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Vaccine hesitancy isn’t new, Seth Berkley points out. “The first vaccine was smallpox vaccine,” he said on this week’s episode of the “First Opinion Podcast,” “and right after they were first used, there were wood cuttings of people with cows’ horns growing out of their heads because the virus was isolated from cows.” Berkley is the former head of Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance, a co-founder of COVAX, and author of the new book “Fair Doses: An Insider’s Story of the Pandemic and the Global Fight for Vaccine Equity.” On this episode of the podcast, we discussed what went right and wrong with the response to Covid — and preparing for the next pandemic. Advertisement “It is evolutionarily certain that we will have more outbreaks, more pandemics, and frankly, they could be significantly worse than Covid was,” he said. “And therefore, it’s very important for the world to understand what worked and what didn’t.” Against this background, including major cuts to scientific research, Berkley told me that global health faces “a little bit of a devil’s choice. Do we continue our routine work and stop the work on preventing pandemics, or do we do the work on preventing pandemics and then stop some of the routine work?” Our conversation was inspired by his recent First Opinion essay, “Global security is impossible without sufficient support for global health.” Advertisement
