Welcome to iHeartRadio Communities, a public affairs special focusing on the biggest issues in facting you.
This week, Here's Many Munio's.
And welcome to another edition of Iheartradios Communities. As you heard, I am Manny Munyo's. It was five years ago that COVID nineteen was officially declared a global pandemic. Hard to imagine it's been that long with everything that has happened since then.
But what did we do right? What did we do wrong? What have we learned?
And are we better or worse off prepared to deal with the next one. It's bringing an expert to answer some of those questions for us.
Doctor J.
Wolfson is a Distinguished Service Professor of Public Health, Medicine and Pharmacy the University of South Florida. Doctor Wolfson, I appreciate the time. Thanks for sharing it with us, My pleasure.
Man, It's always good to speak with you.
Yeah, you as well, sir. Let me start off with that.
I remember after the World Health Organization declared the pandemic. The next day we went into the supermarket. You couldn't find a lyesol or bleach inexplicably, for some reason, we couldn't find toilet paper either. In some ways, it's hard to believe it's been five years, and many others it isn't.
It is hard to produce in five years. Time flies, whether you're having fun or not. In those early days, I think many of us either remember it very clearly or it's a blur. I remember as early as December I began seeing data from Europe about the spread of respiratory viruses and some cardiovascular systems. By January, it was clear that we had something more than just a new
flu on our hands. And it wasn't until just five years ago in March, that the World Health Organization was able to put together enough of its own data to say this is a real pandemic, which means it's not just isolated to one country or one region, but infectious disease and spreading across the world. And people were scared.
People were dying, they were dying in large numbers, and because it was unclear exactly what was going on, a lot of people actually felt that we were in being invaded by something, that we were at war, that there was some kind of disease or illness that was us. It took the World Health Organization while to get to the point of declaring the pandemic. Many of us thought that by February it was pretty clear. But the World Health Organization also dropped the ball on a few other issues.
Many The biggest one, I think was they did not push China hard enough in the early days of this to make data available that will never be found again about the source about So we learned a lot about what the World Health Organization didn't do.
Yeah, and that's something that's going to be one of the biggest questions arguably about the pandemic, right how exactly did it really start? There's still the debate that was it an accidental an accident at the Wuhan lab, there was it human animal to human transmission.
At the wet lab. And because of the.
Lack of transparency by the Chinese early on, we'll never get those answers for sure, will.
We We will not. But I think we kind of have to move on, and you kind of suggest that before we can't just dwell on the path and say, oh my god, you know, what, what did we do wrong? What did we do wrong? We know that some of the things we did wrong, we can learn from those things and some of the lessons are very very important.
A lot of it, A lot of it has to do with good science, good medicine, the rollover media, how social media played into medicine and science in ways that none of us had ever previously expected, and it changed the way we as citizens, whether we're healthcare professionals or or or workers in public look look to look to the government, and look to public health for guidance, advice, and accurate information.
Yeah, and we're going to get into a lot of that.
And one of the reasons I was always happy to speak to you about this is because not only are you objective and you present both sides, but the politics has taken out of it while we're discussing all of these things with you, and you brought up a lot of issues there.
But let me start off with this.
What did we and by we, I mean you public health officials and us as Americans? What did we do right at least initially? Did we do anything right early on?
Yeah? Yeah, I think we tried to do something right. But I want to make sure that there's a there's a kind of a predicate lane. Unlike many other countries, the United States does not have a single public health system. We have separate state systems. Every single state is responsible for a managing its own public health systems and information. We have the centrist to disease control and prevention. We
have the FDA. We have some other organizations, but those are more agencies that collect data, but they don't have power, they don't have regulatory authority over what the states do. So it's not like most of Europe and most of the other countries in the world that have a centralized national public health system. So part of the issue is simply communicating information as we learned what was going on.
