Dr Peter Hotez on How We Can Prevent Another Pandemic

I think people are concerned that this is kind of setting a precedent and that this is going to be something that we have to do in the future. Is there a way to prevent something like this, a full shutdown of the country, to happen in the future? Well, the way is, you know, we've got this incredible scientific infrastructure in America, right? The best research universities and institutes in the world. And I work at two of them, at Baylor College of Medicine and Texas Children's Hospital. And now I'm doing a few things with Texas A&M University and Baylor University as well and Rice. And so the answer is, this is why we have an NIH with a budget of $36 billion annually. We need to have a pipeline of technologies getting ready for this epidemic. We should have, you know, if we had, you know, all the funding we needed for our coronavirus vaccine program, we would have had several coronavirus vaccines and clinical trials and potentially we could have combined them in a way to be ready to go now. So having, figuring out a way to support organizations that don't, that are looking at vaccines and other countermeasures, not in terms of products they can sell that are going to help the health security of the country, I think is really important. So one of the books that I wrote is called Blue Marble Health and it finds this unusual, and we spoke a little bit about this last time, the unusual number of illnesses from emerging infections like this one and poverty related neglected diseases actually in the G20 countries, the G20 economies, the 20 wealthiest economies, especially the poor living in those actually account for most of these diseases. And the problem is the G20 economies are not stepping up to support these technologies. We still rely too much on the US and the UK and the European Union. We've got to do better with China and Brazil and some of these countries to help fund these global health technologies because that's all we have. Otherwise, we go back again back to the 14th century in terms of social isolation.