On October 18 last year, Jane Halton was one of 16 world experts gathered in the ballroom of New York City’s neoclassical Pierre Hotel to talk pathogens and plagues and panic in the streets. A novel coronavirus had leapt from animal to human and a deadly respiratory disease was now sprinting across continents. “We could be looking at double the cases in a week and 16 times as many in a month if we are not able to stop the spread,” the pandemic emergency board was told.

Joining Halton at the table were leaders from business, government, security and public health: a former deputy director of the CIA and former deputy national security adviser; Centre for Disease Control heads from China, the US and Nigeria; and senior figures from the UN Foundation, the World Bank Group, the World Economic Forum, and the Monetary Authority of Singapore. Unsmiling and resolute, they jotted notes as now-familiar TV images of patients on ventilators and the horrifying roll call of predictions continued. The global economy would be in freefall. Social order would collapse. In 18 months, 65 million people could be dead.

Check that date: it would be another 10 weeks before China alerted the world to a virus outbreak in Wuhan and nine more before the World Health Organisation officially declared a pandemic. So how did they know? How did these various world authorities come to be gathered in what would become the plague’s US epicentre, war-gaming an unfolding pandemic that had yet to occur? The answer is: they didn’t. Event 201, as it was known, was a high-level simulation hosted by the World Economic Forum in partnership with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the Johns Hopkins Centre for Health Security to discuss preparedness and response in the event of “a severe, highly transmissible intercontinental outbreak”. The fictional virus was called CAPS (Coronavirus Accelerated Pulmonary Syndrome); it emerged from pigs, not bats, and first appeared in South America. Otherwise, it tracked closely Covid-19, the border-hopping killer that’s brought the world to its knees.

“So how’s that for spooky?” says Halton, back in Australia self-isolating with her countrymen as real-life calamities threaten to outstrip the simulation. It’s spooky but certainly not surprising for the 60-year-old former federal mandarin whose job it is to be paranoid. Halton chairs the Gates-backed Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI), a public health coalition that has been priming for such an emergency for years and is now spearheading the global race to develop – and fairly distribute – a vaccine for SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19.

A former World Health Organisation director and chair of the OECD’s health committee, Halton has long dwelt in the alert-but-not-alarmed camp. She was president of the World Health Assembly at the height of the 2007 bird flu outbreak; both SARS and swine flu struck during her 12-year tenure as secretary of Australia’s health department, prompting her to install a federal incident room designed for public health emergencies. She oversaw the country’s first influenza pandemic plan, ensured surge capacity staffing and developed a national medical stockpile. “Until driven by recent events, I’m not sure anyone has worked as hard on this as [we] did,” says Tony Abbott, who worked closely with Halton as health minister in the mid-2000s.

Two years as federal finance department secretary helped her segue into post-bureaucracy life serving on the boards of ANZ, Clayton Utz and Crown Resorts and, in March, she was appointed to the National COVID-19 Coordination Commission, set up by Scott Morrison to mitigate the economic and social impacts from the pandemic. And so, with the world caught up in the exigencies of a public-health code red, Halton finds herself occupying not one but two very public hot seats. “Occasionally I think I might be stretching the rubber band just a little bit in terms of what I’ve agreed to do,” she says, “but I do come from this history of public service. You get asked to serve; you can’t not.

From The Weekend Australian Magazine, June 6, 2020

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Jane Halton Leads the Coronavirus Team