‘No silver bullets:’ Forum focuses on coronavirus pandemic

GREENWICH — The early data on Pfizer’s under-development coronavirus vaccine announced this week is offering much-needed encouragement to Connecticut and the rest of the country amid a recent resurgence of COVID-19.

The new results are a crucial sign of progress in beating back the virus, but recovering and learning

from the pandemic will need to extend far beyond vaccines, Yale’s Dr. Albert Ko and former PepsiCo CEO Indra Nooyi, the co-chairpersons of the state’s former reopening advisory group, said Wednesday during the final day of this year’s Greenwich Economic Forum.

“There are no silver bullets or magic bullets,” Ko, chairman of the Department of Epidemiology of Microbial Diseases at the Yale School of Public Health, said during an online discussion with Nooyi. It was moderated by The Economist senior editor Anne McElvoy. “What we’re learning is we need multiple interventions and multiple systems.”

While he described as “exciting” the results showing about 90 percent effec

tiveness for the Pfizer treatment — which has been developed in part in Connecticut — Ko noted that coronavirus vaccines will require strong public-health systems that can support mass-immunization campaigns.

“It’s going to take a while to get all the steps in place to vaccinate people,” he said. “‘Back to normal’ is not going to happen in the near future.”

As development of Pfizer’s drug and other companies’ vaccines advance, public officials and private citizens across the state and country still need to act strongly in other ways to contain the coronavirus, Ko said.

“At the crux of that is behavior change,” he said, referencing measures such as social distancing, handwashing and mask-wearing.

The U.S., Europe and other parts of the world are struggling to achieve the

amount of behavior change needed to reduce the spread of COVID-19, Ko said. Connecticut’s infection rate and hospitalizations have risen sharply in recent weeks, although its infection rate of nearly 4 percent in the past week was still lower than the levels in most other states.

“This is a highly transmissible disease,” Ko said. “The threat of resurgence is always ever-present.”

Nooyi, a Greenwich resident, argued that the coronavirus crisis has compelled companies to rethink their missions and embrace a “larger sense of humanity.” No longer can they focus only on metrics such as earnings, they also must determine how they could help tackle the pandemic and other systemic challenges such as climate change, she said.

“I don’t think we can pass those problems onto governments,” Nooyi said. “Every

one of these issues requires a dialogue between private enterprise and public government.”

In a separate panel discussion, Annie Lamont, co-founder and managing partner of Greenwich-based Oak HC/FT, which invests in health care and financialtechnology firms, discussed the pandemic’s impact on the businesses in Oak’s portfolio.

“It’s been an extraordinary year for us. The perspective we had in March is very different than the perspective we have today,” said Lamont, whose husband is Gov. Ned Lamont. “The trends that we’ve been investing in for the last decade have been virtualization, home care, mental health, primary care. All of those things have been dramatically accelerated the last six months. Our companies are growing at twice the rate they were growing a year

ago.”

In the conference’s final event, Ray Dalio, founder of Westport-based hedge fund giant Bridgewater Associates and Arianna Huffington, founder and CEO of Thrive Global and co-founder of The Huffington Post, participated in a “fireside chat” on personal discovery.

They agreed that the pandemic has highlighted the importance of taking care of one’s mental health. Thrive focuses on mental resilience, health and productivity, with Dalio as one of the company’s early investors.

Huffington cited a Thrive program that focuses on “microsteps” for behavior change.

“I’m particularly excited about our relationship with Walmart,” Huffington said. “As the wellness provider for their 2.2 million associates, as they call their employees, we are reaching not just those who have the luxury of working from home right now, but frontline store workers who don’t have that luxury and who’ve often been neglected in the wellness conversation.”

Dalio, a Greenwich resident who also appeared at the conference Monday, explained the impact of meditation, which he has espoused at many other events and in his book “Principles.”

“It gives one an equanimity, it gives one a creativity,” said said Dalio, a billionaire who ranks as Connecticut’s wealthiest resident. “The act of repeating a mantra, which is just a sound, and then transcending into the subconscious mind not only brings a peacefulness and a healthy state of mind, but it also taps the subconscious mind which is where the creativity comes from.”

Ko