one could have ever predicted or prepared for a global pandemic on the scale of COVID-19. At his daily press briefings, in relation to the national stockpile of medical products needed to protect people and combat the virus, he repeats the line that the "the cupboard was bare" when his administration took over from his predecessor, Barack Obama. While it is true that the US was short on some items such as the N95 masks following the H1N1 virus in 2009, the US national stockpile was not depleted. And even if Mr Trump's assertion is true, his administration has had since January 2017 to build up the reserves needed.

No politician can argue we were not warned

In April 2015, the founder of Microsoft, and now billionaire philanthropist, Bill Gates, gave a TED presentation entitled, "The next outbreak? We're not ready".

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He started the presentation by saying, "when I was a kid, the disaster we worried about most was a nuclear war...today the greatest risk of global catastrophe doesn't look like this [shows a slide of a nuclear 'mushroom cloud'], instead it looks like this [shows a slide of a picture of a virus cell]. He then goes on to warn us that microbes are more likely to kill millions of people in the coming years, not war.

Drawing on lessons from the Ebola crisis, he says that three key pieces of the jigsaw required to control the outbreak, were absent:

• Surveillance and data - i.e. a team of epidemiologists to gather data on the prevalence, causes and spread, and IT systems to capture and process the information.
• Personnel - thousands of medical personnel were needed, but it took too long to assemble the resources needed
• Treatment - hundreds of thousands of workers were needed to deliver treatments for Ebola. In reality, there...