One of America’s top pharmaceutical executives has warned that a growing climate of anti-intellectualism is blighting the global response to Covid-19, and questioned whether policymakers are capable of preparing the public for the next pandemic.
David Ricks, chief executive of Eli Lilly, said this was especially true in the Anglo-Saxon world where scepticism about expertise had become a driving force behind vaccine hesitancy and a failure to implement proper controls to tame the pandemic, including mask wearing.
“All this vaccine hesitancy, climate hesitancy you know, it’s all anti-intellectualism, really, anti-expertise. And in a world filled with too much information and people not equipped to digest it, maybe that’s where we land. I don’t know. I mean, it’s kind of sad,” he said.