The BMJ interview - Tom Frieden, former CDC director on why we thought we were prepared

The BMJ Podcast

It’s been just over a year since the WHO declared the pandemic a “Public Health Emergency of International Concern” - if you cast your mind back to then, the news was full of reassurances about how prepared the UK and the USA were for a pandemic. Now a year later, with the benefit of hindsight, that confidence was wildly overstated - but why was that, what is the gap between that theoretical readiness, and reality. In this podcast we're joined by talking to Tom Frieden - former director of the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention, under President Obama, and who has a long history of public health leadership. He talks about the gap between the apparatus to do something, the the political will to do that. Why data have been lacking, and the interaction between a infectious and non-infectious diseases.

www.bmj.com/coronavirus