I think it became clear early on that this was a new type of disease, that we had to be careful what we did, and that there were some things that made sense in the early days. It made sense to think about locking down to a limited degree. It seemed to make sense to socially distanced. It seemed to make sense to mask It seemed to make sense, even
perhaps at the early days, to consider closing schools. But most of those things turned out to be not good for long term policy and practice, and some of them were just bad decisions because we already had a lot of information early on in the pandemic manny. I'd say by March, in April and May, we knew an awful lot and we didn't convey it to the public. That what we I think the most important thing we learned
was that we've failed to exercise transparency. We were afraid, as a matter of public policy, I think, in public health at both the state and federal levels, to put fear into people's heads that they shouldn't take these aggressive actions. And as a consequence, we limited the kind of information that was available to the public. Right, and that was that i think became long a long term damaging issue.
Yeah, and that might affect us.
And when we faced the next pandemic, this last one was handled because you've mentioned this before. Even respected medical professionals, doctors, scientists.
Who might have had what at the time would.
Have been contrarian views, those conversations were kind of squealshed, right those they were never allowed to be brought into a mainstream conversation about how to address the virus.
Spot on manny. And these are hundreds of respected scientists and physicians and researchers across the country. They weren't only question Some of them lost their jobs. As a consequence, they produced good research. It was not published. The major journals were very, very limited in what they would publish, uh, and that that helped I think all of us later later on understand that there is there's a there's a
controlling force even within the respective literature. But historically many you know, it was it's it's science is a process of asking questions, of getting some contrary information, of discussing it, of looking around it, and sometimes recognizing that what you thought was true yesterday may not be true today and that may change tomorrow. Keeping it open and transparent and the dialogue open is what we didn't do, and that's unfortunate.
Do you think it was done in the name of trying to save lives and keep the country safe or was it done for some other reasons.
I think ultimately there was to save lives and keep the country safe, but beneath that there were other reasons.
There was a belief at fairly high levels that vaccines in all cases are the best way to solve infectious disease problems, especially these kinds of viruses, and that perspective became a driving force at the national level of public health at the CDC at the FDA of the National Institutes of Health, and it was a adopted that the policy incentive, the policy requirement, and was what was ignored. What was ignored early on was if that natural immunity
is something that occurs with viruses like this. While the COVID virus was unique, it was not unknown. It was not something that we knew nothing about it all. We kind of knew things about how it behaved. It behaved in many ways knew and differently from some other viruses because it embedded in muscle tissue and it would wait until even after the acute episodes of illness to erupt in some people, creating myocarditis and respiratory illnesses and brain
fog and skin rashes. But we also knew that if you acquired a disease like that, there's a pretty good chance that you would have natural immunity, and that factor was nearly ignored as a matter of public health policy. People who had gotten the disease were told they had to get immunized. We also knew very early on, and this is really important because it came out as part of the Grand jury reports that I know that you've read the three Grand Jewry Reports, the State of Florida,
the Special Grand Julia. On COVID, we knew early on that young men between the ages of eighteen thirty were more prone to something Mark card did its inflammation of the heart, and even before, long before COVID, we've all heard stories of young high school and young college athletes, men just collapsing on the field during training or during the game and having heart attacks on some of the
nine that was the deal. But we know that that population, for a number of reasons, has a higher likelihood of having minor cardatists. We learned early on that COVID itself also created a higher risk of that for that population. And as the pharmaceutical companies we reveled into vaccines in their political trials recognize that as well, but it was never revealed. So there were a lot of things early on that we learned we didn't deployed. We said, everybody's
got to get vaccinated. It's important, you know, everybody's got to get locked down. That was not a good idea. Distancing is important, we learned early on that wasn't important. Wearing the masks. The idea of going the mask is useful if you use the right kind of mask, which most people didn't if you use it correctly, which very few people didn't, and as a consequence, they had a false sense of security about the role of masks s.
Cool closures. Of course, for many we learned early on may not have been a good idea, and now we have a whole generation of young people who lost, in some cases six or nine months of learning and socialization.
A few more minutes here with doctor J.
Wilson, he's a Distinguished Service Professor of Public Health Medicine Pharmacy at the University of South Florida, discussing the fifth anniversary of the beginning of the COVID pandemic. We knew early on those most at risk, those with the elderly pre exist conditions. The younger and healthier you were, the less of a threat this virus was to you. And it doesn't seem like the advice we got generally speaking by our public health professionals, as you mentioned, acknowledge.
