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The MeidasTouch Podcast
Meidas Health, Episode 4: Why Trump’s WHO Exit Puts Us All at Risk (Dr. Van Kerkhove)
00:40:38
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- [00:01]
Vin Gupta
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- [01:23]
Vin Gupta
Hello everybody. Great to be with you. On episode four, we are lucky to be joined by a senior leader at the World Health Organization, Dr. Maria Van Kerkove. And I'm glad she's here because there's a lot that we need to talk about. We actually did some media last week for broadcast tv and the fact is you can't talk about much in five minutes. And so Maria is going to join us and we're going to dive deeper into why the WHO matters to every single American across the country. An organization that does a lot for us, often behind the scenes, and often we don't really have enough time to talk about that. So that's why she's going to join us. Before she joins us, I just want to give you a sense of what we're trying to do here. This is episode four of a new health focused podcast on all things healthcare and public health. We know we have a wide audience, all of you. We, we know that we want to be respectful and time efficient since all of your lives are very, very busy. And we want to make sure that we're doing something new here, not Just redundant. Which is why the caliber of guests and the entities that they represent is a signal for what this represents. We just had for episode two, Dr. Bob Calif, the recent former FDA commissioner. He's a good friend and mentor and we talked about the role of misinformation in our current just healthcare landscape and the work that he did at FDA to try to combat that and really to keep up this momentum and to show you that your time is worth listening to this podcast. We're going to keep up the high caliber of guests and the entities that they represent. Here with Dr. Maria Van Cov. Dr. Van Kerkove, great to see you, Maria. I'm just going to talk. I'm going to refer to you as Maria, if that's okay, just for.
- [03:04]
Dr. Maria Van Kerkhove
No problem.
- [03:05]
Vin Gupta
Well, Maria, thank you for joining us. And as a tee up, I'd love to if you could just give us the audience a little bit about your background at WHO and what your work's looked like over the last, especially during the pandemic.
- [03:15]
Dr. Maria Van Kerkhove
Well, thanks, thanks for having me. And I appreciate, appreciate the time to have a chance to chat. I love podcasts. I have to say, I feel like it's the greatest opportunity to have a discussion and really not be forced to get them in these tiny little segments. But I'm Maria Van Kerkove. I'm an infectious disease epidemiologist here at who. I sit in headquarters in Geneva, Switzerland. We are an organization of thousands of individuals, 6,7000 individuals. We work in regions and in countries, in more than 150 countries. And the job that we do here, and the job that I'm responsible for is to promote, provide, protect health. I sit in our Health Emergencies program and I lead our Department of Epidemic and Pandemic Threat Management, which is essentially where we develop prevention, control programs, evidence based guidance tools, materials to support countries to detect, prevent, respond to pathogens with epidemic and pandemic potential. And we deal with some of the nasty ones. So Covid flu, rsv, which is particularly challenging for young kids and for older adults, but also orthopoxicity viruses and the MPOX public health emergency that we're dealing with. We deal with high threat pathogens like Marburg and Ebola. We deal with arboviruses like dengue and Chikungunya and Zika and Oropucha and many of these types of threats, but not only the biological risks, we also look at laboratory biosafety, biosecurity. So looking at the unintentional potential release of these types of pathogens into the human population. And we also deal with the, excuse me, deliberate release. So working with many other UN agencies on a security side of things in case there were to be a deliberate release. And lastly, in my department, we deal with the landscape of medical countermeasures in terms of looking at access and benefits for diagnostics, therapeutics and vaccines. Now, obviously, I work with tons and tons of people, you know, and across the health emergencies program in who. But one of the things that I love the most, and I hope we could potentially get into is that we are the secretariat of 194 member states and we work with incredible experts in every single country. So the best minds coming together to combat the world's biggest health challenges.
- [05:29]
Vin Gupta
You know, Maria, that was a lot there. And it reminds me of some of the conversations you and I have had in the lead up to last week and just our ongoing dialogues behind the scenes. You know, it strikes me, I served 12 years in the US Air Force, now in the Reserves. And what I've realized is very few people, I mean, you know, you can't get a hundred percent of say, all Americans to agree on anything. But I think very few people question the role of the military. And they understand it. They understand why it exists. It's not perfect. There's things that need reform. I mean, I can say this both on as a voting American and also on the inside, which strikes. And when I hear you talk about what the WHO does. During National Public Health Week last week, Maria joined us for a segment on Morning Joe. For those of you that may not have had a chance to check it out, please do. But you know, you talk about all these vital deliverables and the ways in which WHO makes the lives of every American better. And I'm wondering why it's even questioned. And I'm curious how, when you are sitting with your fellow leaders at who, what's not getting through to a large segment of the American public about why who makes their lives better?
