00:00Well, first of all, thank you for having a chat with us, Peter, and talking about these
00:03things that I know you are very well versed on.
00:05I wanted to start, you've been paying attention to the state of public discourse for years.
00:10I'm curious as to how you would characterise it today.
00:13The whole character of the public discourse, the public conversation has changed.
00:17And of course, it's changed with social media, particularly.
00:21And also, it's become more polarised.
00:25Some of us look back to an era where Australia and the world in general, I think, embraced
00:31a more collective view that everyone deserves a fair go.
00:35That's been greatly eroded, not so much in Australia as in the United States, but it's
00:41much less than it was.
00:42One group we perhaps don't talk enough about is the vaccine hesitant.
00:46How would you describe them?
00:48And how can we better reach them with our public health messaging?
00:51I think vaccine hesitancy is very understandable.
00:55Vaccination is a medical procedure, there's no medical procedure without some risk.
00:59And that's certainly true of vaccination.
01:01And what we saw through COVID-19 was that the new vaccines that were brought in very
01:06quickly, and I think did save a lot of lives, actually weren't tolerated particularly well
01:11by a number of people.
01:13It's certainly true, older women were hit by the vaccine that was made here initially
01:19by CSL, the one that came out of Britain, an adenovirus-vectored vaccine, and several
01:25died.
01:27And that vaccine was quickly withdrawn.
01:29But then the mRNA vaccines were causing considerable distress, particularly to adolescent males.
01:36And a number of kids went into hospital with myocarditis.
01:40And there has, I think, been some permanent damage.
01:42So it's quite understandable.
01:45And it's always a risk-benefit equation.
01:48How do you win people's trust back?
01:49We try to point to the evidence.
01:51And the evidence is that the vaccines of childhood, the standard vaccines of childhood, are really
01:56extremely well tolerated.
01:59And they're safe and effective.
02:02And yet there's enormous pressure against those.
02:07That's the gold standard, really.
02:09We need to get our kids vaccinated with those vaccines of childhood.
02:13There seems to be more bugs around these days.
02:17Are we seeing humans at a greater risk of disease, be that viral, inflammatory, or even
02:22rising rates of cancer?
02:24And how can we best respond to that?
02:27The fact that rates of cancer are on the rise may just be because we're living longer.
02:32There's a perception there are more bugs around.
02:34There's probably not more around, but there's a hell of a lot more people.
02:38If you look at the world in 1900, there were 1.6 billion people.
02:44Now there are 8 billion people.
02:47And a lot of those people are in Africa, and they're coming in contact more and more with
02:52wildlife.
02:54And part of the reason for that is the food situation in Africa is getting steadily worse
02:59due to climate change and various factors like wars.
03:03And people are going to the jungle to harvest, say, bushmeat and so forth.
03:08So there's a danger of viruses jumping across.
03:11This is certainly the case with Ebola.
03:13We just saw a case, there's a new virus that emerged in the Congo.
03:18It appeared first in three children who died after eating a bat.
03:23The other thing that's happened with influenza is after the Second World War, the U.S. and
03:29Australia particularly got together to try and improve food security in East Asia, particularly
03:36in China, and help them build massive chicken industries.
03:41These birds are multiplying influenza viruses and getting them across into people.
03:46So there's a much greater risk from influenza.
03:49Then of course there are the live animal markets, and with many more people, they become more
03:52dangerous.
03:53And then above everything else, there's long-distance planes and mass international tourism.
04:00Changing human behaviour is complex.
04:04I think what governments need to do is they need to keep their public health agencies
04:09strong and on the ball.
04:11And the recent firing of a lot of people from the CDC, which is the premier agency in the
04:17U.S. of course, has been deeply disturbing.
04:20I believe 5,000 of them are now back at work.
04:22I mean, this is what's happening.
04:24The U.S. is in total chaos.
04:27President Trump is a chaos generator.
04:29So public health agencies need to be strong.
04:33People need to be aware of them.
04:34And unfortunately, the COVID-19 experience led to a lot of disillusion on various people's
04:39parts, a lot of which was fed online, of course.
04:43If we ever get a serious disease, I mean, COVID wasn't as serious as it could have been.
04:48But in 1918-19, with the influenza pandemic, with maybe a quarter the size of the population
04:54we've got now, 50 to 100 million people died.
04:58Now if we get a virus like that back again, I hope we can persuade people to actually
05:02listen to public health measures, because initially that may be all we've got.
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