Professor: Planning for pandemic began post-9/11

Prof. Frances Lee explains how US authorities began developing non-pharmaceutical pandemic models in the wake of 9/11. #Covid

Transcript

00:00It is interesting to discover, though, that these non-pharmaceutical intervention models

00:06date back as far as George W. Bush's presidency.

00:10What did you discover about that?

00:12So in the aftermath of 9-11 and the anthrax attacks on the U.S. Congress, there was a

00:21heightened awareness of issues of biosecurity.

00:24George W. Bush, during a summer vacation, read a book about the 1918 pandemic flu.

00:32And he asked members of his homeland security team to start working on a pandemic plan.

00:38And so they began to pool together experts who could help to game out scenarios for responding

00:46to a crisis of that nature so that we wouldn't be as unprepared as we had been in 1918.

00:52And some of those advisors began to turn to and produce, some of them produced and

01:01some of them turned to academics who were producing models that suggested that non-pharmaceutical

01:08interventions could work.

01:11They also took a look back at 1918 and argued that cities in the U.S. that had imposed closures

01:21of theaters and other public gatherings, that they fared better in the 1918 pandemic.