Convincing world leaders to prepare for future health crises is Joy Phumaphi’s job.
A former health minister of Botswana and the new co-chair of the Global Preparedness Monitoring Board, she leads the independent panel set up by the World Bank and the World Health Organization in 2018 to ensure readiness for global health crises.
The board warned in 2019 that the world was at serious risk should a disease outbreak occur.
Three years and an ongoing pandemic later, Phumaphi and the board want to help government leaders implement the lessons learned. But the world’s focus on the war in Ukraine and the pandemic’s economic consequences are making their efforts more difficult.
Phumaphi talked with Future Pulse about what countries should be doing now. The interview has been edited for length and clarity.
How can the world better prepare for disease threats?
We need a global preparedness treaty, and the WHO has started organizing consultations for that.
While you’re in the process of negotiating a treaty, we should take what we learned from this pandemic.
Our public health education and communication has been very, very poor, with a lot of disinformation on social media. We should be addressing that issue.
We should be making sure that we reach the minimum thresholds for vaccination globally.
We have learned about the weak surveillance system. We need to enhance the national, regional, continental surveillance network. We should have unified data platforms across the regions, not just between countries. The current different data platforms make it very difficult to share data. You need to build that capacity now.
What do you think of governments’ and international organizations’ preparations?
We are extremely worried that we are still moving too slowly.
With the $1 billion pledged for the World Bank’s Financial Intermediary Fund, we cannot do anything. It can maybe act as a catalytic fund. We’re hoping that one of the things we can focus on is mobilizing more resources for that fund.
Ministers of health and finances right now need to be making some serious decisions about what to prioritize in health investment. In a lot of countries, when they talk about investments in health, they’re just building more hospitals, whereas community health care is extremely weak.
You must have a robust primary health care system at the community level. This is the strengthening that needs to happen.
How do you see the conflicts around the world affecting your efforts?
If we ignore any of these challenges, it’s going to wreak havoc on the global community.
The war in Ukraine has been described as a potential Armageddon. What about the potential of the next pandemic and what that’s going to do to the world? It’s the same thing.
What if we ignore climate change? What will it do to the world? The same thing. The likelihood of a new pandemic that has an origin in nature has been increasing exponentially.
So we have to learn to deal with multiple crises at the same time. We cannot solve one and not solve the other.
This is where we explore the ideas and innovators shaping health care.
Washington state’s Covid-19 emergency ended on Monday, leaving 11 state orders in place. Six more are slated to end this month. Connecticut’s runs through Dec. 28, and Kansas’ till Jan. 20. Three states have emergencies with no specified end date: California, New Mexico and West Virginia. The federal emergency order expires in mid-January, unless the Biden administration extends it.
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Today on our Pulse Check podcast, Katherine Ellen Foley talks with Ben about the FDA’s tobacco regulatory decision-making process. Plus, Greer Donley, a professor specializing in reproductive health care at the University of Pittsburgh Law School, breaks down what the FDA’s stance on doctors prescribing abortion pills to people who aren’t yet pregnant means in practice.
Demand for medication abortion is on the rise in states with abortion bans.
That’s the message Aid Access founder Rebecca Gomperts sent in a research letter she co-signed with three colleagues in JAMA this week.
Their data shows that U.S. requests for abortion pills at Aid Access, the Dutch telemedicine nonprofit, have increased in states that have imposed restrictions since the Supreme Court allowed states to ban the procedure in June.
- Average daily orders for abortion medication received by Aid Access from 30 states increased to 213.7 from June 24, the day of the high court’s decision, to the end of August. That’s up from a daily average of 82.6 from Sept. 1, 2021, to May 1.
- Demand for abortion medication increased the most in 12 of those states that banned abortion soon after the Supreme Court decision.
- Orders from Louisiana increased to 15 a day in the two months following the court’s decision from an average of 5.6 previously. Orders from Mississippi and Arkansas increased to more than seven a day from two in the same period.
Takeaway: Abigail Aiken, associate professor at the University of Texas School of Public Policy, one of Gomperts’ co-signers and the writer of the research letter, said that the findings are consistent with her past work, which showed that abortion restrictions lead people to figure out how to get abortions despite the legal risks.
“You don’t change people’s need for abortion, you just change the ways in which they access it,” she said.
Cuba has much to teach the world about pandemic response, says a group of scientists who recently visited the island.
One of the group’s leaders is well known in the U.S. as a much-quoted pandemic expert and former adviser to President Joe Biden: Michael Osterholm, the director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota.
His group traveled at the invitation of Medical Education Cooperation with Cuba, a U.S.-based nonprofit that promotes health-related dialogue and collaboration and received funding from the Open Society Foundations created by liberal financier George Soros.
Olive branch: In a report released Monday in Seattle at a meeting of the American Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene, Osterholm and his colleagues called on the U.S. to end sanctions against Cuba that hamper drug and vaccine development.
The country is a dictatorship that the Human Rights Watch nonprofit says harasses and imprisons domestic critics.
Time to reconsider: Osterholm acknowledged in a statement that “the politics [around U.S. relations with Cuba] are complex,” but he said Cuba has an “impressive brain trust of scientists and public health experts” that can help teach the world how to develop and manufacture medicines and vaccines with limited resources.
The scientists said Cuba presented data on its Covid-19 vaccines that they found “compelling and convincing.”
Cuba told the scientists:
- 90 percent of its population is vaccinated against Covid-19, using vaccines designed and made in Cuba.
- 97.5 percent of Cuban children ages 2 and up are fully vaccinated.
- In trials, a Cuban vaccine was 92.3 percent effective against symptomatic infection and 100 percent effective against severe disease and death.
The scientists said they had not independently verified Cuba’s data.