That that's exactly the point. And as a consequence, I think public health lost trust among the population and we have to recover from that. If we can come back to respecting and treasuring and trusting what public health has to offer is terribly important because many surveillance, surveillance of
communities is the core of public health. It's kind of like the old forest fire towers that we even had some places in Florida where there be a ranger looking out, you know, over miles and miles looking for the possibility of a little smoke, and once you see it, you have to determine whether it's real smoke or whether somebody's having a campfire, and you go after that smoke and
you fix it before it spreads. Surveillance and public health works very well when you've got a number of diseases and conditions that you're monitoring communities and you look for spikes, and when you find them, you report them, You isolate them,
and you intervene, You monitor, and then you report. And what happened for the twenty years before the COVID is most states, including Florida, had reduced their expenditures on public health infrastructure and reporting, so we weren't prepared to conduct the surveillance to monitor effectively. And what we have to do is make sure that that's in place, certainly for the next epidemic, which we're bound to have at some point well.
And I want to get into that before we let you go.
About one point more than a one point two million Americans have died because of COVID nineteen. Hard to ever really know because did they die because of COVID nineteen or did they die with COVID nineteen. But far more than any other country, is that because of the price we pay for our freedoms here. Is that the pushback that some in the public we saw throughout the pandemic because of the steps the government took.
I think it's a combination of all of those things. And I think at some point, certainly in the early part of the pandemic, reasonable people had caused to believe that they didn't know who to trust and what to do, and because the information about what could be done and should be done trickled out slowly, and sometimes it was contradicted, we may have done some damage to ourselves and emphasizing vaccines rather than the value of natural immunity, taking kids
out of school. Some of the things we did were not very healthy in Florida. However, I got to say we did a really good job governors antis early on and recognized that the first priority was going to be seniors and nursing homes, and that was spot on. That was really important to do. Not every state did that, and this was just a matter of effective communication, people
knowing what they could do. It was a very contagious disease, certainly, the delta and the omicron, and you and I have talked about just before, Manny, when it comes down to what you really need to count on common sense. You know, if your kid is sick, you're not going to send in the school. If somebody else's kid is sick, you don't want to being brought to your kid's birthday party. You know, if you're not feeling well, don't take a
chance on feeling worse by straining yourself. Exercise common sense. It's one of one of the most important things. In some suggest that we've lost the good part.
Of that, no question about that. And I always like to say, if you can't trust your doctor, who are you going to trust? The thing that amazes me and I'm looking at the clock here, it's been about sixteen minutes. We've spent all of that time discussing the things we did wrong right in our last couple of minutes here, did we do anything right in terms of addressing the virus, in terms of trying to keep Americans safe, Yeah, I.
Think we did. I think we prioritize seniors for immunization. I think we recognized that certain populations might be a high risk of The Johnson and Johnson vaccine was taken off the market early on because of of of adverse effects, and there were other vaccines that were not allowed into the market because they were demonstrating adversary. So we did make some good clinical decisions, who made some good public
policy decisions. I think we tried very hard to inform the public through a variety of data sources, what the spread of disease were looking like, where it was high, where it was particularly in setious, which populations were most likely to be affected by it. We created data systems and reporting systems that we didn't have. We didn't have really fast. The most extraordinary thing we did, quite frankly,
was warp speed. We developed a vaccine in just a few months that normally takes you know, a decade, and we did it with the with the advantage of big data. To Drew used artificial intelligence to help analyze data, and that's taught us that we have the capacity using good science and good medicine to really develop interventions that can make a difference to securing and improving the health of our population. That's one of the most significant things we've done.
What we now have to do is get over that that created hump of distrust of the government and of the distrust of vaccines and interventions.
And that leads to me to the final two questions.
I don't think there's any question that the vaccine saved tens of millions, maybe hundreds of millions of lives worldwide, But at the same time, because of some of the mistrust, we also have people who that We also have many more questioning the legitimacy or efficacy of vaccinations because of that.
And we're seeing that right now with the with the re emergence of measles in the United States, which is terribly unfortunate. We had stopped measles in this country for quite a while, and now it's coming back in Texas and California. We had that's some cases here. That's unfortunate because the distrust people have had just because of COVID and what was done wrong that may affect their children's lives.
