Why do we ignore catastrophic risk?
Business Daily
BBC
4.4 • 816 Ratings
🗓️ 13 July 2020
⏱️ 18 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Covid-19 is showing up a general failure by most of the world's governments to prepare for the worst.
Manuela Saragosa speaks to Dr Sylvie Briand at the World Health Organization, whose job is to get the world ready for new infectious outbreaks like coronavirus. What was it like for her exhortations to fall on deaf ears up until this year? How prepared was the WHO itself, and does she fear the consequences if the multilateral organisation is defunded?
Meanwhile, author and risk consultant David Ropeik explains why human nature makes us so bad at taking action to ward of disasters that happen once in a blue moon. And Jens Orback, head of the Global Challenges Foundation, says pandemics are only one of a host of terrifying cataclysms that we disregard at our peril.
Producer: Laurence Knight
(Picture: Asteroid striking the Earth; Credit: puchan/Getty Images)
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello and welcome to Business Daily from the BBC. I'm Manuel Salagossa. In this edition, |
| 0:07.1 | what the coronavirus pandemic has done to our perception of risk. At the beginning, it was all |
| 0:13.1 | total fear of the disease. But now we're to a different place. Now we want control of our lives back. |
| 0:20.6 | So why do we still ignore alarm bells about some of the biggest existential risks faced by humanity? |
| 0:26.4 | We are not doing as much as we can because we don't feel it on our skin. |
| 0:32.5 | That's all here in Business Daily from the BBC. |
| 0:39.0 | So you don't want to frighten the American public, |
| 0:41.9 | but you need to prepare for and assume that this is going to be a real serious problem. |
| 0:49.0 | That doesn't mean it's going to be one. |
| 0:50.4 | We have to prepare for the worst always, because if you don't and the worst happens, |
| 0:56.1 | you're behind the eight ball. That's Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the US National Institute of |
| 1:02.0 | Infectious Diseases, speaking to CBS News on American TV there way back in January about the risk |
| 1:08.1 | posed by COVID-19. Of course, almost nobody listened to him, and he wasn't |
| 1:13.5 | the only one. Dr. Sylvie Briand works for the World Health Organization in Geneva. She's the |
| 1:18.8 | organisation's director of the Global Infectious Hazard Preparedness Unit. Like Dr Fauci, it's her job |
| 1:25.7 | to tell governments around the world how to prepare for a pandemic, |
| 1:29.3 | instructing them on the risk they face, a factless task perhaps given how few governments paid attention before COVID-19. |
| 1:37.3 | In fact, an independent investigation has now been set up into the WHO amid allegations that it failed to adequately warn the global community about |
| 1:46.1 | coronavirus and that it went softly on China. So I asked Dr. Bryant, why were so many governments |
| 1:52.3 | blindsided by the pandemic? First, they hadn't had a outbreak for a long time. I think they were |
| 1:59.1 | more prepared probably in 2009 before the influenza pandemic |
| 2:03.9 | because at that time we had the alert of H5 and 1 and this coincide with the SARS as well. |
... |
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