Dr Mike Ryan: The Irish man leading the WHO Covid response

It's hard to imagine anything short of an incoming meteor fazing Dr Mike Ryan, the Irish man leading the World Health Organisation's emergency response, who has become known around the world for his unflappable, fast-talking, take-no-prisoners style.

This is a man who carried out life-saving medical treatments in Iraq with a gun held to his head, has dug the graves of Ebola victims and has managed outbreaks of a medical encyclopaedia of infectious diseases – Marburg, cholera, Shigella, Sars, bird flu, Ebola and now Covid-19.

Long before he was the public face of the fight against coronavirus, every knock on the office door brought another crisis – a measles outbreak in Congo or another health crisis in Yemen or Syria. And yet he remains, say those who know him, a perennial optimist as well as a very effective doer; someone both highly respected and just the right amount of pushy.

Both Sligo and Mayo can lay claim to Ryan: he is from the townland of Curry, near Tubbercurry, Co Sligo and grew up in Charlestown, Co Mayo, where he was part of the first generation of his family to go to university.

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There was no history of medicine in his background, but his peripatetic career path is not entirely out of left field. His father, Harry, was a merchant seaman and spent a quarter of a century at sea before his death when Michael was 11. A former school principal would later tell the Mayo News that, when other children his age were watching Dallas, Ryan was reading National Geographic and Scientific American.

Spinal injuries he sustained in Iraq when a military convoy ran his vehicle off the road put a premature end to his career as a surgeon. After a period of rehabilitation back in Ireland, he retrained in public health and infectious diseases, spending much of the next 25 years in the field.

Ryan was just nine months into his role at the head of the WHO’s health emergencies programme in 2019, when another knock on his office door brought news of a worrying new virus detected in the Hubei province of China.

The rest is – unfortunately – not yet history.

In early January 2020, he flew to China to see for himself what was happening. Within hours of his return from Wuhan he was briefing the world’s media on the novel coronavirus that was then thought to be making 20 per cent of patients severely ill.

That trip marked the end of anything approaching normality or a private life for a man who still checks in on the Curry GAA club match results from his home in Geneva. But if he would never have chosen to become one of the most recognisable public health officials in the world, he has accepted the notoriety that goes with the territory with the same equanimity he greets every unwelcome new development in his professional life. After all, as he told Stat news in 2019: “It’s very hard to bullsh*t me.”

Those who watch his media appearances closely will have lately detected growing activity on what he might call his bullsh*t radar. As the pandemic enters its third year, the 57-year-old seems to be maintaining his optimism, but running somewhat lower on tolerance for the world’s complacency about the threat posed to the unvaccinated by the Omicron variant, and the “horrific” pace of progress on vaccine equity.

While Ryan says lockdowns should only be a last resort, he wishes more countries would find a middle ground between fully open and fully locked down. And he’s concerned that the risk from Omicron and the possibility of new variants emerging is not being taken seriously enough. Though a recent US study found that 75 per cent of all deaths of those who were vaccinated and became ill were people who had at least four co-morbidities, the virus still represents a “massive threat” to the lives and health of the unvaccinated, Ryan believes.

“We can definitely say that [the] Omicron variant causes, on average, a less severe disease in any human being, but that’s on average,” he said at a livestreamed Q&A session held by the WHO this week. “There are hundreds of thousands of people around the world in hospital as we speak with the Omicron variant.”

Since the earliest weeks of the pandemic, Ryan has warned that the world’s biggest mistake was to actively downplay the threat and build policy around the best case scenario, instead of the worst.

So what scenarios does he now think we should be preparing for? Does the prospect of new variants emerging keep him awake at night? How does he feel about developed countries boosting the young and healthy, and vaccinating under-12s, while medics in other parts of the world are still going to work unprotected?

And after all the experiences of the past two years, is he still an optimist that we’ll find a way out of this?

Dr Mike Ryan will be answering these questions and more in conversation with Jennifer O’Connell at 9pm on Monday, January 24th as part of the Irish Times Winter Nights series, an online festival of culture, conversation and ideas.

A single price of €50 admits ticket holders to all events at the festival. Digital subscribers can purchase tickets at the discounted price of €25.

For details see: irishtimes.com/winternights