The World Health Organization’s Maria Van Kerkhove On Balancing Science, Public Relations and Politics
Yes. I’m incredibly inspired by the collaborative nature in which people are. There were a number of therapeutics in development through clinical trials for MERS. We were able to kick that into gear. The first clinical trials that were done in Wuhan were done with a protocol that was shared by colleagues in Saudi Arabia [who were researching MERS]. That level of collaboration and camaraderie between peers is really quite heartening for me.
How do you respond to criticism that the WHO was slow to share information about person-to-person spread?on Jan. 14, [in which the WHO said there was no clear evidence of human-to-human transmission, on the same day Van Kerkhove warned of the possibility during a press briefing]. What is said publicly or what is said through Twitter is very different than what is discussed between our countries and collaborators.
When you hear of a cluster of pneumonia, anyone in the infectious-disease community would be lying if they didn’t say there could be human-to-human transmission. That’s what we acted on. You worry about how a respiratory virus transmits and the efficiency with which it transmits. From day one, we’ve been talking about all of the types of scenarios that transmission could look like. We warned against aerosol transmission, airborne transmission.
We had lots of discussions with our networks, which include U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention scientists and scientists all over the globe. Even with all of this politics—and I’m a proud American—U.S. scientists are incredible partners and will continue to be so no matter what. It’s important that we acted as we believed this virus would transmit, and that’s exactly what we did. Can we do better? Always. But that’s true for everyone, everywhere.
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