PERL brings together medical, health policy and communications experts to help leaders respond quickly and effectively when crises strike
Another pandemic is not a question of if, but when, and McGill University has a new lab to ensure the world is prepared.
The Pandemic and Emergency Readiness Lab (PERL) launched on Feb. 3, nearly six years after the COVID-19 pandemic was declared. Organizers say the need is urgent, particularly in today’s polarized political climate.
“Science is under attack, policies are being diluted, and data are fragmented. We need to fight back against this spiral of vulnerability,” said Dr. Joanne Liu, Director of PERL and Professor in McGill’s Department of Global and Public Health.
PERL brings a practitioner’s mindset into the academic ecosystem, she explained. The lab convenes across disciplines to anticipate risks, identify best practices and help leaders act more effectively in an emergency. While health crises are a central focus, the work extends to climate disasters, wars and other global threats.
A full day of panel discussions was held at the McGill Faculty Club to mark the lab’s launch, with sessions on responding to human crises in a fractured world, the politics of preparedness and confronting the dangers of misinformation and disinformation.
Lessons from COVID-19
Reflecting on lessons learned from COVID-19, panelists examined the unprecedented use of travel restrictions that were applied unevenly around the world, often exacerbating inequalities.
“There are human costs to these measures, heartbreaking stories of people who could not travel for genuine, human reasons,” said Kelley Lee, Professor at Simon Fraser University and Canada Research Chair Tier I in Global Health Governance. “Was it worth it? There is an argument for it, but we have to appreciate the secondary consequences.”
Communicating such public health measures is also becoming more challenging, as social media, AI and declining trust in experts reshape how information spreads.
“The challenge we have today is, how do we engender trust in public health in people who automatically think you’re lying?” said keynote speaker Michael Osterholm, author of The Big One: How to Prepare for World Altering Pandemics to Come.
Trust, communication and crisis leadership are central to PERL’s mission. The other key focus areas are pandemic prevention and risk anticipation; policy, governance and crisis infrastructure; data and systems innovation; and equity and community resilience.
Despite the scale of the challenges ahead, panelists expressed optimism about the lab’s future.
“There is tremendous potential here,” said Osterholm. “Hope is not a strategy, but it’s an essential ingredient.”