Pandemic Influenza Leadership Forum – Media Briefing

Good afternoon, everyone.  I’m Bill Hall; I’m with the HHS press office and I’m just going to be here to moderate and kick off this short press briefing this afternoon, late this afternoon.  I know it’s late for most of us; it’s been a long day for some. 

I know we have several people on the phone and maybe one or two folks in the audience from media.  And I think we’ll just sort of go through and I’ll introduce the individuals that are at the table here in the room, ask if each has a couple of comments that they’d like to share with the group, and then we’ll open it up to questions.  And I would ask the media, when you ask a question, if you could please identify yourself and your organization, as we’re taping this and want to make sure we capture all that information.

So today with us we have a very distinguished panel of individuals.  I’ll just start off from my immediate left and work down the table: Admiral John Agwunobi, who is the Assistant Secretary for Health and the Senior Health Advisor to Secretary Leavitt, former Director of Health for the State of Florida; next is Dr. Greg Dworkin, who is the founding editor of Flu Wiki, which I’m sure many of you, if not all of you, are familiar with;  Dr. Joseph Bocchini, who is the Chair of the Committee on Infectious Diseases for the American Academy of Pediatrics; Susan Crosson-Knutson, the Program Development Director of the International Association of Lions Clubs; and finally, Sister Patricia Talone with the Catholic Health Association.

So I think I’ll start with Dr. Agwunobi, if you have any particular comments you’d like to share.  Unfortunately, we just have the one microphone, so if you want to just step up to the podium to make your remarks and then we can just go right on down the line and then we can open it up to questions.  John.

Admiral John O. Agwunobi, MD, MBA, MPH, Assistant Secretary for Health, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services

Excellent.  I think what I’ll do is, given that there are others who have spent the entire day discussing this issue with each other and with others, I’m going to keep my comments rather short, so we can focus a little more time on the things that were talked about today.

I will say that I represent a large team of individuals within the Department of Health and Human Services, and indeed, across the entire federal animal that is Federal government.  The Department of Homeland Security, the Homeland Security Council at the White House, Department of Labor, Commerce, Education, every single part of the federal government has been actively engaged in its role in preparing for the next pandemic.

Having said that, we’ve come to learn and I think today is evidence of that.  That preparedness for the next pandemic, assuring that we have a nation prepared, can’t just be the responsibility of the Federal government or for that matter federal, state, or local government.  To be truly prepared, that which is something not contained within some written plan, but indeed something that is evident and exercised in communities, in people’s homes, is about involving all leaders and all individuals across communities.  I’m hoping that as our colleagues from today stand and speak, give a few words here at the podium, that they talk to that premise.

Now this whole event today has been about the Federal government learning from all other areas of our nation as we try to figure out how best to deliver the message into people’s homes, to individuals, to families, about their role in preparedness.  Ultimately it’s been about us learning how we can better engage individuals in preparedness for the next pandemic, how they can tell us what their challenges are as they prepare, or if they haven’t heard the message, about how we might translate and package that message in a way that’s accessible to the average person out there in our community. 

I should restate that.  Not just the average person, but also how do we need to specially modify our messages, so that special populations can have access to the important messages of preparedness, whether those populations have language as specific needs or socioeconomic specific needs or, indeed, community specific needs.  There are special communities out there that we have to reach and we find them.  And we hope that we’ve learned today, that you reach those populations through their leadership, not through government; you reach it through developing a relationship with their leaders.

Now the bird flu and pandemic influenza, which are two different things, although related, they seem to not be in the press, in the media, to the same degree today that they were just one year ago.  And we recognize that it may not be quite as interesting to the media today as it once was.  But it is something that is even, perhaps, more important today for planners and for individuals, we believe, for everyone in our nation to think about.  After all, just this year alone, so many have died in other nations from H5N1 and the risk of a pandemic is as ever present today is it was two years ago or a year ago.  In fact, some might say the risk is higher.

I think it’s important that we recognize that there are populations out there that stand ready to help government and other leaders deliver the message.  I speak specifically to that community that speaks about, that learns about, that discusses the issues related to flu, H5N1, pandemic influenza preparedness.  On the Internet, Flubloggia, as it is fondly referred to, is an entire community of – I think one of its leaders being here today – that has engaged in discussions about preparedness and about the threat for many, many months, many, many years and I think needs to be leveraged by government and other leaders, or at least needs to be listened to as we try to further this message of preparedness into our communities.

