Raina MacIntyre, professor of global biosecurity at UNSW, warned that political oversight of research could affect academics’ engagement in public debate.
She said that relying on public funding – as opposed to the financial independence of some of the wealthy US universities – meant that “we are more beholden to government…and that does make it more difficult to speak out”.
Professor MacIntyre, who leads the biosecurity programme at UNSW’s Kirby Institute, also warned that nationalist politics could directly undermine attempts to control global pandemics in future.
“We saw issues arising during the Ebola epidemic in 2014, when Australia itself was reluctant to commit support in the affected areas”, she said, warning that “infectious diseases do not have passports or observe national borders” and that things “could go catastrophically wrong” if the global response to a pandemic was not appropriate. READ MORE