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swag

(26,480 posts)
Thu Aug 6, 2020, 02:36 PM Aug 2020

To defeat the virus, we will have to start thinking in years, not months.

https://www.newyorker.com/science/medical-dispatch/americas-coronavirus-endurance-test

America’s Coronavirus Endurance Test

To defeat the virus, we will have to start thinking in years, not months.

By Howard Markel

Excerpt:

In 2006, when my colleagues and I first proposed the idea of flattening the curve, we hoped to draw up plans for the subsequent phases of a pandemic. We knew the basic idea: work would proceed on vaccines and treatments while testing, tracing, and isolation measures ramped up; meanwhile, the federal government would step in to keep households and businesses afloat. But, although the federal government developed a detailed pandemic plan, many stakeholders disagreed about when social distancing might become necessary, and about what should be done during an extended pandemic like the one we are experiencing now. In 2009 and 2013, when epidemiologists warned about the potential for a swine-flu pandemic and a widespread Ebola outbreak, respectively, it seemed as though a sweeping pandemic plan might need to be finalized and acted on. But neither disease turned out to warrant the “nuclear option” of social distancing, and so the working out of a detailed plan, encompassing an initial flattening of the curve and everything that would follow, would have to wait.

As the decade drew to a close, the United States was prepared for a pandemic in some respects and unprepared in others. In October, 2019, a study conducted by the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security ranked the U.S. first in the world in terms of pandemic readiness, in part because of its “robust” health-care system; even so, this was a relative measure, and the researchers took pains to point out that no country was truly prepared. (Despite its over-all ranking, the U.S. ranked nineteenth on measures such as public-health infrastructure and economic resilience.) The Trump Administration exacerbated the problem by disbanding the National Security Council’s pandemic team and defunding various public-health programs. But inattentiveness to the risks of a pandemic preceded Trump: when the millions of masks stored in the federal government’s Strategic National Stockpile were used up, during the 2009 flu pandemic, Congress failed to reappropriate the funds necessary to replenish them.

In retrospect, one of the biggest weaknesses in our pandemic planning was that many infectious-disease experts, including me, focussed on the threat posed by a novel strain of influenza. We feared a repeat of 1918—and yet, because we now have the technology to create and mass-produce a new flu vaccine in only a few months’ time, a flu pandemic isn’t necessarily the worst-case scenario. As we are currently discovering, designing and testing an entirely new vaccine against a never-before-seen infectious disease is a far more uncertain and daunting task. The fact that the novel coronavirus is RNA-based, like H.I.V., intensifies the difficulty. It’s possible that a vaccine will arrive this year—but many experts think that it could be two years or even longer before a safe and effective shot has been developed, tested, manufactured, and made widely available.

The challenge, therefore, isn’t just flattening the curve but keeping it flat—holding the line not for months but for years. In a study published in Science in April, researchers at the Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health estimated that, in the absence of a vaccine for the coronavirus, periods of social distancing would be necessary into the year 2022. (Their analysis was, in its own way, optimistic: it incorporated the possibilities of new treatments for covid-19, increases in I.C.U. capacity, and the spread of durable immunity over time.) The researchers noted that, even after social distancing lets up, governments will need to continue tracking the virus and addressing occasional outbreaks. In that sense, there’s a good chance that the pandemic may not be over until 2024.

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To defeat the virus, we will have to start thinking in years, not months. (Original Post) swag Aug 2020 OP
the virus is a hoax to destroy trump rampartc Aug 2020 #1
Sorry but TheFarseer Aug 2020 #2
No apologies necessary. swag Aug 2020 #3
Good article. I've also been thinking it will take years MyMission Aug 2020 #4

MyMission

(1,845 posts)
4. Good article. I've also been thinking it will take years
Thu Aug 6, 2020, 11:52 PM
Aug 2020

to produce a good vaccine and to distribute it. And if one is available sooner, I'd rather wait several rounds to make sure they've got it right. I'll wear a mask and socially distance before I let anyone inject me with a new vaccine, especially if the current regime is "over seeing" it.

Polio ravaged us for decades, the vaccine was a miracle, yet one lab that produced it had a problem, and ended up distributing active polio rather than the cure. Someone at NIH found the problem, but bad batches got out anyway. Our science is more advanced, so development will be quicker, but flaws can always happen during production, and bad batches could go out again.

