How can we prevent the Next Pandemic?

Professor Devi Sridhar’s vital roles in communicating science to the public and speaking truth to power. In Preventable, she highlights lessons learned from outbreaks past and present in a narrative that traces the Covid-19 pandemic including her personal experience as a scientist, and set out a vision for how we can better protect ourselves from the inevitable health crises to come.

Sridhar, FRSE is an American public health researcher who is both professor and chair of global public health at the University of Edinburgh, Scotland, exposes the effectiveness of public health interventions, the realities of those affected by the jailed doctor in Wuhan who sounded the alarm, and bored passengers marooned on the Diamond Princess cruise ship, to the daily nightmares of exhausted healthcare workers and puts you in the room with key decision-makers at crucial moments from overconfident heads of states and their hesitant scientific advisers to the beleaguered leaders of global health organisations. She gives pointers on how to improve developmental assistance for health.

Sridhar reveals the twists and turns of a plot that saw deadlier variant emerge contrary to the predictions of social media pundits who argued it would mutate to a milder form, the Pyrrhic victory in many countries of the false narrative of health versus the economy those countries which controlled the virus, like Taiwan and Denmark, had steadier recovery. But countries with weak health systems like Senegal and Vietnam fare better than countries like the US and the UK which were consistently ranked as the most prepared, and the quickest development of game-changing vaccines in history and their unfair distribution. Preventable will outrage, challenge, and inspire by dissecting the global structures that determine our fate and revealing the deep-seated economic and social inequalities at their heart.

Sridhar who had accurately predicted the beginnings of the crisis that had gripped the world over the past two years, told audiences at the Hay Literary Festival in June 2018, “The biggest threat to the UK was a Chinese farmer getting infected by an animal with a novel pathogen before boarding a plane bound for Britain”. In reality “ two of the previous leaders in global health “ – the UK and the US- ended up as “tragic stories in the eyes of the rest of the world”, Sridhar claims.

Preventable also takes readers on a world tour to understand why countless western nations with plentiful capacity failed the pandemic test in 2020, while less obvious candidates rose to the challenge.

It also chars the catastrophic breakdown in global cooperation, made worse by the west’s hoarding of vaccine doses throughout 2021.

In February 2020, the UK, the US, and much of continental Europe were “consumed by their own internal issues” while other nations were racing ahead with preparations for the oncoming surge.

 Vietnam closed its borders. South Korea harnessed mobile phone technology for contacting, The Czech Republic masked up, Greece cancelled large-scale public events and Senegal worked with other African nations to scale up testing despite scant resources.

Boris Johnson  “ focused on delivering Brexit – the UK’s divorce from Europe – and on his own divorce from his wife,” writes Sridhar.

Herd Immunity was advocated by the UK science advisers and then adopted by Sweden, or elimination of a strategy known as zero covid was pursued by New Zealand and China.

 Preventable claims a combination of a lack of humility in the face of infectious disease, groupthink among the scientific establishment, and the poor leadership skills of populist leaders including Boris Johnson, Donald Trump, and Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro, condemned some of the countries best equipped to fight the pandemic to failure in 2020.

Post vaccine era, the post-Omicron era most westerners were triple jabbed and life is getting back to normal. The Wuhan wet market, the alarm surrounding an early outbreak on the Diamond Princess cruise ship, and even the endless months of lockdown, Sridhar offers a powerful reminder of how “We must not forget the policy decisions made pre-vaccine, and how many lives could have been saved had the advice and the leadership been different”.

Preventable: How a Pandemic Changed the World & How to stop the Next One by Devi Lalita Sridhar, Viking £20, 432 pages.