- [06:45]
Dr. Maria Van Kerkhove
I love this question because I think it's so practical. I mean, I'm an American as well, proud American. I'm also a very proud international civil servant. And to be working at who, working with in what we call multilateralism, which just means working with lots of countries. I think we don't make the work that we do necessarily clear, necessarily accessible to individuals. I think about my own family. I was, I'm from upstate New York, but my family lives in different parts of the US right now. And how does the work that we do globally Resonate to someone sitting around the kitchen table? How does it resonate with parents? How does it resonate with people who are, you know, caring for their children, wanting to make sure that they're safe, but also caring for older individuals and of not just health, but the context of education and paying the bills and filling up the gas tank and thinking of a secure future. We don't talk about health like we talk about security. We don't talk about health the way we talk about defense. Everybody invests in defense because we see the threat that's there, this hypothetical threat. Maybe not so hypothetical because we have wars that are happening right now. But health is a fundamental right. And much of what I do is prevention. Much of what I do doesn't make headlines because if you prevent an outbreak from happening, there's nothing to actually show for it. Now, we all went through Covid, and I was the COVID lead. As an American, I have a very significant leadership role. So proud to have had that incredible responsibility with Dr. Tedros and Dr. Mike Ryan, our director general and the lead of our health emergencies program. Incredible men, incredible dedicated people. But more so, the people that we work with and we work for, we serve people to keep them safe. And when I was growing up, we didn't need to know about who because we had good healthcare. We had, you know, we weren't worried about the interconnectedness so much that we need to deal with. Now. The pathogens that I deal with don't respect borders. They don't care about any background that you may have, your political affiliation, the color of your skin, how much money you have in the bank. And what we, in the interconnected world that we live in, where something emerges on one side of the planet, it could be on the other side of the planet within 24 to 48 hours. So what? Who does? And this is not a perfect example, it's not a perfect similarity, but what us CDC does for the US we try to do with every single country across the globe. Whether it's improving surveillance, whether it's improving capacities for clinical care, whether it's developing evidence based guidance to turn data and knowledge into practical advice for leaders, for doctors, for parents. And that matters at the kitchen table, because just think of COVID Take Covid as the example. How many people no longer sit at that kitchen table. That didn't have to happen. Certainly we were gonna have a pandemic because of this pathogen and how it spread and the immunity profile of the globe. But it didn't have to have the impact that it did. It didn't have to kill 20 million plus people. And the fact that we no longer have people at that kitchen table, maybe not at your immediate kitchen table, but certainly at that table or that Christmas table, whatever holiday table that you have where you bring people together. Sunday dinners were big in my Italian upbringing family. They're not there anymore. And what we do at WHO is. We share information across every country as soon as we have it. To have governments take decisions to keep their citizens safe, we advance research and development so that not only the vaccines for pathogens that we know about, we're preparing for coronaviruses, we're preparing for threats that may be somewhere far over there that could end up in your community, you know, in the near future to be prepared to anticipate. And we turn that science into action and into things that can protect you and your family. And you don't have to talk about it every day, you don't have to think about it every day. But people like me, people like you, people who work across institutions in every countries do. And that's. I think that's a privilege. I think that's actually a blessing because we love what we do. I love what I do. I don't know about you, Vin, but I feel so lucky to work in this field of work. I don't want a pandemic. I don't want the devastation that we dealt with before. But there's passion, there's dedication, and there's a willingness to be challenged constantly to do better. But who's work protects Americans? Our work protects you, home and abroad.
