She goes on, but I won't. Here we are in a country where the public health communication around the Covid vaccine is a disgrace. We did better on handwashing than we did on getting ourselves immunised against Covid, and in the meantime an avalanche of myths and hysteria have not just spread across the internet and into people's families, but have devastated vaccination certainty. About one-third of Australians say they are hesitant to get the vaccine, partly because people are worried about AstraZeneca-related clots and partly because people think there's no hurry while borders are closed.

While plenty of health communication experts tell us what the government should be doing to improve take-up, no one seems to have come up with the right jingle. I nominate Kylie Minogue to spread the word. C'mon baby, do the vaccination with me.

Or an appropriation by, I dunno, Magda Szubanski: "She sang as she plunged that needle in my upper arm, You should come get AstraZeneca with me."

OK, I'll stop making terrible jokes about something which is really not funny - the failure of the federal government to deal with the pandemic properly. I can only really call it a failure because those who've dealt with serious public health emergencies agree. I remember interviewing Bill Bowtell back in the '80s as we were in the grip of the AIDS crisis. As he says, this disease had erupted and was carving a terrible path of destruction and death.

"One tool was making available truthful information about what was going on; you had to change your behaviour or we were in real trouble," says the veteran public health campaigner and adjunct professor at UNSW.

I remember publishing a terrible story about the devastation wrought by AIDS across the Australian community - "One by One", I think we called it. But we stopped it, one by one. Use condoms. Use clean needles.

Bowtell says the politicians got out of the way of the public health officials who delivered useful, truthful messaging. And the information they had, those public health experts, was available and open. He says it's not like that any more. Our top advisers have secret men's business, he says; and that delivery of message by mainly older men doesn't help the community develop trust.

He remembers with enthusiasm the way Ita Buttrose, in her early 40s, got on board and delivered important health messaging. Instead, now we have politicians who are both confused and confusing. They didn't get on board with masks, didn't get on board with buying the right combination of vaccines, didn't immediately embrace lockdowns. We lost many more lives than we should have.

Bowtell says the political handling of the pandemic has been clunky and laggardly.

"If our current political leaders were of the calibre of Bob Hawke and Andrew Peacock in the '80s, and put aside their differences, we'd all be vaccinated by June," he says.

Big call, but since Bowtell was the engineer of our response to AIDS, I'll take it.

So how do we engineer a future response to a pandemic? Eddie Holmes, a professor at the University of Sydney and champion scientist, was the first person to release the genomic sequence of SARS-CoV-2, which obviously made it possible to develop tests and vaccines. He says the way we live now - the crowdedness, the globalness - makes it much more likely we will have more pandemics. He disputes the idea that this is a one-in-100-year event.

"That's not true, it's much quicker ... this is the fifth coronavirus we've had in 20 years," says Holmes.

His answer to how we deal with this? Mass global surveillance, and - as Holmes puts it with a laugh - the only barriers are politics and money. The World Health Organization needs to be faster and more flexible, and to share data speedily.

"if we don't learn from this, what a bloody stupid species we are," Holmes says.

Raina MacIntyre, a professor of global biosecurity at UNSW's Kirby Institute, where she heads the biosecurity program, is completely on board with the need for better, faster data. And we can't just wait for the formal case notifications, which in some countries barely exist. She's leading a grant to mine the chats we have with each other about how we are feeling.

It might be Twitter. Might be Facebook. Might be Baidu or Weibo or maybe even TikTok. But it's where we talk about how we are feeling. The coughs. The nightsweats. The fevers and the sneezes. It might only be a baseline indication, but she says that in the case of Ebola in west Africa in 2013, analysing that kind of chat would have revealed the outbreak three months before official channels.

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"Early epidemic signals are the key, because one case gives rise to three, and three to nine," says MacIntyre.

And there are other protective measures we can take. Adam Kamradt-Scott, a professor and non-resident fellow at the United States Studies Centre and expert in global health studies, says our capacities need to be strengthened. Our healthcare system needs to be robust enough to deal with whatever pandemics throw at it, from hospitals to onshore vaccine manufacturing to quarantine arrangements.

Ah, the elephant in the room. Kamradt-Scott says our quarantine arrangements should be able to be dual-purpose - much like hotel quarantine, but far safer. Or maybe temporary crisis accommodation, which could be used for quarantine when necessary.

"Only in rare circumstances do we see them develop into full-blown pandemics," he says. "But it happens and we need to be ready."

He says the World Health Organization has already pinged a top-10 disease list, and Australia should turn its mind to looking at cures, vaccines, whatever, for the diseases on that list. They won't go away until we have ways to make them leave.

In the meantime, all we have left is song.

Our land abounds in science gifts

Of vaccines rich and rare;

On health's page, let every stage

Vaccinate Australia Fair.

Truly terrible. Can do better.