This event, today’s discussion with leaders on ways to better inform and to better involve the average person, the average resident of our nation, is just the beginning of a much broader campaign to further that effort.  That campaign will include the release this summer of tools that are tailored to this notion of involving individuals and families in pandemic preparedness. 

To date much of our focus has been on leaders, getting them to write plans and to exercise plans for their organizations, whether they be private sector or government.  But now we’re moving beyond that.  We’re trying to now reach to individuals, whether they be employees, and we’re going to employers to get to them.  Whether they be members of congregations, we’re going to the faith-based community to get to them.  Members of a blog community, a blogging community, an Internet community, a virtual community, and we’re trying to figure out ways to reach them or any other individual – we’re reaching to them through these leaders.  So we’re going to provide in the summer a set of tools that leaders can use to carry the message into their communities to the individuals that they work with and live with and learn with every single day.

In the Fall, we’re actually going to take much of what we’ve learned on an ongoing basis and we’re going to reach out to ten – five or ten, we haven’t quite decided on the exact number – communities where we now begin to reach into those communities and work with those leaders, try to get a sense of how, well we are doing.  Are individuals in communities hearing the message and taking action on the message that they hear?  Are there lessons that we can learn?  Are there roadblocks in the transmission of the importance on the information that we’re trying to deliver?  Are there ways that we can overcome?  Are there best practices that have been used to overcome those challenges and those roadblocks?

So I’m going to end by simply saying this.  That for me it has been quite humbling to learn from the dialogue, whether it was during our blogging exercise of the last three weeks – and I know it’s ongoing – or even today.  As I stood before the leaders who discussed this issue, I recognized that the Federal government, and indeed all government, still has a lot to learn about the best way to engage individuals in communities, families in communities in this effort that we remain so committed to preparing for the next pandemic.

I’ll stop there and ask Dr. Greg Dworkin if he would like to step up here. I think what I’ll do is just make it easy on everyone else and let them sit and I’ll just pass the mike down and just remind everyone who’s who… thank you so much.

Greg Dworkin, MD , Founding Editor, Flu Wiki & Flu Wiki Forum 

I’m Greg Dworkin.  I’m a blogger and I represent an online virtual community, which is fairly robust.  I’m also a pediatrician, a pediatric pulmonologist and a local planner.  I sit on city and town planning committees for all hazards, for pandemic flu.  And what you’ve seen today, what we’ve seen today and what we’ve experienced today is really something rather remarkable.  It’s unusual for Health and Human Services and any government organization to not just develop something and then put it online and expect people to go get it, but rather invite people from across a variety of different sectors and listen and ask for advice and ask for input, so that we can develop some of these tools together and then use them in ways, which are best suited to our own communities.

We do have people who feel that, perhaps, the media focus hasn’t been so much on H5N1 or pandemic flu, and yet there are many, many interested people out there, who really want good information and good advice from a credible source, like Health and Human Services or Centers for Disease Control.  And if there can be a consistent and coherent message about individual and family responsibility and how people can get the message out that this is important.  And that we do have to look forward and prepare.  That there is an answer to “Why me?”  There is an answer to “Why now?” and there is an answer to “What can I do?”  

That people can therefore take that information back to the communities and do something positive with it, which will help every community prepare for not just this, but whatever comes, because whatever comes is never exactly what you planned for.  So I have to thank Health and Human Services for allowing us to have, and not just in person, but online, where there is, indeed, a robust and dynamic community willing to take this issue on and who wants to learn more.

Mr. Hall                                 

Thank you, Greg.  Dr. Joseph Bocchini. 

Dr. Joseph Bocchini, Chair, Committee on Infectious Diseases, American Academy of Pediatrics

Hello.  I’m Joseph Bocchini.  I’m a pediatrician and I’m here today representing the American Academy of Pediatrics, whose mission is to take care of the health and well-being of infants and children and adolescents and young adults.  As a pediatrician and with an area in infectious diseases to me, this was a very important meeting.  This is critical that if we’re going to be effective in preparing individuals to be ready for pandemic influenza, which we know eventually will come, then we need to find the best way to communicate with individuals to allow them to effectively prepare.  We need to engage them in such a way that they understand the reality of pandemic flu, the problems associated with it, and how to prepare their families to be successful in either reducing the risk or potentially dealing with the infection in an effective way.