- [11:11]
Vin Gupta
No, I. No true words have been spoken. And I will say, when we think about everything that you just said and the opportunity to be able to tell that story, I think the analogy to how we talk about defense is correct. It's clear why that industry exists, why the military exists, and we recognize and acknowledge reform needs to happen. But nobody fundamentally questions the very existence of the US Military. And I think we do need to tell a better story to that end. It feels like, because that story isn't getting through or that sort of, you know, why who exists, what it does for us isn't getting through to everyone. I mean, I think it's getting through to a good number of people. But because it's not getting through or there isn't that echo chamber necessarily as much, obviously politics have gotten away, misinformation's gotten away, we should get into that in a little bit. I am wondering, what do we do about that? And so you had said we need it. We. We need to change the narrative. And, and let me, let me ask a sort of a finer point on a final question. It feels like a good number of people and sort of a sect of the American society is willing to say, you know what? We don't need it. We don't need an entity like it. We're going to be fine. Can you help explain what's at risk without the who? That there isn't an entity that exists that could just step in and do all the vital preventative work and what that would mean for every family at the dinner table this evening there. That there isn't sort of a plan B here. But I want to. I'm curious from your own vantage, how would you react to something like that? Oh, you know, we. Some need it.
- [13:01]
Dr. Maria Van Kerkhove
It's. If we didn't exist, it would need to be created. If who did not exist, countries would need to come together to create it. We're part of the United nations and we're the health entity of the United nations. Coming together more than 76 years. We're celebrating. We just celebrated our 77th birthday. Coming together across countries to work together on just one aspect of this. Just think of surveillance, for example. What is out there? What is circulating? The known pathogens that cause disease, cause death, cause economic disruption, change livelihoods, changes the course of your lives. Think of the lives that have been changed for Covid. Businesses that closed, you know, the biggest histories and wars were changed because of diseases that were spreading. What we do is we bring countries together to communicate under international law, the international health regulations, to rapidly share information within 24 hours when there is the detection of certain types of pathogens. We together with experts from around the world do risk assessments to say, what does this mean for you? What is the actual potential that this could cause something really bad? And we warn, we warn the world. You don't have eyes and ears in every country. We, we do in the sense, and I do not mean this from a detective surveillance point of view, but we have this type of reach in countries because we're working with the member states. We are the secretariat of government. We don't actually have any power to go into countries to do different things. And I think that's really a critical distinction because people don't necessarily know what who does, or if they don't, they believe a lot of the misrepresentation and misinformation about us. We don't. Countries have sovereign rights. We don't go in and tell anyone what to do. What we do is we develop evidence based guidance, take the best information to say to prevent this infection from spreading or to prevent this infection from turning into a deadly disease, do the following, but we work with governments, we work with medical ministries of health and actually other sectors as well to turn that evidence based guidance into policy, which obviously there's a lot of other factors, economic factors and political factors. Acceptance, trust in governments to work with countries to do that. The world needs. We actually often say we're not just who, we're not just the World Health Organization, we're the World's Health Organization. And I think that helps, you know, to say that we are here. Our only job, our only job is to keep people safe. We have no other motivation. I just want to say one other thing, Vin is the budget, you know, we mentioned defense. Our budget at WHO is less than one hospital, one hospital in one city, in one high income country, less than one hospital in New York City, for example. And so it's not a lot of money. And a lot of people think that the US gives us huge amounts of money and they do through assessed contributions, which are dues, which are dues member states pay, but also in a lot of voluntary contribution which can change. But the amount of money that the US gives to WHO is very tiny in terms of the budget of the U.S. government. And in fact one of the biggest challenges that right now is not only the change to WHO, but to global health. And you and I talked about this before. The cuts in funding from the US to global programs impacting more than 50 countries right now, USAID not in operation. This is having huge impacts and life changing. It's really detrimental at the moment and that's really scary for us right now. Yeah.
- [16:42]
Vin Gupta
And I think it's really important for people to keep in mind, just as you know, we're reaching millions of people on the Midas Touch network and this is an important thing to talk about because there is a belief and I do think a proportion of people that believe. Why do you need a secretariat to be data sharing? And the reality is you do need, need that somebody's not going to post something about a novel infectious disease to media or to the business wire or to X or another social media. Can I want to ask you a question on that? If the WHO did not have its central role in health information convening data sharing. I know you guys are working on a new set of pandemic negotiations which I'd like you to talk about if you can. But if you didn't exist to do something fundamental like that. It's not like a country somewhere in the world would, if they saw something concerning, would necessarily be compelled to share it and provide that information to the global populace. But curious, your reaction to that.
