NPR Interview with Ed Yong: Why we need to prepare for the next pandemic

[ahimsa]

NPR's Michel Martin speaks with journalist Ed Yong about his piece in The Atlantic titled, "We're Already Barreling Toward the Next Pandemic."

https://www.npr.org/2021/10/03/1042883030/why-we-need-to-prepare-for-the-next-pandemic
[6 minute interview, full transcript available]

A couple of quotes:

... history has shown us that every major epidemic creates a wave of interest and attention that is rapidly followed by a phase of neglect. Experts have talked about this panic-neglect cycle for years, for as long as I have been reporting on this topic. And it means that if we wait until COVID is no more to think about the next pandemic, we will already be well into the point where the window for preparing for the next one has closed.

... you can have all the biomedical, shiny tools that you want. But if you deploy that onto a society with gross inequities, with a public health system that is weak and has been allowed to rot for a century and a health care system that millions of people still can't access, then they lose a lot of that power. We cannot simply expect these panaceas - vaccines and drugs - to get us out of pandemics which are fundamentally a societal problem. They need massive societal fixes to address.