Strategies to mitigate the rippling impact of COVID-19
Published: 04 Sep 2020
The “COVID-19: Updates from Singapore” weekly webinar series is a forum for leading clinicians, scientists, public health officials and policy makers to share insights from their fields of study. The 22nd webinar session was held on Thursday, 3 September at 7pm.
Sir Jeremy Farrar, Director of the Wellcome Trust since 2013 and a renowned clinician-scientist, was this week’s guest speaker. Sir Jeremy Farrar has accumulated extensive research experience in infectious diseases and global health, focusing on emerging infections. For his humanitarian efforts towards improving global public health, he was awarded the President Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter 2019 Humanitarian of the Year Award and was previously awarded the Memorial Medal and Ho Chi Minh City Medal by the Government of Vietnam.
Titled Strategies to Mitigate the Rippling Impact of COVID-19 – From Virus-Host Interaction to Geopolitics, Sir Jeremy Farrar began with a cautionary warning of the staggering case figures of COVID-19 to date and the need for consistent work to boost public health efforts because COVID-19 is a human-endemic infection which will continue to reverberate around the world and will not go away on its own. Unless the world keeps up the efforts on public health, builds trust in societies and continue to research development efforts to create accessible interventions that make a difference, it will be difficult to go back to pre-COVID-19 days.
Sir Jeremy Farrar noted that transmissions from urban areas to rural communities have been happening and more young people are getting infected, even though the overall case numbers have started to decrease. With the schools, universities and workplaces starting to reopen, it is especially important to observe if the transmission in younger people spreads to the vulnerable populations, like how it did in February and March.
In the course of this pandemic, Sir Jeremy Farrar emphasised that it is crucial to exercise wisdom accumulated from what we have learnt about the virus and its disease, with a generous dose of humility. With a possibility of having a breakthrough in vaccine development in October or November this year, it brings up issues on vaccine multilaterism and vaccine nationalism. He highlights that science should not return to its ivory tower status before the pandemic and it needs to be more involved in society to gain trust. To reciprocate, people need to respect the independence of science and the institutions that look after its application, such as the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and other global regulatory authorities, which ensure that science does not become politicised.
Sir Jeremy Farrar outlines four overlapping consequences of COVID-19—its direct impacts such as the resulting health consequences and deaths; indirect health consequences like the curtailing of other medical services; the economic aftermath including job losses and unstable job security; and lastly, geopolitical relations in the world. Taking into account all these changes, he posits that these consequences cannot be dealt with by any one country. It would take a global, multilateral approach to critically define how we could emerge from this pandemic and handle future pandemics, while addressing other 21st Century challenges such as climate change and antimicrobial resistance.
Sir Jeremy Farrar called for more involvement of scientists in politics because science can be political in nature, in some shape or form. It is important that national health institutions are trusted by society and be above politics because of the recent public perceptions of mistrust. Science is part of society, much of it is kept up due to public funding or philanthropic funding, and therefore the public has the right to have free access to it. He is convinced that such an approach could better advance scientific knowledge which would lead to better decision-making when crafting policies. It would also help to liberate the scientific endeavour to ask those big questions by providing longer term grants to encourage a better research culture, as well as a longer career ladder to entice young researchers to stay in the research field.
WATCH: COVID-19 Updates from Singapore: Webinar 22 | Sir Jeremy Farrar
Tune in to the penultimate session of this webinar series, happening on 10 September 2020, where guest speaker Dr Michael Ryan, Executive Director of the WHO Health Emergencies Programme, will be speaking on the “COVID-19 Pandemic, The Way Forward”. Register now at https://medicine.nus.edu.sg/cet/webinar/.