- [17:44]
Dr. Maria Van Kerkhove
Well, no one country could do this alone. No one country could do this alone. Because the notion that a pandemic or an epidemic is going to start in some faraway country is a false sense of security. I mean, look at the 2009 flu pandemic which began in North America, Covid. We don't know the complete origins of COVID but the first cases were identified in China. We have outbreaks of Marburg and of Ebola in different countries across Africa. We have mpox, that's in the drc, but also spreading through international travel. These pathogens don't respect border. And we need a collective response, collective engagement to fight these threats. No one country can do it alone. No one country has the capacity to deal with these types of threats because they cross borders, because we live in this massively interconnected world and also because of the geopolitics and the things that we're seeing. You know, surveillance is so critical, but no country wants to find the next pandemic virus. Nobody wants that blame. But in fact, the earlier you can detect something, the earlier you can react. If you're actually working on prevention and building those capacities, sustaining those capacities, many of which were massively improved during COVID you have a better chance of actually preventing that spillover event or that breach in, you know, turning into infecting humans to turn into an outbreak, to turn into an epidemic, to turn into a pandemic. The earlier you can do that and collectively working together. You know, my experience with WHO has been in outbreak investigations mainly in the Middle east for mers, but in Asia as well, in Africa as well. And we show up, we're invited by countries, we, we show up at the worst possible moment. A country is dealing with an outbreak to help them bring it under control. And that is just support. It's not placing blame, it's not saying something is wrong. It's just bringing people to use your best minds to say, okay, where are we in the outbreak? How do we bring it out of control? And how do we alert the world to get them ready to have their system agile to scale up and scale down if needed.
- [19:44]
Vin Gupta
Just hearing you speak, Maria, it's so easy to understand now, especially in our information environment, the way our politics are, not just the United States, but globally, how WHO operating in a very high stakes environment where to your exact point. I love your framing there, which is you are entering a country at a point in time which it's the most complicated, it's the most difficult and most challenging. Very few people want to be identified or any country wants to be identified with potentially the next pathogen of pandemic potential because so many things, economic consequences, reputational consequences. And so. And then that's the environment that you guys are being dropped into and operating. And it's obviously, obviously all you're going to get in many cases is arrows and criticisms and scrutiny and very little praise because, you know, no one wants to be receiving bad news or having to deal with that type of news. And there you are having to navigate all those complexities. So one, I just want to say we recognize that many, many people do recognize that the indelible role that the World Health Organization plays and I think it's conversations like this longer form that I hope help to really reframe this narrative is, you know, when you think about the. So we know the purpose. The purpose is as a convener. I mean this is one of many purposes, data information sharing on really sensitive topics like a concerning new infection. Recognizing that countries will not just post to social media if they see something wrong. No one's going to just do that. And I think it's important to emphasize that to, to our listeners here, there is no off ramp that doesn't involve the WHO or some version of it. Which is to say that no one's just going to magically share this information. You have to build negotiations, treaties.
- [21:33]
Dr. Maria Van Kerkhove
There's international law. The international health regulations is law that countries have signed up to, to agree to share this information. Yes.
- [21:42]
Vin Gupta
And without it, without it we wouldn't have, however imperfect, we wouldn't have the mechanisms in place that you've worked to establish. Can you talk about. I know you're working on some new efforts here in light of COVID lessons learned. Wondering if you can talk to us about how you're thinking about optimizing that, recognizing some of the criticism, some of the scrutiny that the entity that WHO has received in the last few years.
- [22:06]
Dr. Maria Van Kerkhove
Yeah, I mean criticism is not a bad thing. I mean criticism for me, unfair criticism I have a problem with, but criticism that pushes us and drives us to do more. I mean, that's why we're here. We think every day what can we be doing better? What can we be doing more? And I have to say, you know, at who, for me in particular, I don't have to work here. I want to Work here. Like, I want to be part of. I drunk the Kool Aid. I believe wholeheartedly in what we're trying to do and wanting to make it better. And so many of my colleagues want to do the same, including our director general, including Mike Ryan. But there is criticisms of us. I mean, one of the things learning, and we're criticized of this, of, like, not acting fast enough. I mean, one of the lessons you learn every single time is to act fast. And I have to say, you know, this is one of the. One of the criticisms I find the most strange. Could we have done more? Absolutely. Could we have done better? Absolutely. There's no other answer to that question. But in terms of acting fast, what we were able to do is from that first instance of this cluster of pneumonia, of unknown ideology, we. We activated what we call our emergency response framework. We do this for every outbreak, whether it's a big signal or it's a small signal. We knew right away something was wrong. A cluster of 27, no health workers involved. We didn't know the cause. In a country that has very strong lab surveillance, meaning it's not flu, it's not mers, it's not sars, it's not adenovirus, it's not Legionella, it's not. Not. Not right. What is it? I immediately thought coronavirus cause. That's my background. But that's just what. But immediately, red flags. We set up an incident