Science should be driving public health, says Soumya Swaminathan

Soumya Swaminathan criticizes global COVID-19 lockdown playbook, emphasizes need for science-driven public health decisions and equitable vaccine access.

Noting that the lockdown during the COVID-19 pandemic worked in China, as they were able to contain within a matter of three months with complete shutdown of Wuhan and a lot of neighbouring places, the playbook adopted around the world was wrong, said Soumya Swaminathan, chairperson, M.S. Swaminathan Research Foundation, and formerly Chief Scientist of World Health Organisation (WHO).

“We then saw, country after country putting it [lockdown] in place as that became the playbook, as China did it and showed it to be effective. Then, high income countries were doing it, and it became the solution. This is where it went wrong,” she said.

Every family comfortably living and having food delivered to them does not happen in a poor country or in a poor neighbourhood, she observed. “So, I think the playbook adopted around the world was wrong. There has been a lot of research now on what public health measures should be used,” she said during a panel discussion on ‘Learnings from the COVID Pandemic’.

The discussion, organised by Chennai International Centre was based on a book, ‘At The Wheel of Research - An Exclusive Biography of Dr. Soumya Swaminathan’. The book’s author, Anuradha Mascarenhas, and Nalini Krishnan, co-founder, REACH, were part of the panel.

“School closure was another controversial one. But in many countries, schools were reopened in a few weeks, like in Switzerland, schools were closed only for five weeks as the government said that the cost of keeping children out of school will be too high. By that time, we knew that small children were not severely affected. There was not much of a medical risk but the other risks of children not going to school was too high. So, schools were prioritised,” she said.

In India, schools were kept closed for two years, despite enough evidence by then, that it was better for children to be in schools. Apart from the fact that they missed education, so many children missed school meals, Dr. Soumya said, wondering how children who did not have access to online education would have been able to catch up. “This happened all over Africa. This will be the economic impact of the pandemic that will last for a long time, as a whole generation missed out on education and nutrition through the social safety net,” she said.

“We have to think very carefully. Science should be driving public health. It was not at all times, science was driving public health, but people were doing things that may have been inappropriate for their own country. For WHO, it is difficult to make a guideline for the whole world,” she said, raising the need for an interdisciplinary team to make decisions.