Masters of Disaster

from Irish Scene May/June 2020 Edition

Shamrock Rovers

BY LLOYD GORMAN

Unlike his high profile and distinguishable federal counterpart WA’s chief medical officer would probably be unrecognisable to the vast majority of people in the West. Dr Brendan Murphy is a name - one we will come back to shortly - and a face most Australian’s will know from the many times he has stood beside and spoken at press conferences with Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison and other senior politicians. Dr Andy Robertson does not have the same kind of profile, but his role is exactly the same as Murphy’s. Dr Robertson is the Chief Health Officer at W.A. Department of Health. As such, Dr Roberston is to Premier Mark McGowan what Dr Murphy is to Scott Morrison. The premier has repeatedly said all his decisions in response to the COVID-19 pandemic are based on medical and public health advice. A lot of that advice would be coming from the state’s top doc. What is a sound medical opinion - particularly in a time of crisis when good decisions need to be made quickly - based on? Knowledge and experience no doubt count, things Dr Robertson has in abundance. Before his career in public health Robertson had a very different occupation, having served with the Royal Australian Navy from 1984 until 2003, including completing three tours to Iraq as a Biological Weapons Chief Inspector with the United Nations Special Commission in 1996 and 1997. In October 2003, he took up the position of the Director, Disaster Preparedness and Management in WA Health. Just over 12 months later, he led the Australian Medical Relief team into the Maldives post-tsunami, and managed WA Health’s response to the 2005 Bali Bombing. He also, led the WA Health team into Indonesia after the Yogyakarta earthquakes in June 2006 and worked as the Radiation Health Adviser to the Australian Embassy after the Fukushima nuclear incident in 2011. He has also

coordinated the WA Health responses to Cyclone George, the Varanus Island gas explosion, the Ashmore Reef incident, the public health system aspects of the H1N1 (Swine flu) 2009 pandemic, and the 2011 CHOGM meeting in Perth. In 2015 he was promoted to the position of Commodore and Director-General Health Reserves - Navy. The strong defence Western Australia has been able to mount to date against COVID-19 is no doubt down to a lot of factors and the work of many individuals and agencies, but there would seem to be a safe pair of hands and a cool head at work for the people of Western Australia, perhaps that is an important part of state’s successful management of the infectious disease to date.

Dr Andrew Robertson

There is one thing Dr Roberston is missing for the normal purposes of Irish Scene, a known Irish connection, but given his impressive background and the fact we here in WA are all in his hands, he merits a mention. He is not entirely alone in this regard. “Despite his name, he is neither Catholic nor Irish,” Amber Schultz, said in a Crikey article on April 16 2020 called “The Man behind the eyebrows: just who is Brendan Murphy?” [www.crikey.com. au/2020/04/16/brendan-murphy-profilecoronavirus/]. Schultz, an experienced and award winning reporter, did quite a good job of digging into the background of this now high profile figure and talked with people from his past. She found he was a very private, even shy, but fiercely intelligent man whose background was in hospital administration. As they say in Ireland, he came of good medical stock. His father, Leo John Murphy, was a respected psychiatrist and ground breaking educationalist for deaf children, while his mother Betty De Hugard taught blind students. While his father was a well known figure - he was awarded an Order of Australia for service to community health in 1989 - there is very little public information available about Brendan Murphy. What I have been able to find out is that he has two brothers, Fintan and Liam. If nothing else, the names given to the three boys at least hints at some acknowledgement of Irish heritage. Australia’s Deputy Chief Medical Officer also has a name that would not be out of place in the Irish phone book, Paul Trust me I’m a doctor!

Above: Deputy Chief Medical Officer Intern Liam O’Malley (played by Aussie comedy actor Francis Greenslade) on the comedy news program “Shaun Micallef’s Mad As Hell”. Top right: Australian CMO Brendan Murphy. Bottom right: Deputy CMO Professor Paul Kelly

Kelly. Amongst his extensive medical and professional experience and postings Kelly has some specialist grounding in areas of medicine that are no doubt proving to be useful in dealing with the pandemic. He has been a director of the Masters of Applied Epidemiology Program at the National Centre for Epidemiology & Population Health at ANU as well as with the Centre for Disease Control in the NT Department of Health and his work has taken him over four continents. Kelly is an expert in infectious disease epidemiology, in particular influenza, pneumonia and tuberculosis. The ‘Irishness’ of the names of Australia’s top two doctors was not lost on sketch writers for Shaun Micallef’s comedy news programme Mad as Hell on ABC television. On its March 20 programme Micallef played a short clip of Brendan Murphy being interviewed on Insiders in which he said: “For most people we don’t want to encourage major panic buying at the moment.” This of course left it open to Micallef to suggest that at some point then presumably the government would encourage this kind of behaviour. He turned to his ‘studio guest’ for further comment, Deputy Chief Medical Officer Intern Liam O’Malley (played by Aussie comedy actor Francis Greenslade): “The important thing with the panicking is we don’t want to rush into it,” the mock medic said. “We want all Australians to wait until we can declare a state of national panic so we can have an ordered descent into chaos.”