management team. We informed our member states through our closed system, and then we informed publicly. We issued a package of guidance, technical guidance, within two weeks, 9 January to 12 January issued guidance. The sequence was shared around the 9th, 10th, 11th, depending on the day, depending on the, you know, the source of that. But the first PCR test was actually the protocol was published on the 13th of January, and we started activating our systems and we started warning the world. Now, the thing where I think we can improve, and I think this is coming through with the updated and amended international health regulations, and certainly from the pandemic accord that is being discussed, is the warnings that we can issue, how loud that actual alarm is and how serious people take that. I mean, people arguably did not wake up to Covid until Lombardy was hitting because it was some unknown pathogen in some faraway country. When Lombardi was hit, it was significant. When New York was hit, really, people started to wake up and think, oh, my gosh, this is here. And the hubris that we had of like, we could handle this. I talked to health workers all over, and you Know this, you've treated patients, right? That anticipation of waiting for patients to arrive, so acting fast is one huge one. A second one is around using science as a foundation. But it's not the only important element, right? Data and knowledge and evidence is very. Evidence based guidance is very different than policies that are set and policies take into consideration so many other things, not let alone availability of the material that you actually need to have that intervention, but the acceptability of people, the trust of communities, communities. You know, outbreaks begin and end in communities, but communities can actually prevent those outbreaks from happening in the first place. When are we going to learn? And I've learned a ton on communication. I mean, you know, what we say, how we say it. I've not trained in risk communication, I'm not trained in communication. But my goal always to say what we know, what we don't know, what we're doing to find out and what it means for you. But I think trying to correct coming out there all the time and even when we make mistakes and we've made mistakes and I've made mistakes to correct that, correct the record and say science is a process, science evolves. And therefore your evidence and your advice needs to evolve. But you know, we never issued mandates. Never, never. And one of the things we hear all the time is a criticism is we didn't issue masks, advice on masks fast enough. But in fact, in January we advised anyone who was sick to be wearing a mask, anyone who was caring for an individual who was sick to wear a mask. Obviously that changed over time. We were the first organization to issue guidance on how to make a three layer mask then not just wear a bandana or a piece of fabric. And you have to remember supply. Could we have communicated that better? Absolutely. Really? I mean, that's where you draw lessons of how we could have said what we said and when. But that's where we need to learn. But we never issued mandates, we never said lockdown. What we were trying to do was to apply a layered approach, a tiered approach so that businesses could keep open and countries went into lockdown and different levels of lockdown because they had to, because they were overwhelmed. And the healthcare system was absolutely overwhelmed. And you remember that. And the things that strike me the most, the things that keep me up at night, that give me chills every time, are the refrigerated trucks, are the fire pyres in India. And did you ever see then this image from Brazil where there were people dying in ICU and there was a glove filled with warm water, and they put the glove in the hand of an individual dying in ICU so that they didn't die alone. You know, that's the level that we were dealing with. And so everything that propels us, everything that's being negotiated in this pandemic accord is about not just a handshake to say, oh gee, we should do better, we have to do better. And if I wasn't on a podcast, I'd probably use some colorful language. But we have to do better. It didn't have to be this bad. And the next one doesn't have to be as bad as Covid, you know.
- [27:42]
Vin Gupta
Well, thank you for saying all that. And it just reminds me that I spent a lot of my time as I'm a pulmonologist and often think about the intersection of climate and health, as I know the WHO does. And it's something that you have to be very careful. You know, this is no surprise to how you talk about, because certain words will trigger and you'll immediately turn off, you know, 4 or 5 in 10 of people that might be wanting to listen to you. And, and there's a short termism that afflicts how we think about policymaking right now where it's easy. The easy button is to say let's, we didn't like something about some entity or some response. We're just going to say let's shut it down or let's tear it down. The hard thing and what a WHO or climate health advocates for that group of entities and individuals that is a body of work that by definition is medium to long term for a reason for prevention, to prevent the scenes in Rio and New Delhi and others from playing out again. And it is, we operate unfortunately in a political and policymaking timeline that rewards short termism often. And so it's with that tee up, I'm curious. We've seen some of the criticism, direct criticism of the WHO when it comes to handling of, you know, the, the, the, the, the root causes of the COVID 19 pandemic. And I, and I think it's important that we talk about that because, you know, you've done an amazing job, I think of level setting why the W ratio exists and how it improves all of our lives because it is the shield for all of every single family in the United States from something bad from happening without it again. There is no other off ramp or alternative. I'm curious though, when people want to say if they hear the words who, I would imagine some people are triggered to think something negative not everybody, obviously. And maybe that is vis a vis the etiology of COVID 19. So if, if you were talking to somebody that firmly believed that you didn't do enough to be transparent about the origins of COVID 19, what's the response and how is who responding to that specific question?
