David Nabarro: How can countries minimise Covid damage?

The Interview

BBC

News, Government, Politics

4.3 • 537 Ratings

🗓️ 23 November 2020

⏱️ 24 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

This is a bittersweet moment in the global fight against the Covid pandemic. Joy that at least two vaccine trials have produced extremely promising results is tempered by the continued spread of the disease across much of the world. To put it bluntly, the global containment effort has had limited success. Stephen Sackur speaks to Dr David Nabarro, the World Health Organisation’s special envoy for Covid-19. Are countries doing enough to minimise the damage done before mass vaccination changes the game?

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to Hard Talk on the BBC World Service with me, Stephen Sacker. My guest today has been a leader in
0:06.5	global public health for decades. Dr. David Nabarro, trained as a medical doctor, then proved to be
0:13.9	an adept administrator at the UN and the World Health Organization. He's led international health
0:19.8	programs looking at the impacts of
0:21.7	food insecurity and climate change, and he was put in charge of the UN's response to the Ebola
0:27.6	epidemic. His academic base in recent years has been Imperial College London. But this year, he was
0:33.9	appointed World Health Organization's special envoy for the COVID-19 pandemic.
0:40.4	He's been one of the most prominent international advocates for a coordinated, urgent,
0:46.6	international response to the global spread of COVID-19.
0:51.1	So how has the world done?
0:53.0	Well, right now, the picture is at best mixed. Infection numbers are
0:57.7	surging in many parts of the world. Public patients with restrictions, curfews and lockdowns appears to be
1:04.3	fraying. But there is also hope. At last, two vaccine trials have generated extremely positive results.
1:12.7	A game-changing mass rollout of effective vaccines just might happen next year.
1:19.0	Given the complexity of this COVID challenge, where should our priorities be right now?
1:25.6	Well, David Nabarro joins me on the line from Geneva. Welcome to Hard Talk.
1:31.1	Hello. Hello, Stephen. How do you do? I am very well. May I begin by reading out to you something you
1:37.5	tweeted very recently. You said, COVID-19 is surging back, threatening to overrun hospitals causing long-term illness and
1:46.3	more death. We have had nine months as a world community to contain COVID-19. Why have we failed?
1:54.8	Stephen, I think the first thing to say is that things would have been a lot, lot worse without the efforts that we've seen
2:03.0	throughout the world in the past 10 months. But at the same time, I have to agree with you
2:09.4	that there's much more that should have been done and there's more that must be done now
	...

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