A The lack of transparency by Chinese officials, particularly about the transmission of the new coronavirus and the obstruction of an American scientist to investigate it, played an important role in allowing COVID-19 to spread. outside China, NIAID Director Anthony Fauci told Axios.
The big picture: Axios first spoke to Fauci a year ago this week about the “mysterious pneumonia” in Wuhan, China, which he suspected was a new coronavirus, but which Chinese health officials reported was not as infectious.
- “At the time, the lack of full appreciation of the seriousness of what we were dealing with was [due to] several reasons, “says Fauci.” Some things were absolutely not known to anyone. And, some Chinese knew some things and weren’t too transparent about it, ”he adds, citing delayed reports of person-to-person and asymptomatic transmission of the virus.
- Many people outside of China were “tricked,” he says, because they didn’t know the pandemic-causing virus acted differently from their cousin, SARS-CoV, where people infected with SARS show symptoms.
- If China had revealed its asymptomatic spread earlier, it would have “changed everything” to focus on masks, social distancing and contact tracking, he says.
China also refused to allow it foreign scientists to investigate the virus in the “for a considerable period of time,” limiting the ability to see how it was transmitted and to trace its origin, he says.
- When they finally allowed an international group led by the WHO, they still blocked some of these scientists, including one from NIAID, from traveling to Wuhan from Beijing.
- And this week, China delayed travel authorization for a group of WHO-led international scientists who planned to investigate the origins of the virus.
If we look back on the previous year, Fauci and other public health experts say there are some lessons learned …
1) Communication is key.
- “You don’t know everything you need to know the first day” and as data accumulate, public health guidelines will evolve, Fauci says.
- Some public health experts say this process could have been explained more clearly to the public, especially as the guidelines changed.
- “The key here isn’t that we didn’t know what to do, but there were barriers to it, whether they were political or otherwise,” says Tara Kirk Sell, a scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security. “The CDC has this approach called Emergency and Crisis Risk Communication. It’s science-based and it works well, but we didn’t. [use] “.
2) Misinformation and misinformation are hugely harmful.
- These were “incredibly powerful in this pandemic,” Sell says, adding that they can affect people’s health and national security. “We really need a national strategy to combat this.”
3) “Political division is a big hurdle to an adequate public health response, ”Fauci says.
- “You get people who make decisions about their own behavior based on political considerations, rather than an objective assessment of the threat to public health,” Fauci adds.
- “Public health has always been political, but it has never been as partisan as it has been this time. Public health partisanship has been really incredibly dangerous in this pandemic,” says Carlos del Rio, a distinguished professor of medicine at Emory University School of Medicine.
Scientific advances in vaccine technology Fauci says they are the brightest spots this year.
- The development and administration of a safe and effective vaccine in 11 months is “a monumental success. It is historic in its proportion,” says Fauci.
- “Rebuilding confidence in science is a priority and I hope vaccines do.[cut: I think we need to continue to communicate what an incredible achievement that has been, and the fact that these vaccines did not come out of nowhere. Vaccines came from the years of research in mRNA technology and other things,]”Add Sell.
The summary: The pandemic has shown thatt “It does something unimaginable,” Fauci says. But he hopes that “within a year we will return to normal.”