- [29:54]
Dr. Maria Van Kerkhove
Yeah, we still don't know the origins of COVID 19.5plus years on for us, it's not just a scientific endeavor. It's a moral and an ethical imperative that we find out. Because it's not just enough to know if it was zoonotic or lab. We need to know the details surrounding all of that because without knowing that detail, we're not going to be able to prevent it the next time. I think for us there's a couple of elements to this. One is the early days of COVID and how people saw us. And if we were, you know, I hear a lot, you're in China's pocket, but for a while we were in America's pocket. And so you kind of can't win on that, that, that side of things. We did not have the information that we needed early on from China. That's a fact. We've been very vocal about it. And I think I hear some people use that when they want to and others just say we just believed everything that they said. But as an organization, as scientists, you know, you already think there's human to human transmission. You already know that it's probably bigger than what's actually being reported. And so we act, we acted already as if that were happening. I think on the origin side of things, this is extremely frustrating for me. I fully, fully believe that much more information is actually out there that has not been shared with us about how this pandemic began. And we had several missions. I was part of a mission that went to China in February 2020. One of the earliest groups that were in there of actually looking at. And in fact in many parts of the country in China, the cases were coming down. It was, it was pretty incredible. Learning was the first time we got information out of the country to say what was happening. It was the first time we knew people could be infectious before they tested positive. I mean it's, it's or developed symptoms. Excuse me. It's incredible. Right. And the origins is unknown. And right now we don't know when, where and how this pandemic began. The totality of available evidence, and the key word here is available is zoonotic in origin. Right. We're looking at the market, the amplification at the market, but we don't have the upstream study. So where did the first cases occur? I don't fully believe they occurred at that market. Believe that these animals were important in terms of potential spillover. But we don't have evidence that actually happened at the market. It could have happened as part of the trade route. It could have happened at some of the source farms. We have no information on the labs.
- [32:11]
Vin Gupta
You know, zoonotic, just for the audience.
- [32:14]
Dr. Maria Van Kerkhove
Zoonotic, yeah. So that's transmission between animals and humans. And when I say zoonotic, where the hypothesis is that an animal was infected, some kind of an intermediate host, maybe a raccoon dog or civet cat or something like that, and people came in contact with those animals. And usually what happens when you have a spillover event, you have what we call almost like a stuttering. Some people might get infected. They may not develop severe disease and therefore they don't seek healthcare. So they might get missed. And the pathogen may not be. It may not have developed enough characteristics to transmit between people easily. And so you have a petering out. But other times when the virus is able to transmit efficiently, that's when you start to have an outbreak. And usually you'll pick up people in a healthcare system because they develop severe disease. But at that point, there's normally more cases. Now, the other hypothesis is that there was a breach in biosafety, biosecurity. It leaked from a lab. This is the lab leak hypothesis, not an intentional release, but that either the Wuhan Institute of Virology or the CDC lab that was in Wuhan, the China Centers for Disease Control lab in Wuhan, was working with similar viruses. The virus infected someone working in that lab, and then the outbreak began. The problem is that China has not been forthcoming. They have not collaborated with. They have not communicated with us to the ability that we believe that they could. And the frustration that I have at WHO is we cannot force a country to tell us. We cannot force a country to work with us. We couldn't do this with the us we couldn't do this with France. We couldn't do this with South Africa. We have to rely on countries to share this information with us. Now, there's a lot of intelligence reports that have come out from the us, From France, from Germany, and many of them say they believe it was a lab leak. But none of those reports actually provide any evidence or data to show that that had happened. So right now it's a debate. We want it to be a scientific debate and not a political Debate. And right now it's politics. And this is hurting everything. It's hurting all of the work that we do on surveillance. It's hurting all of the work for collaboration and trust in science. And this is the frustration that I have. So would I like us to do more? Absolutely. But we will not stop until we have exhausted every avenue to understand how this pandemic began.
