"We couldn't just snap our fingers and address Mpox right away and that should be the standard." One of the biggest factors was we rely on state, city and county public health entities to roll out programs and these are the same government bodies that lost a lot of employees during the pandemic because of burnout, Hepburn said. "There was some inertia to get the response started," Hepburn said. We didn't respond as quickly as we could have, and this was a disease for which we already had a vaccine, but just not enough of it, Hepburn said. In many ways Monkeypox, now called Mpox was a test. "We have a lot of headwinds around 'I don't want to think about infectious diseases.'"Ĭovering the pandemic: 'I will wake up from this': A year of Austin's heartbreak, resilience with COVID Was Mpox a first post-COVID-19 test? One thought that keeps them up at night is this idea some people have that: "We did this for COVID-19, but we will never do it again," Hepburn said. We have to keep public attention about infectious diseases and continue funding to prevent them. That means looking for the next disease and preserving our ability to ramp up vaccine production quickly and on a massive scale. "The challenge we collectively have is can we keep the well-oiled machine going," Hepburn said. Fast forward 10 years ,and we had COVID-19, which was worse than swine flu, and unimaginable to many people 10 years before.
They wouldn't have to worry about a pandemic again. Hepburn remembers after H1N1 swine flu in 2009, people had the sense that they were glad that was over and they could go on about their every day business. Life after COVID-19: 'You have to pivot:' What Austin's medical community has learned from COVID What is the biggest challenge in preventing the next pandemic? Now, with mRNA technology, once the disease is isolated, we can adapt that technology to encode for that disease and create a new vaccine quickly, Bennett said. Before, it took 10 to 15 years to develop a vaccine. We have the science to create vaccines very quickly, in a matter of months and then ramp up production to create 30 billion doses in a year. What will be different with the next pandemic?īoth Bennett and Hepburn said we now know what to do. "We have gotten really good at responding to variants," she said. "It will look like a seasonal flu, with the severity of the variants being less and less," Bennett said. We will continue to have new variants emerge, said Hamilton Bennett, the senior director of vaccine access and partnerships at Moderna, which produced an mRNA vaccine for COVID-19. Instead of it being a COVID-19 pandemic, it's an endemic, meaning something that is frequently around like the flu. "We have all been through a collective trauma. Matthew Hepburn, an infectious disease specialist and the senior advisor to the director of the White House's Office of Science and Technology Policy for pandemic awareness. We went from the panic phase to the neglect phase, said Dr. Since that time more than 1.1 million people have died from the disease in the United States, more than 93,000 in Texas and 1,802 in Travis County. People started working from home and trying to educate their children and grandchildren from home. Schools went on spring break and didn't return in person until August. Three years ago, Austin, the United States and the world shut down. That was the big question of the South by Southwest panel "COVID, Mpox, Disease X, What's Next?" last week. What will the be the future of COVID-19 and will there be another pandemic?
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