So this meeting was very important because it brought together HHS, the CDC, other governmental agencies, and members of the health area, business, faith-based organizations, and the community in an effort to determine what would be the best way for leaders in these areas to engage the public that they deal with.  And I think it was a very good meeting; it enabled an opportunity for a great deal of discussion.  And as a result, I think we can go forward with some ideas on how to bring each of our organizations further along in developing our plans to engage our members and then have our members effectively work with the people that they serve.

Mr. Hall                                 

Thank you. 

Susan Crosson-Knutson, Program Development Director, International Association of Lions Clubs

Thank you.  My name is Sue Crosson-Knutson.  I’m with Lions Club International, which is the world’s largest service club organization.  We have 1.3 million members and 45,000 clubs in 200 countries worldwide. 

Last year we developed a program called the Lions Alert Program, which encourages all Lions Clubs to go into their communities and work with their local authorities to develop a proactive emergency plan in case of a local or regional disaster.  The program was implemented as a result of recent disasters in Asia with the tsunami, Hurricane Katrina down in the Gulf Coast, the World Trade Center, and also the disasters here at the Pentagon in Washington, D.C., and in Pennsylvania.  It’s a result of emergency care that we have provided for years after disasters have occurred.  We are encouraging Lions Clubs to provide a proactive emergency plan before, and this obviously would fall into the arena of a pandemic preparedness.

So I was here today – I was honored to be part of this group today to learn more about ways that Lions Clubs throughout the world can help spread the message of pandemic preparedness.  Thank you.

Sister Patricia A. Talone, RSM, PhD, Vice President, Mission Services, Catholic Health Association

Thank you.  I was very happy to be invited to be a part of the blog and I have to say, frankly, it was a real learning experience for me.  And I’m still having to check with Dr. Dworkin to say, “Okay, now how do you do this and what exactly is the etiquette with this?”  So today was a real reinforcement of my own learning about the possibility of pandemic flu.  I’ve been reading about this because I’m a healthcare ethicist.  I’ve been reading about this for about the past 10 or 12 years, and today I learned – there’s certainly some new things, reinforced many things that I’ve learned in the past few years. 

But I think the biggest thing that I heard or that I will take back with me was a very clear concern for and desire to reach many of those persons who seem to fall through the cracks within our healthcare system today, a real concern for people who are uninsured, for persons who are undocumented, for persons who do not have regular physicians or even regular nurses whom they see, and will not know how to prepare themselves.  So there was a tremendous sense of compassion. 

If there’s something that I would like to reflect on and maybe continue to write about in the blog, it’s why are we doing this, why is the Department of Health and Human Services putting this amount of time and money into a topic like this if this is not something that people like to hear about.  If they’re not going to turn on their evening news – or not even evening news, but certainly not primetime and look at something like this, so why are we doing this?  We’re doing it partly, and we heard this today, there is this strong economic concern on the part of not only business, but of the government.  There’s a tremendous what I would call public safety issue, not just in defense of our country, but even in defense within the country if we have the type of pandemic that has been, at least in some cases, predicted. 

So there’s the issue of public safety.  There’s the issue of economics, but it strikes me that the most important reason or the reason really we are doing this is because this is about human lives.  This is a moral imperative; we don’t have a choice with it.  We are doing this not because of the money, not because of the safety, but because this is the right thing to do.  And as we continue to move forward within the communities where we have some spheres of influence, I think we need to repeat that over and over, because, make no mistake about it, and I’m looking into a room of young faces, this is going to require sacrifice. 

Mr. Hall         

Thank you.  I guess we’ll take questions.  We have a few people in the room and then we have some people on the phone.  So are there any questions from the room right now?  Anyone in here? Okay.  Then why don’t we go to the phone and I believe we have an operator who – do we have any questions on the line?

Moderator     

And we will go to Anita Manning with USA Today.  Please go ahead. 

Anita Manning, USA Today

I wonder if, not having attended this session today, I don’t really get what practical steps you’re going to be taking after you leave today.  It sounds like it was all very feel good, but what practical things are coming out of this?

Dr. Agwunobi

I’m going to ask my panelists to join me in their sense of what the practical outcomes of today were.  But, Anita, thank you for your question.  What I’m going to do is, I’m going to get you a sense of what we were hoping to achieve.  I’ll then turn it over to the panelists to see if we came close to achieving that goal.