Last thing for you then with everything that we've learned, and I fear that because of what we went through with COVID, we are worse off prepared for the next pandemic.
I think more people will die because of it.
Do you think we're better prepared for the next pandemic because every virologists, stepidemiologist I speak to says it's going to happen sooner rather than later in our in our lifetime.
It's going to have a pseudor rather than later our lifetime manage. There's no question about it. This is the way these things work. I have a half more than half full glass good. I think that we are an incredibly resilient people. Our nation, our republic has gone through trials and tribulations since it's in self, and we've gotten through things, and we're creative and we come together brilliantly
around challenges. And while some say history repeats itself and some folks don't learn from history, I'm more optimistic and I'd like to think that we do, and that we've put in place systems of surveillance, of monitoring. What we have to get over is the politicization of medicine and the politicization of science. There is no room for that. But that means that all scientists, all competent, bonafide scientists,
need to be heard. And that's why I'm so pleased that doctor j Bottaria, who was one of the authors of the Great Barrington Declaration early on in the COVID, is the candidate for the Director of the Nationalistitutes of Health. He is a solid, well trained physician, and he's an economist, and he's a balanced guy. He's not an anti vaxxer. He's a good scientist. But we need balanced views by good scientists who welcome dialogue, debate, discussion, and alternative considerations.
And in the end, that's what I think we'll.
Do that that's what science is supposed to be, right, Doctor J. Wolfson, Distinguished Professor, Service Professor, Public Health, Medicine Pharmacy at the University of South Florida. I'm truly appreciative to you for your time, your expertise.
Thank you so much.
Be well, doc, my pleasure many you'd be well and be safe. Take care bybye.
From something very serious to something a little bit fun. When you think of Saint Patrick's Day, you might think of wearing green or drinking green beer. Whiskey, things like that, parades, corn beef and cabbage. But have you ever stopped to wonder about the history of Saint Patrick's Day and why we celebrate it the way we do. Even if you haven't, we're gonna learn about it now as we bring in Christopher Klein. He's an historian and author. His website is
Christopher Klein dot com. Christopher, I appreciate.
The time, good to talk to here, manny.
So let's start off with that Saint Patrick's Day, Uh, the way we celebrated here. Let's start off with the way it's celebrated in Ireland because that's where that's where this all original.
Yeah, and it's very different than what we're accustomed to these days. So in Ireland, for centuries, Saint Patrick's Day was more a holy day than a holiday. So it was this solemn remembrance of the anniversary of the death of Saint Patrick on March seventeenth every year, and it was, you know, as you expect many holy days to be celebrated.
You'd go to church in the morning, there might be a low key meal in the afternoon, but that was pretty much it for centuries and even well into the nineteen hundreds, pubs in Ireland would be closed on Saint Patrick's Day. Until nineteen sixty one, the only place you could get a beer on Saint Patrick's Day would be at the dog show that they were holding in Dublin.
And it's not really until really like the nineteen nineties that they start in Dublin to adopt the parades that we're so used to here in the United States.
How did that transition from religious day to kind of a symbol of Irish national identity take place.
Well, it occurs here in the United States because of the experiences of the Irish immigrants who are coming into this country. So large scale Irish immigration really starts to happen in the eighteen hundreds and really takes off in eighteen forty five when the potato crop starts to fail in Ireland, where you just get ways of immigrants coming
into this country. So from eighteen forty five eighteen fifty two you have more than a million Irish immigrants who are coming into this country as a result of the failure of the potato crop and so coming to America. The way to sort of express their Irish identity was to embrace the customs that they had back at home, and it becomes a bit more of this festive environment for Saint Patrick's Day becomes that holiday where they're celebrating
with parades and showing off their Irish pride. And then when they faced the backlash in this country from Nativis in the eighteen fifties eighteen sixties, again they sort of you know, turned into their Irishness and as a source of pride, they're more prominent in celebrating Saint Patrick's. So that's really become when it becomes more of this festive occasion for the Irish in America.
Who was Saint Patrick? Why is he celebrated to begin with?
