AN The lack of transparency on the part of the Chinese authorities – particularly about the transmission of the new coronavirus and the obstruction of a leading US scientist to investigate it – played a significant role in allowing COVID-19 to spread outside China, he said. the director of NIAID, Anthony Fauci, to Axios.
The big picture: Axios first spoke to Fauci a year ago this week about “mysterious pneumonia” in Wuhan, China, which he suspected was a new coronavirus, but was reported by Chinese health officials to be not so infectious.
- “At that time, the lack of full appreciation of the seriousness of what we were dealing with was [due to] for a number of reasons, “says Fauci.” Some things were not known to anyone. And, some things were known to the Chinese and they were not very transparent about it “, he adds, citing the delay in the person to person transmission and asymptomatic of the virus.
- Many people outside of China “were tricked,” he says, because they were unaware that the virus that caused the pandemic was acting differently from its cousin, SARS-CoV, where people infected with SARS show symptoms.
- If China had revealed its asymptomatic spread earlier, it would have “changed everything” for guidance on masks, social distance and contact tracking, he says.
China also refused to allow foreign scientists to investigate the virus in the terrain “for a considerable period”, limiting the ability to see how it was transmitting and tracking its origin, he says.
- When they finally allowed an international group led by WHO, they still prevented some of these scientists, including one from NIAID, from traveling from Beijing to Wuhan.
- And this week, China has delayed travel authorization for a group of international scientists led by WHO who plan to investigate the origins of the virus.
Looking back at the previous year, Fauci and other public health experts say that some lessons have been learned …
1) Communication is essential.
- “You don’t know everything you need to know on the first day”, and how data accumulate, public health guidelines will evolve, says Fauci.
- Some public health experts say the process could have been explained to the public more clearly, especially with the change in guidelines.
- “The key here is not that we didn’t know what to do, but there were barriers that prevented it, be it political or otherwise,” said Tara Kirk Sell, senior researcher at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security. “The CDC has this orientation called Crisis and Emergency Risk Communication. It is scientific and works well, but it does not [use] this.”
2) Disinformation and disinformation are extremely harmful.
- They were “incredibly powerful in this pandemic,” said Sell, adding that they could affect people’s health and national security. “We really need a national strategy to combat this.”
3) “Political division is a major obstacle for an adequate public health response “, says Fauci.
- “You have people who are making decisions about their own behavior based on political considerations, as opposed to an objective assessment of the threat to public health,” adds Fauci.
- “Public health has always been political, but it has never been more partisan than this time. Public health partisanship has been incredibly dangerous in this pandemic, ”said Carlos del Rio, distinguished professor of medicine at Emory University School of Remedy.
Scientific advances in vaccine technology are the biggest highlight this year, says Fauci.
- Developing and administering a safe and effective vaccine in 11 months is “a monumental achievement. It is simply historic in its proportion,” says Fauci.
- “Rebuilding trust in science is a priority and I hope that vaccines do that.[cut: I think we need to continue to communicate what an incredible achievement that has been, and the fact that these vaccines did not come out of nowhere. Vaccines came from the years of research in mRNA technology and other things,]”Sell ads.
The final result: The pandemic has shown thatt “The unimaginable can happen,” says Fauci. But he expects “we are very, very much back to normal in a year.”