The world acted as if the COVID-19 pandemic was a big surprise. However, just months before, the Global Preparedness Monitoring Board (GPMB) had warned that the world was vulnerable to a pandemic of respiratory illness and needed to act quickly. Kolinda Grabar-Kitarović, the former president of Croatia, says she felt frustrated and helpless when the pandemic took hold in early 2020. She had just left office and felt powerless as she watched global failure after global failure from lockdown.
Now Grabar-Kitarović is co-chair of the GPMB and is urging world leaders and institutions to act on what’s been learned from COVID-19 failures. “Today, we find that despite some improvement, preparedness remains perilously fragile,” the GPMB says in its latest report. “We know in theory how to stop a pandemic in its tracks, but in practice, the gaps in preparedness leave us dangerously exposed to a future threat.”
What’s needed is much better planning, preparation, and, above all, trust, Grabar-Kitarović tells us in this episode of One World, One Health. And the first step to growing trust is to build equity.
Listen as Grabar-Kitarović explains how short attention spans work against us, and what the Three Little Pigs can teach everyone about preparing for the next pandemic.