Tune in to the Global Perspective Dr. Julio Frenk
Kenneth Warner
Northern Express talks public health and the pandemic with Traverse City resident and dean emeritus of the U of M School of Public Health, Dr. Kenneth Warner. By Patrick Sullivan This week, the Traverse City International Affairs Forum at Northwestern Michigan College opens its 27th season with a topic on everyone’s mind: global health crises. The Wednesday, Sept. 16 event, “Grappling with Pandemics: Global Health Policy in the 21st Century,” brings Northern Michigan an expert with an impressive resume: Dr. Julio Frenk, the president of the University of Miami, former minister of health for Mexico, a former senior fellow at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and former executive director of evidence and investigation at the World Health Organization. Interviewing Frenk will be Kenneth Warner, an IAF board member with a similarly impressive resume — and local ties. Warner, a native of Washington, D.C., has been a resident of Northern Michigan since 2012. This November, he’ll be on the ballot for Northwestern Michigan College’s board of trustees. Warner, an economist, has a deep background in health and academia. For 40 years, he researched tobacco policy and served as the World Bank’s representative to negotiations on the Framework Convention on Tobacco Control, the world’s first global health treaty. He served as the dean of the University of Michigan’s School of Public Health until 2017, when he retired as the Avedis Donabedian Distinguished University Professor Emeritus of Public Health and Dean Emeritus. Warner moved to Traverse City with his wife shortly after he went into semiretirement eight years ago. His wife grew up in Northern Michigan, and today the couple lives on the land where she was raised, in a home overlooking East Grand Traverse Bay. Northern Express talked with Warner about the upcoming event and his perspective
on COVID-19 from his home in Northern Michigan. Northern Express: You were the dean of the University of Michigan School of Public Health, and you had a career that was filled with accolades and honors. Did you see this pandemic coming? Warner: I did not see this particular kind of pandemic coming. I think everybody who’s in public health appreciated the potential for something like this. I think with SARS, everybody was very much
comparable fraction of the cases — maybe even a larger fraction of the cases. The cases are of course identified depending on how much testing is going on, which is both good and bad news for us. It means that because we do a relatively fair amount of testing, we’ve identified a number of cases. But we’re not testing nearly as well as many of the other countries, certainly including a lot of them in Asia, places like Korea and Singapore and Taiwan, which I believe has no active cases and maybe
You need to recognize the obvious — we have 4 percent of the world’s population, and we have between 20 and 25 percent of the deaths from the disease. concerned that it would lead to some kind of global pandemic. But that was a time when the world got its act together and managed to put a hold to the disease before it could spread like this one has. So, I think it’s fair to say that there are a lot of people who focus on infectious disease epidemiology who would have said, “Yes, we did anticipate something like this.” But you know, it’s a little hard to say, since it’s been 100 years since we’ve had anything like this. Express: How do you think the United State’s response to the pandemic has been? Warner: It’s been abysmal. You need to recognize the obvious — we have 4 percent of the world’s population, and we have between 20 and 25 percent of the deaths from the disease. And of course, we have, I think, a
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had about 20 altogether. New Zealand and Australia have done much better than any number of countries because they have tested a lot, and they’ve been quick to jump on it, and they do very well with the social isolating. Unfortunately — and for reasons that I don’t think anybody really fully understands — this has become politicized in the United States, with President Trump’s supporters kind of following his lead about being, let’s say, ambivalent at best about wearing of masks, even though we know at this point that masks are a crucial feature of reducing the spread of the virus. I mean, if everybody wore their masks, you could cut the transmission rate by something like 70 to 80 percent.
Express: What precautions do you personally take to protect yourself from the virus, and how has your life changed since March? Warner: Our life has changed dramatically in only one manner that really matters to me — we last saw our children and our grandchildren in person in January. Now, fortunately, we live in an era when you can talk with them and see them on Zoom or Facetime frequently, so that’s really helped. I’m cautiously optimistic that we will have a vaccine approved and ready for distribution sometime this spring. That’s just my guesstimate. I’m very worried, frankly, about the claim from CDC that there may be one out in early November. That strikes me, from everything I know, from all my expert colleagues in this area, as a purely political statement that really could discredit the whole development of a safe and effective vaccine. So, I’m very worried about that. I think if we stick with the appropriate procedures for studying the vaccine, doing the testing that needs to be done, the trials, it is conceivable that we’ll be ready to get shots in our arm sometime this spring or maybe early summer or something of that nature. But for me and my wife, the biggest cost is the inability to be with our kids, because we’re retired. … What we are doing is, we’re not going out to restaurants. We have only had a few friends over out on our deck on East Bay on nice days, and we keep them on one side of the deck, and we’re sitting on the other side. We have not gathered in anybody’s home, and we’re basically taking all the precautions that one should be taking and can take. And we’re fortunate in that regard because we don’t have small children in our household. We don’t have jobs that we have to go to physically. My wife goes to Costco during the senior citizen hour once every few weeks. We shop at Oryana where
