Debora MacKenzie > Quotes

“Every disaster movie starts with someone ignoring a scientist.”
― Debora MacKenzie, Stopping the Next Pandemic: How Covid-19 Can Help Us Save Humanity

“The fact that the world is a complex system helps explain how this pandemic happened. First, it means our system has a management problem. People tend to see things in a simple linear way. That’s not a criticism—we can’t usually control anything but a few, simple, direct interactions within our complex social system. So faced with a problem, those are the solutions on offer. We cannot always anticipate how the rest of the complex system will impinge.”
― Debora MacKenzie, Stopping the Next Pandemic: How Covid-19 Can Help Us Save Humanity

“Adalja observes that Bioshield cost in the low billions of dollars, far less than Covid-19 will cost. Preparation is always cheaper than reparation.”
― Debora MacKenzie, Stopping the Next Pandemic: How Covid-19 Can Help Us Save Humanity

“Science didn’t actually fail us. The ability of governments to act on it, together, did.”
― Debora MacKenzie, Stopping the Next Pandemic: The Pandemic that Never Should Have Happened, and How to Stop the Next One

“Homer-Dixon says increasing complexity makes societies more resilient only up to a point. Connections between villages might mean one comes to the other’s aid in an attack. But as the villages become more tightly coupled, both may suffer when one is attacked. A loose network absorbs shock; a tightly coupled one transmits it. That is happening in the Covid-19 pandemic. Countries go into lockdown; people stop shopping, traveling, and producing; and the effects ricochet through a tightly coupled global economy. The global supply chains of money, materials, people, energy, and component parts that underpin industries falter and break. Airlines go under as they are not set up to weather even a temporary disappearance of travelers. Malaria worsens in Africa as insecticide and antimalarial bed net deliveries falter. Microcredit that underpins small businesses throughout the developing world defaults because payment collectors are locked down, causing ramifications throughout an economy.”
― Debora MacKenzie, Stopping the Next Pandemic: How Covid-19 Can Help Us Save Humanity

“Then there’s the one disease on the WHO priority list that is most likely to keep the scientists awake at night—other than flu, and we’ll look at that later. Few people have heard of Nipah virus. Frankly, this one truly scares me.”
― Debora MacKenzie, Stopping the Next Pandemic: How Covid-19 Can Help Us Save Humanity

“Mothers who listen to the lies of anti-vax campaigners today have never seen how measles, typhoid, and polio can carry off children.”
― Debora MacKenzie, Stopping the Next Pandemic: How Covid-19 Can Help Us Save Humanity

“All this reminds me of a tale told by the author Douglas Adams in one of his Hitchhiker’s Guide books, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe. The planet Golgafrincham had too many people. So it contrived to keep the top professionals and the low-level practical workers, but rocketed all the middle-level “useless” people into space: security guards, for example, and telephone sanitizers. The remaining population subsequently lived happily—until they all died from a virulent disease contracted from an unsanitized telephone.”
― Debora MacKenzie, Stopping the Next Pandemic: How Covid-19 Can Help Us Save Humanity

“The world is networked, and it takes a network to run a network.”
― Debora MacKenzie, Stopping the Next Pandemic: How Covid-19 Can Help Us Save Humanity

“As species disappear under the onslaught of deforestation or other ecosystem destruction, they at least take their pathogens with them. But in degraded ecosystems, the remaining animals can also carry more pathogens than they might in healthier surroundings, because they are stressed or hungry, and germs take advantage.”
― Debora MacKenzie, Stopping the Next Pandemic: How Covid-19 Can Help Us Save Humanity

“Human history is a long saga of people learning to harness ever-increasing amounts of energy to maintain ever more complex, ordered systems, punctuated by periodic collapses—the Romans, the Maya—when civilizations became more complex than they could maintain, with the energy and technologies they had, in the face of changing conditions. At that point, small stresses sent overstretched social systems into a rapid downward spiral, which ended with major losses of people and social organization, as one stable complex system made a rapid nonlinear descent to a less complex one. But after a setback, humanity always innovated and rebuilt, a little bigger and more complex than before.”
― Debora MacKenzie, Stopping the Next Pandemic: How Covid-19 Can Help Us Save Humanity

