420 - "Dangerously Unprepared": Dr. Jennifer Nuzzo on the Global Health Security Index's Newest Findings
Public Health On Call
The Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health
4.6 • 644 Ratings
🗓️ 21 January 2022
⏱️ 12 minutes
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Summary
The Global Health Security Index, released by the Nuclear Threat Initiative and the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, looks at every country's capacity to respond to emergencies like a pandemic. Dr. Jennifer Nuzzo returns to the podcast to talk with Dr. Josh Sharfstein about some takeaways from the 2021 report and what we've learned—and didn't learn—from the pre-COVID-19 2019 report. They also talk about the report's use as a tool for countries to shore up gaps in their ability to respond to future crises and why even the most prepared countries, like the US, still struggled with COVID-19 response.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome to Season 5 of Public Health On Call, a podcast from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. |
| 0:13.0 | I'm Joshua Sharfstein, Vice Dean for Public Health Practice and Community Engagement, and a former |
| 0:19.1 | health commissioner here in Baltimore, Maryland. |
| 0:21.7 | Our goal with this podcast is to bring scientific evidence and experience to shed light on critical |
| 0:27.5 | health issues. If you have questions or ideas for us, please send an email to public health |
| 0:33.0 | question at jhhhu.edu. That's public health question at jhhut.edu for future podcast episodes. |
| 0:42.5 | Today, I speak to Dr. Jennifer Nuzzo, senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health |
| 0:48.7 | Security. Our topic is the recent release of the updated global health security index, an inventory and |
| 0:57.3 | ranking of the world's preparedness for pandemics. Let's listen. Dr. Nozo, thanks so much for |
| 1:04.4 | coming back to public health on call to talk about the global health security index. Now, |
| 1:10.1 | when we last heard about this, it was 2020 and people were talking about the Global Health Security Index. Now, when we last heard about this, it was 2020 and people |
| 1:13.4 | were talking about the 2019 Index. Yes, it was. We published the 2019 Index in October of 2019. |
| 1:22.2 | So just a few months before the pandemic. And in that index and the report that we issued, |
| 1:28.5 | we concluded that no country was fully prepared |
| 1:31.2 | for a pandemic. |
| 1:33.0 | It's a conclusion that was a hard one to say at the time. |
| 1:38.9 | But unfortunately, I think became true, |
| 1:41.5 | as we would see several months later. |
| 1:49.7 | And the concept behind the index is to look at every country for their preparedness across a whole bunch of different dimensions. |
| 1:52.8 | Yes, the index is really a benchmarking tool. |
| 1:55.7 | So what we're trying to do is take a look at what capacities, both in the public health side, as well as health care, |
| 2:03.9 | countries have to be able to use in responding to a serious infectious disease, emergency, |
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