The Big Question: Is Asia Losing the Fight Against Covid-19?
A Q&A with Hong Kong-based epidemiologist Ben Cowling on how governments can overcome vaccine hesitancy in Asia.
Taiwan and other Asian nations need to get more shots in arms.
Photographer: Bloomberg/Bloomberg
This is one of a series of interviews by Bloomberg Opinion columnists on how to solve the world’s most pressing policy challenges. It has been edited for length and clarity.
Clara Ferreira Marques: You were just starting your career during the severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) outbreak of 2003, and eventually came east to research infectious diseases and prepare for the next epidemic, at the University of Hong Kong. Your team had been expanding for years when Covid-19 hit. What was it like to realize last year that the moment you’d prepared for had come, but not all of your recommendations would be heeded?
Ben Cowling, Professor at the School of Public Health, University of Hong Kong: Mid-January is when we really started thinking that this might be a pandemic. We worked with the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention on some of the earliest data and disseminated it as a warning to the world. When I talked to friends and collaborators in Europe and the U.S., they didn’t seem to think it was a big deal. They had their threat assessment, they hadn’t seen any infections domestically, so they were continuing work on the flu. At that point, we were already flat out on Covid-19, trying to understand pre-symptomatic transmission, the severity profile and more.