We brought together today leaders from different sectors of society, leaders that we feel have great influence or at least great understanding of large swathes of our communities in terms of the individuals that make up their businesses, the individuals that make up their constituencies, the individuals that are a part of their practices or a part of the world where they spend much of their professional or perhaps personal time.  And we brought them together to have them advise us and that advice hopefully will continue to come into the Department on how we can better tailor the message of preparedness.

I don’t want it to sound like spin, because it’s not just about that.  It’s about them transmitting both ways, them letting us know what the concerns and the unique needs of those individuals are, so that we can take that into mind as we try to help those individuals prepare for the next pandemic.  Now that was the goal.  It might sound a little warm and fuzzy, Anita, but we believe it’s an absolutely important next step in preparing our nation.

What I’m going to do now is, I’m going to pass down the microphone to the members of our panel, to see if we came close in your opinions to being able to achieve that goal, or at least to beginning that journey.

Dr. Dworkin  

One of the things that we do at the local level is have talks with library groups, boards of education, small and large businesses in our individual area and community.  And one of the things we were looking for from HHS, which I think we got today in pretty clear terms, that there was validation for the amount of effort that people are putting into in trying to prepare their own local communities, not just for me, but for other people who want to be in the position of actually bringing this message and talking to folks within their own communities and their own spheres without the validation that this is real and that this is of concern, as Sister Talone said.  It’s much more difficult for people trying to bring this message out. 

I came here today looking for – not reassurance, that’s not the right word – but validation and legitimization that this is a real issue.  That people at HHS and other agencies within the federal government, and that people within other spheres that I met here today interacting as conference members, all take seriously.  And I was able to get that sense and I can bring that issue back home.

Dr. Bocchini  

I don’t have much to add to that.  I think the discussions that occurred in the groups, I think provided HHS with a significant amount of feedback.  There were proposals for how to address the individuals throughout the country, as well as engage the organizations that were here.  So I think it was very productive in that, it is the beginning of starting a dialogue and an interaction to try and develop what we think would be the best plans for meeting the needs of various groups that we each serve, as well as the underserved populations to try and make sure the message gets out to everybody.

Ms. Crosson-Knutson          

I don’t think there’s much to add.  I think we’ve said that we all appreciated the day spent, discussing various ways that various components of the community can come together to bring this message to the public, so that we can be prepared.  I think that came out – there was very evident and we all, I believe, reiterate the same message.  I’ll pass it along.

Sister Talone 

I think something practical that I would be bringing back to the hospitals who are members of the Catholic Health Association is a strong commitment to urge our members to review, first of all, the relationships that they have within their own state and local government in regard to preparation for a pandemic, to review their policies and procedures, and even to look at the policies and procedures that they have for their employees, because all of these have serious implications for how we will address this.  So it does have practical implications both internally and externally to healthcare.

Mr. Hall

I’ll just ask Stephanie, Stephanie Marshall, who works with our Assistant Secretary for Public Affairs who helped set today’s event up.  Stephanie, did it meet the expectations of these organizers?

Stephanie Marshall, Director of Pandemic Communications, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services           

Yes.  This is Stephanie Marshall; I’m the Director of Pandemic Communications.  Two tangible deliverables that we planned to provide to participants today and other sector leaders is sector-specific toolkits, which will contain information, sessions of activities groups can take at the very local level to help the people they represent take steps now to prepare for a pandemic.  We will have those toolkits this summer.

And in the fall we’re going to identify five to ten communities across the country for more intensive communication support to identify some best practices that could be replicated.  So those are two action steps we will take over the next six months. 

Dr. Agwunobi

And I’ll just add – I raise my voice while I get the microphone here – I’ll just add that if you were looking for a – I recognize I don’t get to write your headlines.  And as I understand, it most journalists don’t get to write their own headlines, they just write the content.  I’ll say this, that a headline would be if I was writing it, “Federal Government Sets its Sights on Individual and Family Preparedness: Will Not Stop Until it has Learned and Improved its Message for Getting Individuals to Prepare for the Next Pandemic.”  That’s too long a headline.  That’s a dissertation.  That shows you why I’m not a headline writer.

Mr. Hall         

Do we have any more questions on the phone?

Moderator     

We have no further questions.

Mr. Hall

Okay.  Any other questions in the room? Okay, well thank you all very much for taking the time to be here today.  I hope it’s been informative for everyone who attended.  Thank you very much.

Moderator     

Thank you.  Ladies and gentlemen, that does conclude our conference for today.  Thank you for your participation and for using AT&T Executive Teleconference.  You may now disconnect.