Pandemic, politics and hope for the next generation

Dr. Bill Valenti with UR students at Rush Rhees Library. Provided by Dr. Bill Valenti

I gave a talk about pandemics and politics to students in a class in the University of Rochester History Department, and I came away optimistic about the future.

We talked about managing a pandemic, and what I did was present science as the foundation for our response to pandemics. When politics enters the picture, it needs to conform to science and try and get us out of the pandemic rather than digging in deeper.

It was very nice to talk to young people about these things. A lot of what I said came from my book AIDS: A Matter of Urgency, which I’d sent to them. I could tell they’d read parts of it, and we were connecting.

What I talked about, and what I’ve been saying a lot lately, is that we need to simplify our response to pandemics and say that we’re trying to stop virus spread. Plain and simple. Stop virus spread.

I’ve also quoted Shakespeare, who said what’s past is prologue, and how we need to learn from what’s happened. So I gave a couple of examples from the AIDS pandemic.

One was the Ryan White Care Act, which is a federal legislation that funds care of people with HIV. Trillium Health and legacy Community Health Network have been recipients since the program started in 1990. That program stops virus spread, it gets people into care, on treatment and saves lives.

Another is PEPFAR, the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, a global initiative that has saved millions of lives around the world as well as helped economies in large and small countries. Who do you think initiated that? George W. Bush. Someone identified as being a conservative.

Another good piece of policy we talked about was the rapid development of the mRNA COVID vaccines. One student talked about family members who don’t trust the vaccine because it was developed so fast. He asked me what I tell people.

I said the mRNA technology is at least 25 years old. The COVID vaccine is new, but not the science behind it. The name of the program for development of the COVID vaccine was Operation Warp Speed, and that came from the Trump administration. Now, the name may have been a disadvantage because it conveys the message that this came out of nowhere quickly. But it was based on science that had been around for 25 years. I think we could have done a better job explaining what was done at warp speed and what had been around for a while.

But getting the vaccine was a remarkable achievement, and now we have politicians proposing legislation against it. Legislating against vaccine mandates doesn’t help us stop virus spread.

We have some thinking to do about how we approach politics and science, and the students really caught on. The students really are thinking in scientific terms. They’re the generation that is going to deal with future pandemics. They need the tools to do the messaging so that we stop virus spread, whatever the next virus is.