AS/COA Online | LatAm in Focus: Dr. Julio Frenk on the Coronavirus Pandemic in an Age of Populism
/As most of the world reels from the impact of the coronavirus pandemic, Dr. Julio Frenk told Latin America in Focus: “The sooner you start acting, the better.”
The president of the University of Miami, who also served as Mexico’s health minister and dean of Harvard University’s School of Public Health, says social distancing measures are crucial to stem the pandemic’s spread. “Those do work and the sooner you adopt them, even understanding that they do carry an important social and economic cost, the better off you’re going to be,” he says, pointing to time lost during the first days that COVID-19 hit Italy.
When it comes to countries’ health systems, Dr. Frenk, who has held decision-making roles during a number of pandemics, describes investing in technical competence as “fundamental” for preparedness. “It’s great to have these big hospitals and do heroic surgery to save a life, but the real core of the health system is the public health component and particularly having good epidemiological surveillance systems.” He added that this was a key aspect to controlling the 2009 swine flu epidemic. “Mexico behaved in a very responsible way, and knowing there would be serious economic consequences, immediately reported the outbreak to the World Health Organization, and that again gave time to other countries.”
Dr. Frenk said that, for that reason, the wave of global populism since that outbreak has undermined global readiness on the public health front. “In 2009 the multilateral system was in a much better shape than today,” he told AS/COA Online’s Carin Zissis. “You see that time and again, and it’s happened already with coronavirus: presidents presuming that they know better than their experts.”
He also points out what we need to learn from this pandemic. “The stock market has lost trillions of dollars in market capitalization. With a fraction of that we could have competent surveillance and preparedness systems. But again, this is the invisible part of the health system. It’s the thing that we only notice when it fails.”
“I hope this is a wakeup call for people because now it’s hitting home. You cannot engage in this sort of anti-science discourse without eventually paying the price,” says the former World Health Organization executive director. “And, by the way, the way we’re going to get out of this current pandemic is through science.”