LONDON - Professor Chris Whitty, Britain's chief medical adviser, stood before an auditorium in a London museum two years ago cataloging deadly epidemics.But Prof Whitty, who had spent most of his career fighting infectious diseases in Africa, was reassuring. Britain, he said, had a special protection.
Officials once boastful about their preparedness were frantically trying to secure protective gear and materials for tests, as death rates soared in Britain, France, Spain, Italy and Belgium.The expertise and resources of Western Europe were expected to provide the antidote to viral outbreaks flowing out of poorer regions.
Officials in some countries barely consulted their plans; in other countries, leaders ignored warnings about how quickly a virus could spread.Mathematical models used to predict pandemic spreads - and to shape government policy - fed a false sense of security. Sir David King, a former British chief science officer, said,"The word 'arrogance' comes to mind, I am afraid." He added:"What hubris."Fear swept the continent. It was spring of 2009 and a new virus that became known as swine flu had infected hundreds and killed dozens in Mexico.
Britain's plans read like the script of a horror movie, if written in the language of a bureaucrat. More than 1.3 million people could be hospitalised and 800,000 could die.These doomsday scenarios drew on a new subspecialty of epidemiology pioneered by British scientists: using abstruse mathematical models to project the path of a contagious disease.
Yet when swine flu emerged, British leaders again turned to Mr Ferguson and the large modeling department he had built at Imperial College.But the modelers'"reasonable worst case" was wildly off.HOLLOWING OUT"It created some kind of complacency," said professor Steven Van Gucht, a virologist involved in the Belgian response."Oh, a pandemic again? We have a good health system. We can cope with this.
On the surface, Europe's defenses still looked robust. EU reviews of each country's pandemic readiness seemed to provide oversight, but the process was misleading.