OTTAWA — Canada is already forgetting lessons from the COVID-19 pandemic as it lets the country’s research infrastructure rot out, repeating a cycle we went through after the SARS and H1N1 scares, says University of Waterloo president Vivek Goel.

“We’ve had several successive federal budgets without any significant investments in science capacity,” he said in an extended interview with The Logic. The Liberals boosted research funding when they took office, but inflation has eaten all that up, he said. “We’re essentially back to where we were in 2015, before the current government came in, or perhaps even with less funding per capita.”

Faced with stagnant funding, pandemic fatigue and the need to draw in outside money, Goel said, universities are pushed to focus on research with immediate applications, while longer-term exploration with less certain results is bumped farther and farther down their to-do lists.

“As a public health physician, I’ve watched this movie many times,” Goel said. “It’s like a rerun.”

A government-appointed panel flayed the Liberals early this year for neglecting the system. The government is studying the matter. Meanwhile, Goel said, Waterloo needs to heat its labs, replenish its libraries, send its researchers into the field.

The university’s campus has just filled up with undergraduates again, kicking off the first normal-seeming academic year at the tech-focused university since 2019. “We have third-year, fourth-year students who are coming, taking part in events they never had a chance to,” Goel said.

He understands how badly everyone wants to not think about the pandemic, and why nobody tells a politician canvassing at their door that they want to see more funding for academic research. But he argued we need to if we want to blunt future emergencies, whatever form they might take.

“A lot of the capacity that got called upon to help mount scientific responses came from graduate students, came from research labs, because those are highly skilled people, and many of them pivoted or adapted their work to meet current needs,” he said.

Goel was one of them: a physician whose academic specialty is public health, he resigned as vice-president of research at the University of Toronto in July 2020 to focus on the pandemic fight.

Goel had been the founding CEO of Public Health Ontario in 2008, an agency born from the 2003 SARS outbreak that killed 44 people in the Toronto area. In those years, public health labs were overhauled, research budgets boosted.

In 2009, a nasty form of influenza—an H1N1 “swine flu”—spread across the world, killing hundreds of thousands of people and overwhelming vaccination clinics. The Public Health Agency of Canada, another post-SARS creation, issued a response plan; the National Microbiology Laboratory devised a new type of test for the new strain.

But the investments didn’t last. 

“If you follow the trajectory five years, 10 years out, they’re flatlined—or they actually start to decrease. And either way, with inflation, even if you flatline it, you’re eroding the value of what you have there,” Goel said.

Then along came the big reminder. In early 2020, Canada had researchers, like biologists and civil engineers, noodling around with testing for trace materials in sewage, Goel said. It was legitimate, valid science, but “nobody really paid that much attention to them,” he said.

Until, all of a sudden, monitoring whole populations for a particular virus—and its different forms as they evolved—was really, really important. Testing sewage is now our main means of monitoring the COVID-19 virus’s prevalence. “That network that grew and got built up really started in university research labs, across a number of different disciplines,” Goel said. 

Part of the lineage of the mRNA vaccines from Moderna and Pfizer-BioNTech that have been vital in tamping down the pandemic can be traced to research on lipids at the University of British Columbia in the 1980s. That led to the means of getting delicate mRNA particles into people’s cells—but only decades later.

It’s not just laboratory science, Goel emphasized: Social scientists had insight into how to communicate health information. Historians familiar with the Tuskegee syphilis study—in which some participants, all of them Black men, were purposely denied information and treatment that could have cured them—could help understand some people’s reluctance to trust health authorities. 

“You see during the pandemic, how these scholars, who are working in very different areas where you might question what is the value, on a day-to-day basis, of that kind of research [had] critical knowledge,” Goel said. Even for serious social challenges less acute than a world-stopping virus—climate change, wildfires, the shortage of housing—the time to start researching solutions was 10 or 20 years ago, before they topped people’s worry lists.

Focusing funding on work with immediate and obvious applications is short-sighted in another way, he said.

“PhD students’ objective is to produce new scholarship, something that nobody has done before. And at the time that they start that, if we tie their hands by saying, ‘You’ve got to do scholarship that’s going to be impactful immediately,’ we lose all the creativity.”

Universities have to take a share of the blame if public understanding of what they do has withered, Goel said.

In public health, it’s just assumed you’ll engage with the public, Goel said, but “in many disciplines, it’s not been the tradition to look outside of academia for impact.”

If governments use the results of universities’ work, or doctors do when treating patients, that should be measured along with grants secured and citations by other researchers, he said.

These counts need to have some rigour if they’re going to be fair, Goel said, but there are models to follow, such as law schools’ tracking when judges cite the schools’ professors.

Improving exchanges with companies and organizations outside the university is also important, in his view.

“In Germany, there’s PhD students who’ll do their dissertation work on the shop floor of a major manufacturer. It’s not as common here,” he said. The University of Waterloo is known for its co-op programs that give undergraduates work experience, but it’s expanding that to students in graduate programs, too.

“If we do more things like that, where we can show the connection of what happens in research, over this long term, to finding the solutions for everyday problems that people are facing, I hope we can help regain the trust of the public in what we do,” Goel said.