- [34:36]
Vin Gupta
Yeah, I think you know something that you mentioned, I mean, everything you mentioned, it just reminds me of the earlier part of our conversation, which is sometimes you are caught in the crossfire without actual authority to force any individual country to do anything. We're hopeful for everybody's better angels to collaborate because it's in all of our best interests from a global citizen standpoint, to know what's out there, to information share, to be better for the next time. A WHO only has so much power to compel them. And to your point, it's quite limited. You can't force any individual country to do anything. You're beholden to them to be transparent. If they're not being transparent, it is then going to potentially birth what's happening right now, which is politics over health.
- [35:17]
Dr. Maria Van Kerkhove
Is.
- [35:18]
Vin Gupta
Do you feel like, I mean this, to state the obvious, but let's have this conversation. It feels like the WHO is being unfairly blamed for, for, for realities beyond its control, but wondering how you would respond to that.
- [35:31]
Dr. Maria Van Kerkhove
Listen, I mean, I, I am glad people know what WHO does. I'm glad we have an opportunity to answer these questions. We are in the crosshairs, but we are in the long game. You know, you mentioned in one of your earlier questions here, you know, these outbreaks, these epidemics, the work that we do, whether it's climate change or pandemic preparedness outlives any election cycle. These transcend election cycles. And politicians need to show their people that they are responsible for that. They've got them through this. And so there's this collective amnesia right now about what's happening with COVID which is very detrimental again to what we need to do for it, especially in a constricting fiscal space of most of the money from health, certainly from COVID crisis shrinking, going to Gaza, going to Ukraine, and now many of the government budgets going from health to defense. That area of work is constricting even further. I think we don't mind criticism. Like, we are not sitting here saying, oh, you know, please don't talk bad about us, we want to do better. But we do need, as a member state organization, our member states give us the power they want us to have. So they sit every year at the Executive board in January or January, and the World Health assembly every May here in Geneva, and they come together to outline what they want us to do in support of all member states. We have a global program of work. All of that is online. You can see what it is that our member states are asking us to do. But we have the power that they want us to have. And I think that's the crux of like how. And you can hear, I mean, there's been recordings of us leaked, you know, which is a terrible thing to happen. But, you know, it's happened to me several times. And the threats on myself and my colleagues and my children, you know, we're here to do a job. We want to do that to the best of our ability. And just like you, just like you who want to see us do better, we want to do better as well. But we are restricted on what we can do and that's limited by what our member states want us to be able to do and give us the power to do.
- [37:37]
Vin Gupta
Really, really well stated, Maria. I mean, first, before we wrap, I want to be respectful of your time. I want to acknowledge the fact that our audience members are busy. And I've loved this conversation. I think, frankly, I've learned a lot in this conversation that again, it's not amenable to a three to five minute media segment or something even shorter or a headline. So you've made us all smarter. Maria, I will say if in 60 seconds, can you give us just a quick snippet on the ways in which, and this could be, in closing, the ways in which who makes the lives of every American better? Maybe a few things that are top of mind.
- [38:16]
Dr. Maria Van Kerkhove
So to us, we convene the world's expertise and bring people together to tackle some of the biggest challenges that we know and anticipate the challenges of the future, like climate change, like war, like humanitarian crises, the world is incredibly complex and health is just one element. What we do is we bring people together to make sure that that information is shared. There's a democratizing of that information, there's a transparency of that information to be able to prevent bad things from happening. And here we're talking about outbreaks and epidemics and when they do happen, when we can't prevent them because we can't prevent everything, that we mitigate their impact and that impacts the lives, the livelihoods, the mental health, the well being of children, of families, of communities globally, because the pathogens that we deal with don't respect borders. And so when anyone is at risk, everyone is at risk. And so who managing this type of work and working together with people around the world keeps people safer. Without even if we didn't exist, the world would have to create us.
- [39:22]
Vin Gupta
Love that Maria. And with that, I'm gonna. I'm gonna give everybody their time back. Maria Vancouver Cove Dr. Maria Vancouver Cope thank you for your time today. Hope this is the first of any conversations, but thank you for all your work.
- [39:34]
Dr. Maria Van Kerkhove
Thank you so much for having me.
- [39:35]
Vin Gupta
Can't get enough Midas? Check out the Midas plus substack for ad Free articles, reports, podcasts, daily recaps from Ron Filipkowski and more. Sign up for free now@midasplus.com when the.
- [39:47]
Dr. Maria Van Kerkhove
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