COVID-19 has thrust another public health official into the world’s spotlight, and there is no doubting his Irish credentials. You will probably have seen him sit at the right hand of the the Director General of the World Health Organisation Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus on their daily press briefings about the pandemic, and often fielding questions from journalists. He is one of the WHO’s top figures - executive director for Health Emergencies Programme - but has been at the forefront of dealing with major risks to global health for nearly 25 years. A native of Curry, on the Sligo/Mayo border, Dr Michael Ryan grew up in Charlestown, Co. Mayo. He trained in medicine as a trauma surgeon at the National University of Ireland in Galway and got a Masters of Public Health from University College Dublin. Some 190 new doctors from Ryan’s alma mater in Galway graduated through a virtual ceremony at the start of April, after the university brought forward their final exams so that they could join the Irish health system and the fight against Coronavirus as soon as possible. In July 1990 Ryan - and his then girlfriend (now wife) Máire Connolly who he met while studying at Galway - went to Iraq to train local doctors. Shortly afterwards Iraq invaded Kuwait and the first Gulf War began. The two Irish medics were forced to work for Saddam Hussein’s regime. A vehicle Ryan was driving there was driven off the road by a military convoy and in the crash several of his vertebrae were crush. They Ireland’s Dr WHO

were allowed to leave the country as a result, but the injury - which ruled out him working again as a surgeon - saw him shift into public health and infectious diseases, including working for the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation in Africa. Dr Ryan first joined WHO in 1996, with its new unit to respond to emerging and epidemic disease threats. He is a founding member of the Global Outbreak Alert and Response Network (GOARN), which has responded to hundreds of disease outbreaks around the world. He has worked on the ground in dozens of countries - often in conflict zones - fighting every dangerous disease and virus known to man. He has battled Ebola more than once in his career, including an outbreak in the Democratic Republic of the Congo - the second biggest incident of Ebola spread in history (the largest was in West Africa from 2014-2016) which started in August 2018. Thousands of people - including many medics and health care workers - lost their lives in that crisis but the virus was on the brink of being defeated there in April 2020. The Ryan family returned to Galway to live in 2011 but he returned to WHO in 2017, and now lives and works in Geneva. Dr Michael Ryan

Comic relief for Ireland’s top doc! While it is a position that would likely command a lot of esteem within medical circles, the job of Chief Medical Officer is not one that has traditionally attracted celebrity. Indeed, most people were probably unaware the top post even existed until Coronavirus raised its ugly head on the world stage. Despite being in the job for the last 12 years (and seven years before that as deputy), Ireland’s CMO Dr Tony Holohan, like many of his counterparts worldwide, has become something of an ‘overnight’ sensation, at least in the public eye. A recent cartoon of Dr Holohan coming out of an Irish telephone box in Superman pose to fight COVID-19 has proved to be a bit hit generally and even more popular with Mná na hÉireann (women of Ireland). The caricature was commissioned by a woman who said she was a ‘big fan’ of Holohan’s. The artist is Dunboyne, Co. Meath based Niall O’Loughlin who went back to doing caricatures for Mothers Day after his weddings and events business died overnight as a result of COVID-19. Demand for his drawings exceeded his expectations and he has been busy since, including making Continued on page 8

Above: Dr Holohan (centre) at a Department of Health press conference. Left: Ireland’s CMO Dr Michael McBride.

Continued from page 7

prints of his hero image of Holohan for other female customers. Indeed, he might have a superhuman knowledge of medical and health issues - ranging from communicable and rare diseases to smoking and alcohol misuse - but Holohan is as susceptible to sickness as anyone else and maybe that is part of the appeal. Midway through a daily COVID-19 press briefing at the start of April Dr Holohan suddenly took a turn for the worst and had to be whisked away for tests and treatment. Fortunately it was not coronavirus related and just 48 hours later Holohan was back in the hot seat, leading the fight against the virus. He has been described as “unflappable” and “not likely to panic”, very important qualities in a crisis, particularly when the national death count is in the hundreds and with many thousands more confirmed contaminations. Holohan studied medicine at University College Dublin in 1991 and trained initially in general practice, before specialising in public health medicine and graduating with a Masters in Public Health in 1996. Northern Ireland's CMO is Dr Michael McBride and he has been in that role since 2006, even longer than Holohan. Dr McBride is a product of Queen's University in Belfast and spent his early years in the field trying to find drug treatments for HIV. As well as his CMO duties, McBride is also the CEO of Belfast Health and Social Services Trust and has responsibility for 20,000 employees and an annual budget of £1.3 billion. On April 7, health minister Simon Harris and his Northern Ireland counterpart Robin Swann signed a Memorandum of Understanding on behalf of their respective governments to share the fight against COVID-19 on the island of Ireland. Drs Holohan and McBride also signed the document which will set out greater cooperation in areas such as public health messaging, research and even joint procurement where there is a mutual benefit.

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