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New Challenges for Controlling the Pandemic

By Heriberto García - Chile Public Health Institute
Director

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By Heriberto García | Director - Fri, 11/18/2022 - 09:00

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The COVID-19 pandemic is the greatest challenge that the health industry has faced. It requires companies to innovate, adapt, and develop not only products but also new ways of working. It led to the constant threat of shortages, the closure of commercial and tourism borders and quarantines. One other consequence is the deterioration of people's mental health.

The pandemic as such is not over, the contagion rate is still high and there is uncertainty about the appearance of new variants; however, the feeling of risk is decreasing.

Due to the above, we cannot go backward. We must advance in the process of returning to normality, where COVID-19 should be treated as any other respiratory infection,  building efforts on avoiding levels of contagiousness and reducing the severity of the illness. .

One of the most important adaptations we had as a health sector was to demonstrate the need for a  complement between public health institutions and industry and precisely,  because the progress of this adaptation was successful, we must now urgently incorporate a third actor: the community that benefits from health products and services.

The coronavirus (SAR-COV-2) has changed. We are talking about the omicron variant and its sublineages BA1, BA4, BA5, BQ, BQ1.1 which, thanks to evolutionary theory, mutate into a less aggressive virus from the pathogenic, but is still highly contagious. Therefore, the knowledge we, as the health sector, have acquired since COVID-19 came into our lives  must be taking into account by the population, for example  the use of masks should be  innate when and where it is required, hand washing must be part of our a daily routine, the disinfection of surfaces should be a custom as well as getting vaccinated annually,  must be  assumed as a preventive way to reduce contagiousness and avoid getting seriously ill.

All the efforts that were made to obtain a vaccine against this disease should not be in vain.In the evolution of the preparation of vaccines, today there are bivalent vaccines.  Together with the original variant (Wuhan variant ), a new formula was developed with 50 percent of the variant that currently circulates, omicron. Today, there are two versions in the market, Wuhan-BA1 and Wuhan-BA4/BA5, approved  by the FDA, the EMA and also the Institute of Public Health of Chile, What must happen every year is that laboratories develop new bivalent or perhaps trivalent (three variants or strains) or even tetravalent (four variants or strains) formulas. The important thing is that we know that it is the same vaccine, the same immune principle, but with formulations that improve its effectiveness, especially to reduce the rate of infection. This does not mean that the previous formulations are not effective; they continue to be effective in preventing the disease from getting worse. For this reason, the best vaccine is the one that is available, and the best care is self-care and prevention, hygiene and disinfection.

This is no different from other contagious respiratory diseases, such as influenza, where there are different formulations year after year, and others, such as parainfluenza or syncytial virus, where the sanitary measures that we learned during the pandemic will also contribute to better health.

It is the responsibility of the pharmaceutical industry and the drug regulatory agencies to advance with the processes of health registrations or marketing authorizations that allow greater access to vaccines, the promotion of vaccination campaigns and the surveillance of adverse events that occur to investigate causality.

Our duty in the regulatory sphere and in the industry is to provide control and prevention tools, promoting self-care and responsibility for our health and for our loved ones. Therefore, there is an evolutionary change in what we offer. That is, we do not only offer health products, but we promote healthy habits as a preventive action. products today are not only disinfectants, cosmetics, medical devices or medicines by themselves, they are health tools that must be used to prevent, treat and cure diseases¨; therefore, the quality of these products must be a relevant added value, hence the regulatory agencies, such as the Chilean Institute of Public Health, are making progress in improving the registration and control system of these products.

Risk communication must also be different. It must not be based on fear, it must be based on self-care.  We must collaborate with clear messages about the importance of vaccination, the responsible and adequate use of masks, hand washing and hygiene — everything that makes it possible to identify in the population that there is access to tools that prevent the spread of infectious diseases like COVID-19 and that it is the individual and collective responsibility to use them. This is very important because as we have seen, we are constantly at risk of new and old pandemic threats, including monkeypox, hantavirus, tuberculosis, and other emerging diseases that we need to be very vigilant about.

Heriberto Garcia Escorza

Director(I) Institute of Public Health of Chile

Master in Public Policy

Diploma in Health Authority and Health Management

Photo by:   Heriberto García

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