Here's the title and excerpts from an article about the polio vaccine tragedy, chosen to show the time line of development, testing and distribution. Years. Link below.

The tainted polio vaccine that sickened and fatally paralyzed children in 1955
It was ‘one of the worst biological disasters in American history,’ one scholar wrote...

As scientists and politicians desperately search for medicines to slow the deadly coronavirus, and as President Trump touts a malaria drug as a remedy, a look back to the 1955 polio vaccine tragedy shows how hazardous such a search can be, especially under intense public pressure...

Roughly 40,000 got “abortive” polio, with fever, sore throat, headache, vomiting and muscle pain. Fifty-one were paralyzed, and five died, Offit wrote in his 2005 book, “The Cutter Incident: How America’s First Polio Vaccine Led to the Growing Vaccine Crisis.”...

It was “one of the worst biological disasters in American history: a man-made polio epidemic,” Offit wrote.

In those days, polio, or infantile paralysis, was a terror.

“A national poll … found that polio was second only to the atomic bomb as the thing that Americans feared most,” Offit wrote.

“People weren’t sure how you got it,” he said in an interview last week. “Therefore, they were scared of everything. They didn’t want to buy a piece of fruit at the grocery store. It’s the same now. … Everybody’s walking around with gloves on, with masks on, scared to shake anybody’s hand.”

The worst polio outbreak in U.S. history struck in 1952, the year after Offit was born. It infected 57,000 people, paralyzed 21,000 and killed 3,145. The next year there were 35,000 infections, and 38,000 the year after that....

Often polio victims were children, but the most famous affected American was President Franklin D. Roosevelt, who got polio and was paralyzed from the waist down in 1921 when he was 39.

In 1951, Jonas Salk of the University of Pittsburgh’s medical school received a grant from the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis to find a vaccine. During intense months of research, he took live polio virus and killed it with formaldehyde until it was not infectious but still provided virus-fighting antibodies....

In 1953, Salk tested it on himself, his wife and three children.

On April 26, 1954, Randy Kerr, a 6-year-old second-grader from Falls Church, Va., stood in the cafeteria of the Franklin Sherman Elementary School in McLean and became the first to be vaccinated in a massive field study....

A year later, on April 12, 1955, when officials announced the results at a news conference at the University of Michigan, there was jubilation. Reporters hollered: “It works! It works!” Offit wrote.

The news made front-page headlines across the country. “People wept,” Offit said. “There were parades in Jonas Salk’s honor. … That’s what contributed to the tragedy of Cutter more than anything else … the irony.”

That same day, licenses were hurriedly granted to several drug companies, including Cutter Laboratories, to make the vaccine.

But the officials granting the licenses were never told of Eddy’s findings, Offit wrote....

She began testing Cutter’s samples in August 1954 and continued through November, according to a later report in the Congressional Record. She found that three of the six samples paralyzed test monkeys...

Eddy’s discovery suggested that Cutter’s manufacturing process was flawed. Its vaccine should have contained only killed virus.

She reported her findings to William Workman, head of the NIH Laboratory of Biologics Control.

But amid the scientific and bureaucratic chaos, Workman never told the licensing committee, Offit wrote.

Starting on the evening of April 12, 1955, batches of the Salk vaccine made by five drug firms were shipped out in boxes marked “POLIO VACCINE: RUSH.”

About 165,000 doses of Cutter’s went out.

Within weeks, reports of mysterious polio infections started coming in....

Other cases followed....

Not only did some people injected with the tainted vaccine get sick, but some who got the vaccine went on to infect family members and neighbors....

“By April 30, within forty-eight hours of the recall,” Offit wrote. “Cutter’s vaccine had paralyzed or killed twenty-five children: fourteen in California, seven in Idaho, two in Washington, one in Illinois, and one in Colorado.”

On May 6, all polio vaccinations were postponed. They were resumed on May 15 after the government had rechecked the vaccines for safety. But people were still frightened....

Years later, in a suit brought against Cutter, ...

Magda Jean-Louis contributed to this report.


https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/retropolis/

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