


Laurie Garrett is a Pulitzer-Prize-winning journalist, recently named as the 2021 Senator Frank R. Listen to the interview to find out what lessons we need to learn from this current experience so that we can prepare better for the coming plague of the future. By early 2020, it seemed clear to her that we were headed for a global pandemic. What did she think when she first heard of an infection showing up in China in 2019? For Laurie Garrett, who reported from China during the SARS epidemic, it felt like déja vu. Misinformation also contributed to bungled responses, including difficulty encouraging people to get vaccinated. This breakdown of international solidarity has impeded vaccination efforts worldwide. The international systems that should have helped stop the spread of the infection failed to do so. Many governments made some serious errors in their initial reactions. Laurie Garrett has been paying close attention to this pandemic and to responses around the world.

What should we have learned from The Coming Plague? And what can we learn from our recent experience to help us respond better to emerging pathogens in the future? What Should We Learn From the Coming Plague? In the US, not enough personnel were available or trained to do contact tracing to help stop chains of transmission.

National stockpiles of PPE (personal protective equipment) were depleted. Public Health Systems Were Not Ready for COVID-19:Īlthough Garrett has been warning that such emerging diseases threaten not only health, but also national security, we were not at all ready for COVID-19. Since then, of course, a number of bacteria and viruses have appeared, including SARS in 2002, Ebola in 2014 and, most recently, SARS-CoV-2 in 2019. In this thorough, carefully researched analysis, she laid out why public health authorities should be watching for new pathogens and how they should respond if that happened. Almost thirty years ago, Laurie Garrett published The Coming Plague: Newly Emerging Diseases in a World Out of Balance.