So he's a patron saint of Ireland, and although we connect him with Ireland, he was actually born in what we know is Great Britain. They think maybe somewhere in Wales is where he grew up. And this is in the late fourth century and Britain still this outpost of the crumbling Roman Empire, and Saint Patrick is kidnapped by a group of Irish and taken as a slave to Ireland, where he lived for sixty years. And then his faith really deepened when he was the slave in Ireland and
he gets this divine message. According to his confessio his autobiography, they wrote, he got a divine message that he should try to escape, and he manages to find a boat, escapes from Britain, comes back to his homeland, escape from Ireland, gets back to his homeland and Britain then gets another divine message that he should become a priest and go
back to Ireland to serve there as a missionary. So after training as a priest, he is sent back to Ireland to serve those Christians in Ireland, but also to do the work of trying to convert a lot of the Irish to Christianity at that time. And so he does that for decades and decades there and his death is on March seventeenth and what we believe is four sixty one AD. And it's his connection to Ireland and becoming a patron saint for the country is why he's
so important. There is really thought that he's the one who brings Christianity into Ireland, and of course Ireland became a very Catholic country still means so today one of the more Catholic countries in the world.
We're speaking with Christopher Klein. He's in his story and an author. His website is Christopher Klein dot com. Was there something about snakes somewhere along the line to or am I confusing that was somebody else?
That's definitely the legend that is associated with Saint Patrick that he supposedly drove the snakes out of Ireland. Probably that legend is more a metaphor of maybe driving the
paganism out of Ireland. So it is true you you will not find any snakes native to Ireland, but it's thought that basically by the time like the ice sheets had had receded, and then Ireland is surrounded by water, basically the climate wasn't right for any snakes to be there, and then they certainly weren't going to be able to cross over the water right to get to the island. So so yeah, it's it is this. It is true that there are no snakes there, and Saint Patrick is
the one who's given credit for for that fact. So if I know, it's a little bit different than a lot of areous country down in Florida and elsewhere where you got snakes. But so if you don't like any serpents, Ireland's place.
To go, the wearing green, the drinking green beer, the three laf clovers and corn beef and cabbage, stuff like that. The americanization of Saint Patrick's day is that something that we've seen transfer over to Ireland.
Does any of that stuff happen there?
Yes, you're getting You're starting to see that more and more in the last couple of decades. So the colors that are traditionally associated with Saint Patrick's actually a blue with the color that was associated with him, but green became more connected to Irish nationalism. Ireland was a colony of the British for centuries until the nineteen hundreds, and Irish nationalists in late seventeen hundreds eighteen hundreds adopted symbols
like a gold harp on it. They had flags of a gold harp on a green background, and green, the natural color of green, the forty shade of green, got tied up with Irish nationalism, and so you saw that color being connected more and more here in America and back in Ireland. And so that's sort of the origin where we get our shamrock shakes and coming the Chicago River, green bagels, everything green. On March seventeenth is connected to that.
And the corn beef and cabbage is actually interesting because that really is an American twist. It would be more traditional to have ham and cabbage as a meal on Saint Patrick's Day in Ireland, but for many of the Irish in America, ham was a little too expensive for them. So what they do, particularly this really starts in the lower East side of New York City and you have
a lot of Irish shooes who settled there. What they would do is when ships would come back from their voyages that they had any leftover salted beef that was pretty cheap that they could afford, So they buy the corned beef. They boil it three times to try to take the Brian out of it. Last time they'd boil with cabbage. And that's when you get to corn beef
and cabbage. And so you're sort of seeing now when the advent of television and these broadcasts at the big parade and festivities United States, make your way back to Ireland, that's when you start getting Now you'll see a lot more of the green the associated with Saint Patrick, the corn beef and cabbage, those sort of American twists on St. Patrick's Day you'll find back in Ireland.
Well, keep the corn, beef and cabbage, because I'm happy with that one. Christopher Klein, historian, author website Christopher Klein dot com. Really appreciate your time.
That was fascinating, great, great to talk to you.
And that'll do it for another edition of Iheartradios Communities.
I'm Manny Wuno's Until next time, m