Talking public health with Laureate Professor Peter Doherty

360info

"The whole character of the public discourse, the public conversation has changed. And of course, it's changed with social media particularly. And also it's become more polarised."   Immunologist Peter Doherty AC, who is a Laureate Professor and patron of The Peter Doherty Institute for Infection and Immunity, discusses the state of public health in Australia with 360info Senior Commissioning Editor Suzannah Lyons.

Transcript

00:00Well, first of all, thank you for having a chat with us, Peter, and talking about these

00:03things that I know you are very well versed on.

00:05I wanted to start, you've been paying attention to the state of public discourse for years.

00:10I'm curious as to how you would characterise it today.

00:13The whole character of the public discourse, the public conversation has changed.

00:17And of course, it's changed with social media, particularly.

00:21And also, it's become more polarised.

00:25Some of us look back to an era where Australia and the world in general, I think, embraced

00:31a more collective view that everyone deserves a fair go.

00:35That's been greatly eroded, not so much in Australia as in the United States, but it's

00:41much less than it was.

00:42One group we perhaps don't talk enough about is the vaccine hesitant.

00:46How would you describe them?

00:48And how can we better reach them with our public health messaging?

00:51I think vaccine hesitancy is very understandable.

00:55Vaccination is a medical procedure, there's no medical procedure without some risk.

00:59And that's certainly true of vaccination.

01:01And what we saw through COVID-19 was that the new vaccines that were brought in very

01:06quickly, and I think did save a lot of lives, actually weren't tolerated particularly well

01:11by a number of people.

01:13It's certainly true, older women were hit by the vaccine that was made here initially

01:19by CSL, the one that came out of Britain, an adenovirus-vectored vaccine, and several

01:25died.

01:27And that vaccine was quickly withdrawn.

01:29But then the mRNA vaccines were causing considerable distress, particularly to adolescent males.

01:36And a number of kids went into hospital with myocarditis.

01:40And there has, I think, been some permanent damage.

01:42So it's quite understandable.

01:45And it's always a risk-benefit equation.

01:48How do you win people's trust back?

01:49We try to point to the evidence.

01:51And the evidence is that the vaccines of childhood, the standard vaccines of childhood, are really

01:56extremely well tolerated.

01:59And they're safe and effective.

02:02And yet there's enormous pressure against those.

02:07That's the gold standard, really.

02:09We need to get our kids vaccinated with those vaccines of childhood.

02:13There seems to be more bugs around these days.

02:17Are we seeing humans at a greater risk of disease, be that viral, inflammatory, or even

02:22rising rates of cancer?

02:24And how can we best respond to that?

02:27The fact that rates of cancer are on the rise may just be because we're living longer.

02:32There's a perception there are more bugs around.

02:34There's probably not more around, but there's a hell of a lot more people.

02:38If you look at the world in 1900, there were 1.6 billion people.

02:44Now there are 8 billion people.

02:47And a lot of those people are in Africa, and they're coming in contact more and more with

02:52wildlife.

02:54And part of the reason for that is the food situation in Africa is getting steadily worse

02:59due to climate change and various factors like wars.

03:03And people are going to the jungle to harvest, say, bushmeat and so forth.

03:08So there's a danger of viruses jumping across.

03:11This is certainly the case with Ebola.

03:13We just saw a case, there's a new virus that emerged in the Congo.

03:18It appeared first in three children who died after eating a bat.

03:23The other thing that's happened with influenza is after the Second World War, the U.S. and

03:29Australia particularly got together to try and improve food security in East Asia, particularly

03:36in China, and help them build massive chicken industries.

03:41These birds are multiplying influenza viruses and getting them across into people.

03:46So there's a much greater risk from influenza.

03:49Then of course there are the live animal markets, and with many more people, they become more

03:52dangerous.

03:53And then above everything else, there's long-distance planes and mass international tourism.

04:00Changing human behaviour is complex.

04:04I think what governments need to do is they need to keep their public health agencies

04:09strong and on the ball.

04:11And the recent firing of a lot of people from the CDC, which is the premier agency in the

04:17U.S. of course, has been deeply disturbing.

04:20I believe 5,000 of them are now back at work.

04:22I mean, this is what's happening.

04:24The U.S. is in total chaos.

04:27President Trump is a chaos generator.

04:29So public health agencies need to be strong.

04:33People need to be aware of them.

04:34And unfortunately, the COVID-19 experience led to a lot of disillusion on various people's

04:39parts, a lot of which was fed online, of course.

04:43If we ever get a serious disease, I mean, COVID wasn't as serious as it could have been.

04:48But in 1918-19, with the influenza pandemic, with maybe a quarter the size of the population

04:54we've got now, 50 to 100 million people died.

04:58Now if we get a virus like that back again, I hope we can persuade people to actually

05:02listen to public health measures, because initially that may be all we've got.

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