'Special Agent' Bruce Aylward Faces Covid-19

THE ADVENTURES OF BRUCE AYLWARD

In the fall of 2013, Syria was still in chaos after three years of conflict that had displaced millions. At the same time, the polio virus had returned to Syria, 14 years after the country had been declared “polio-free,” with 10 confirmed cases. With the keen eye of an experienced epidemiologist, Dr. Bruce Aylward immediately recognized that Syria’s problem was not just fierce fighting, but also the potential for a new outbreak in the Middle East, a small spark that would ignite the largest, most expensive, and most ambitious public health campaign in history. Bruce Aylward flew to Oman to attend an emergency meeting organized by the WHO, where he convinced 22 health ministers from the region that the Middle East was facing an emergency. In just four weeks, 23 million children from Syria, to Egypt, Iraq and southern Türkiye were vaccinated against polio.

Dr Bruce Aylward led the global polio eradication campaign. Photo: Getty

Stopping the polio outbreak in the Middle East from the “small spark” of Syria is just one of many “outstanding performances” of Dr. Bruce Aylward as a leading expert of WHO over the past 20 years. Bruce Aylward’s colleagues at WHO still comment that he is an adventurous person, rarely staying in one place for too long, because he is always drawn to research and control infectious diseases around the world. Ever since graduating from Memorial University in Canada, then the London School of Tropical Medicine, Johns Hopkins School of Public Health and joining WHO in 1992, almost everyone knows that “whenever he has enough money in the bank, Bruce Aylward packs his bags and starts new adventures”, with the destination mainly in developing countries - the places most vulnerable to infectious diseases due to the lack of public health systems.

So it’s no wonder that Bruce Aylward has been at the forefront of WHO’s major campaigns. In 1998, Bruce Aylward was tasked with leading the Global Polio Eradication Initiative, a public-private partnership between WHO, the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. At the time, many were skeptical about the Initiative’s goal of having every country in the world on the ground with a polio-erad program by the year 2000. Leading a team of more than 6,000 field workers, Bruce Aylward did it! In 1999, Sierra Leone and the Democratic Republic of the Congo became the last countries to join the fight. From 2014 to 2016, Bruce Aylward continued to be appointed as a Special Envoy to the WHO Director-General, leading a team of 2,000 experts and medical staff to respond to the Ebola epidemic in West Africa. Of course, the fight against the Zika virus in Latin American and Caribbean countries later could not be without Bruce Aylward's presence when he led the WHO rapid response team to the region.

Aylward leads a team of WHO experts to China to coordinate solutions to control Covid-19. Photo: CBC

For those working in the medical field, Bruce Aylward has all the qualities needed to lead major campaigns: in-depth knowledge, sharp ability, and experience working at the highest level with national governments. And that is also the reason why Bruce Aylward was once again assigned by WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus to lead a team of experts to China this time to coordinate in finding solutions to control and contain Covid-19.

Dr. Bruce Aylward led a WHO team of experts to China during the most tense days of Covid-19: thousands of new infections every day, even yesterday (February 13) recorded the number of new infections up to nearly 15,000, the number of deaths each day also continuously increased to hundreds. Everyone had to admit that Bruce Aylward was entering a complicated and difficult battle. But his colleagues, including WHO Senior Advisor Chris Maher, said that they believed Bruce Aylward "will find a way, even if it is just a small alley in a maze".

Apart from Dr. Bruce Aylward, the identities of the members of the WHO expert team to China have not been disclosed. They will have to work with their Chinese counterparts to find answers to the questions: What stage is the outbreak in China? Will things get better or worse? How can the spread of Covid-19 be controlled?...

WHO said it is not yet possible to predict the development of the Covid-19 epidemic. Photo: Sky News

At this point, the WHO team of experts is still very cautious when making the assessment that "It is still too early to make predictions about the epidemic situation", which means that Bruce Aylward still has a lot of work to do. Among the many "unknowns" that people are waiting to be "decoded", the biggest concern right now is whether experts can clearly confirm how Covid-19 spreads. This issue was raised after Hong Kong (China) authorities had to evacuate residents in a high-rise building because of suspicions that Covid-19 could spread through the building's shared sewage system. If this possibility is confirmed, the fight against Covid-19 will certainly be much more difficult.

Of course, the fight against Covid-19 will be a large-scale war, with extensive cooperation between governments, international organizations, medical workers and volunteers. WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus once affirmed: in the solidarity of everyone, experts, doctors, nurses, public health workers working on the front lines are truly heroes when accepting personal risks to join hands to prevent the outbreak of Covid-19. But the larger the scale of the fight, the more leaders like Dr. Bruce Aylward are needed. They are considered one of the few people who "hold the key" to find the way forward. Dr. Bruce Aylward has been successful in many previous campaigns, and the fight against Covid-19 will be no exception - that is the hope not only of the Chinese people, but also of the whole world is placing on "Special Agent Bruce Aylward".

Thuy Ngoc