“The US tried to improve matters. It spent $1 billion on detection labs and preparedness plans in developing countries, as required by the International Health Regulations; stockpiled protective equipment and set up networks of hospitals in the US primed to respond to a pandemic; and created an office in the White House to plan and lead the response, the National Security Council Directorate for Global Health Security and Biodefense. All three, wrote Kirchhoff, were underfunded or shut down under the Trump administration. When the Covid-19 pandemic hit, the pandemic plan written by the Obama administration was largely ignored.”
― Debora MacKenzie, Stopping the Next Pandemic: How Covid-19 Can Help Us Save Humanity

“In any case, what I discovered by asking what might happen if another Black Death hit us turns out to be very relevant to what we are already going through with Covid-19, even though it has been much less lethal. The link, as with many apparently intractable problems, is complexity.”
― Debora MacKenzie, Stopping the Next Pandemic: How Covid-19 Can Help Us Save Humanity

“Covid-19 has been, by anyone’s reckoning, a crisis—and it’s just getting started. Things are going to happen or change now, whether people take control of them in the broad interests of humanity or not. It may be an opportunity to achieve things we could not achieve before. The popularity of Kennedy’s statement shows we recognize this deeper truth—that crises can provide those opportunities. Or, we might just be swept along by the economic and political storms the pandemic has unleashed and never deal with any of the underlying problems that got us here.”
― Debora MacKenzie, Stopping the Next Pandemic: How Covid-19 Can Help Us Save Humanity

“Western countries have been talking about pandemic preparedness since bird flu rang alarms in the early 2000s. This was especially true in the US, which was widely expected to be the country best prepared for something like this. But when Covid-19 hit the US, the plan was largely abandoned, while unexpected complications set in everywhere. Health workers didn’t have enough protective gear and ended up sick or in quarantine. Insurance rules meant people initially couldn’t afford to get tested. For weeks, they couldn’t get tests in any case because of problems with one test at the US CDC in Atlanta. Employees with no paid vacation came in to work, hoping it was just flu. The virus spread earlier and farther than surveillance systems could detect, partly due to years of cuts to public health.”
― Debora MacKenzie, Stopping the Next Pandemic: How Covid-19 Can Help Us Save Humanity

“One way is to start from the recognition that nation states seem unlikely to give an international agency the power it needs to overrule nation states. So if countries have all the power, they have to find some way to use it in the common interest. If the WHO cannot tell a big country what to do, other countries will have to. Which might work, especially as they are all trading partners. A global government, as governments are usually understood, is not likely to work. Complexity scientist Yaneer Bar-Yam says that when social systems get too complex, old-fashioned hierarchies, with one guy (it’s usually a guy) in charge, don’t work anymore because one person can’t get their head around everything. Hierarchies are already devolving into global networks as the real power structures in many areas of global concern, writes author and governance expert Anne-Marie Slaughter, especially things that can be managed by networks of experts. So we need a network. We now have an annual meeting at which WHO member states tell the WHO what they want it to do. What if we also had a more constantly convened, high-level council of countries to deal with global threats, that could demand that individual governments act on big deals like suspicions of incipient pandemics and other problems that could have impacts far beyond one country? And what if it was advised by a network of scientists-on-call, like the one the WHO now convenes for emergencies?”
― Debora MacKenzie, Stopping the Next Pandemic: How Covid-19 Can Help Us Save Humanity

“connection with this, may I respectfully make a suggestion? Tradition is very important, and traditional medicine is often valuable, but perhaps using bat feces to treat eye disorders is one practice we might consider letting go of. This is not because it’s feces—indeed, Western medicine is now learning uses for that long known in China—but because of what we now know about bat viruses. The Chinese people asking for that particular remedy to be taken out of the Chinese Pharmacopoeia and traditional Chinese medicine shops have a point. There are safer ways to get vitamin A.”
― Debora MacKenzie, Stopping the Next Pandemic: How Covid-19 Can Help Us Save Humanity

“What stands out now is the speed and efficiency with which, in retrospect, the world acted. The virus didn’t get opportunities to establish itself in countries outside China that delayed taking action to contain it, as happened with Covid-19. As the virus arrived, there was no disputing the need for containment or talk of relying on herd immunity. Because of this swift action, SARS never circulated widely enough to be called a pandemic. Maybe the virus’s high death rate scared everyone into line. Maybe its inability to spread before symptoms started, and absence of many mild cases, just made it easier and less disruptive to follow the epidemiologists’ advice. And there was more public trust in experts 17 years ago.”
― Debora MacKenzie, Stopping the Next Pandemic: How Covid-19 Can Help Us Save Humanity