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studies have repeatedly shown that if the public is given honest, forthright information, panic almost never ensues and we all learn to pull together.
Source?
The specifics of the particular disease and its target populations must play a central part in official decision-making. We know in the influenza model that closing schools early in an outbreak is effective, and early in the COVID-19 pandemic, a number of countries closed schools without data to support the theory that schools were amplifying disease in their respective communities. At this point in an epidemic or pandemic’s evolution, we should take that step only if we can show that children have higher rates of infection by being kept in school than by being kept at home. Two advanced
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Common things occur commonly. Uncommon things do not. When you hear hoofbeats, think of horses before you think of zebras. So was this a zebra, or simply two unrelated horses?
Two years is a very short amount of time to develop any vaccine,
HIV infection is still a public health crisis, particularly in sub-Saharan Africa, but now it’s what we call “hyperendemic”: a really bad public health problem that doesn’t go away.
Primo Levi, the revered Italian chemist, philosopher, and author whose searing memoir, Survival in Auschwitz, is one of the essential Holocaust narratives. Levi said, “When you know how to relieve torment and don’t, then you become the tormentor.”
The challenge is not to be wrong, because your credibility will be forever challenged if you are.
What we call criminals in the human sphere we call pathogens in the microbial realm.
It turned out that the Soviets were conducting vaccine studies using live, attenuated H1N1 influenza viruses in the very area where the new H1N1 was first detected. During our research, we uncovered a letter from the Soviets to the US government requesting that we share with them the 1976 Fort Dix strain of H1N1 for their vaccine studies. I have little doubt that the appearance of the 1977 H1N1 virus and its rapid global transmission in just several months was the result of a release of the virus in the course of the Soviet vaccine studies.
Gain of function research -> leaked virus
Saudi Arabia has only 9.8 percent of the region’s human population and 4.3 percent of its camels, but more than 80 percent of the MERS cases. Why? We don’t know.
