The Lancet Covid-19 Commission published an article on Sept. 14, 2022 about the lessons learned from the Covid-19 pandemic. As of May 31, 2022, 6.9 million deaths from Covid-19 were reported, but the estimated excess death toll is 17.2 million, based on data from the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) at the University of Washington. The report states that “this staggering death toll is both a profound tragedy and a massive global failure at multiple levels.”

The Commission identified six major areas of failures, namely failures of prevention, failures of rationality, failures of transparency, failures to follow normal public health practice, failures of operational cooperation, and failures of international solidarity.

Due to these failures, social sustainability goals were set back a few years and 17.2 million lives were lost.

What can we learn from these failures? I’d like to share my thoughts based on the six failure reasons raised by Lancet. First Lesson Learned: Failure of Prevention Many countries adopted aggressive methods to stop the spread of the virus, such as social distancing, lockdowns, vaccines, etc. But none of the methods hit the nail in the head, so to speak.

A SARS-CoV-2 human challenge experiment was done among young adults by researchers in the UK. Their paper was published in the March 2022 issue of Nature.

The study involved 36 healthy volunteers aged 18–29 without history of SARS-CoV-2 infection or vaccination. They were inoculated with the SARS-CoV-2 virus intranasally. During the experiment, two were excluded from the Per-Protocol analysis because baseline antibodies were detected. The results of 34 subjects were: 16 participants were infected (confirmed with PCR tests) with mild symptoms, 3 were infected (confirmed with PCR tests) but were asymptomatic, and 15 participants remained uninfected.

The reason why the 15 participants were not infected should be the key to prevention. In my view, this key is to strengthen people’s immune systems.

Humans have an intricate immune system, a comprehensive defense network against external invading substances. The first line of defense is the physical barriers such as skin, nose hair, tears, etc. They can block most pathogens from entering the body.

The second line of defense is the epithelial interferon barrier. When a virus enters an epithelial cell, the cell automatically activates its antiviral mechanism and produces interferon. Interferon is a natural enemy of viruses and sends instructions to coordinate cells to fight the virus and prevent it from replicating.

Even if the virus enters the blood, there are the innate and adaptive immune cells to protect us. These include the macrophages, dendritic cells, and natural killer cells in the blood, all of which play an important role in antiviral immunity.

No matter what type of disease we are facing, it is important to know that the pathogens are external factors, and it is the human body itself that determines whether we fall ill or not. After we identify and correct the problems in our immune system, those external factors won’t matter much.

Therefore, strengthening our innate immune functions is the key to prevent pandemic spread. Second Lesson Learned: Failure of Rationality Rationality refers to the ability to make decisions based on facts. In the process of vaccine development, irrationalities included blindly pushing the vaccine among the masses without a complete evaluation of its efficacy and safety.

There are many limitations with the vaccines.

Inability to prevent infection: Neutralizing antibodies are mainly produced in the human bloodstream, but not in the epithelial cells. Therefore, if the first two lines of defense were weakened, the virus could still enter the blood and cause infection. That is why the vaccine and antibody strategy is unable to prevent infection. Needs to be renewed: Vaccines need to be renewed along with...