More and more Americans who want COVID-19 vaccinations are now able to get them.
But will that be enough to prevent future shutdowns?
Dr. Larry Brilliant has intimate experience with disease outbreaks. He helped eradicate smallpox and was a senior technical advisor for the movie Contagion. Now the CEO of Pandefense Advisory, Brilliant told KCBS Radio’s “Ask An Expert” that countries including Taiwan got the response right — by treating even a handful of cases as a national emergency and taking tough action to stop the spread.
“Unless we get to that attitude, we’re not going to be able to avoid the constant looming fear that there will be another shutdown, which will be disastrous,” he said.
Another shutdown would take a huge toll on both the economy and peoples’ emotional states.
“We need to do a Plan B, which is to make sure we get good at outbreak containment, at predicting where outbreaks are going to be, at testing — but not just the routine kind of testing, the PCRs,” Brilliant told KCBS Radio. “We’ve got to have viral sequencing so that every time we find a new outbreak, we know which variant it is - the UK variant, the South African variant - and we match the best vaccine to the right variant.”
He said the U.S. has the technology, but what the country needs is the will.
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