Virus Outbreak Quotes

Viruses are the undead of the living world, the zombies of deep time. Nobody knows the origin of viruses—how they came into existence or when they appeared in the history of life on earth.

Ebola virus moves from one person to the next by following the deepest and most personal ties of love, care, and duty that join people to one another and most clearly define us as human. The virus exploits the best parts of human nature as a means of travel from one person to the next. In this sense the virus is a true monster.

Outbreaks of magic started all kinds of ways. Maybe a tank coming in from the quarantined zone didn’t get hosed down properly. Maybe, like some people said, the refugees brought it up with them from Atlantia, the virus hiding out in someone’s blood or in a juicy peach pie. But when magic infected the slums of west Durham, in the proud sovereign nation of Carolinia, it didn’t matter how it got there. Everybody still died.

Another one says she has asnap-off crotch. What do you think she means by that? I'm a little worried,though, about all these outbreaks of lifestyle diseases. I carry a reinforced ribbed condom at all times. One size fits all. But I have a feeling it's not much protection against the intelligence and adaptability of the modern virus.

A giant virus named the Mamavirus, which was discovered infecting amoebae that live in a water-cooling tower in Paris, gets infected by a small virus called the Sputnik. A Mamavirus particle with Sputnik disease is one sick virus—deformed and unable to replicate very well.

There won’t be any rat brains in Haven. Put that image out of your mind. We’re completely self-sufficient in energy and water and food. The refugees will put some strain on us but we have enormous reserves. Mac, Nick, and I are used to military planning and—well, we planned for a siege right from the start.” Oh no. Her breath blocked in her chest. Her hand slid from his and her back hit the chairback with a thud. “You knew this was coming?” she whispered. The words would barely come out between numb lips. “You knew and you didn’t stop it?” He grabbed her hand back. “No, God no. We didn’t plan for this. For a massive outbreak of a deadly virus, no.

there was an outbreak in China of a virus that caused a severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS).

Outbreak or no outbreak, we’re being overrun by crazies.

The filoviruses are a family of viruses that all look alike, and most of them are extremely lethal.

Viruses are the undead of the living world, the zombies of deep time.

One general theory for the origin of AIDS goes that, during the late nineteen-sixties, a new and lucrative business grew up in Africa, the export of primates to industrialized countries for use in medical research. Uganda was one of the biggest sources of these animals. As the monkey trade was established throughout central Africa, the native workers in the system, the monkey trappers and handlers, were exposed to large numbers of wild monkeys, some of which were carrying unusual viruses. These animals, in turn, were being jammed together in cages, exposed to one another, passing viruses back and forth. Furthermore, different species of monkeys were mixed together. It was a perfect setup for an outbreak of a virus that could jump species. It was also a natural laboratory for rapid virus evolution, and possibly it led to the creation of HIV. Did HIV crash into the human race as a result of the monkey trade?

she describes it, Hensley had a sudden flash of conviction, as a college student, that emerging viruses were going to become the single greatest threat to human health in her lifetime.

Ebola virus moves from one person to the next by following the deepest and most personal ties of love, care, and duty that join people to one another and most clearly define us as human.

If the world returns to its order before the coronavirus epidemic, the world will once again prove to be very stupid! The coronavirus outbreak is an opportunity! An opportunity for what? It is an opportunity to destroy the arms industry; it is an opportunity make peace with nature, to get rid of stupid ambitions, for a new world order primarily focused on health, art and science; it is an opportunity to be a humanity with human values!

And still there was no vaccine or treatment for any filovirus, including Ebola. Nor was there a vaccine or medical countermeasure against other viruses that seemed ready for a breakthrough into the human species: Sars, Mers, Nipah.

What I propose to look at is a global outbreak that might be termed a Level 4 event worldwide outbreak of a Biosafety Level 4 emerging virus that travels in the air from person to person, and is vaccineless and untreatable with modern medicine.

Normally, the newsfeeds didn’t interrupt everyone’s interactive sitcoms and soap operas unless something really major had happened. Like the outbreak of some new killer virus, or another major city vanishing in a mushroom cloud. Big stuff like that.

If SARS had conformed to the perverse pattern of presymptomatic infectivity, its 2003 emergence wouldn’t be a case history in good luck and effective outbreak response. It would be a much darker story. The much darker story remains to be told, probably not about this virus but about another. When the Next Big One comes, we can guess, it will likely conform to the same perverse pattern, high infectivity preceding notable symptoms. That will help it to move through cities and airports like an angel of death.

And although better coverage of the outbreak’s evolution in the press couldn’t have stopped the influenza virus, a single newspaper headline in Philadelphia saying “Don’t Go to Any Parades; for the Love of God Cancel Your Stupid Parade” could have saved hundreds of lives. It would have done a lot more than those telling people, “Don’t Get Scared!” Telling people that things are fine is not the same as making them fine. This failure is in the past. Journalists and editors had their reasons. Risking jail time is no joke. But learning from this breakdown in truth-telling is important because the fourth estate can’t fail again. We are fortunate today to have organizations like the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the World Health Organization that track how diseases are progressing and report these findings. In the event of an outbreak similar to the Spanish flu, they will be wonderful resources. I hope we’ll be similarly lucky to have journalists who will be able to share necessary information with the public. The public is at its strongest when it is well informed. Despite Lippmann’s claims to the contrary, we are smart, and we are good, and we are always stronger when we work together. If there is a next time, it would be very much to our benefit to remember that.

One way to understand viruses is to think about them as biological machines. A virus is a wet nanomachine, a tiny, complicated, slightly fuzzy mechanism, which is rubbery, flexible, wobbly, and often a little bit imprecise in its operation—a microscopic nugget of squishy parts. Viruses are subtle, logical, tricky, reactive, devious, opportunistic. They are constantly evolving, their forms steadily changing as time passes. Like all kinds of life, viruses possess a relentless drive to reproduce themselves so that they can persist through time.

A question has to be asked: If a Level 4 emerging virus spread to a million people in North America, or in any continent, would hospitals be able to handle the patients and give them care? Would epidemiologists be able to trace and break the chains of transmission if a million people were infected?

Ebola, that little bastard of a bug, had popped up earlier in the summer in Sierra Leone in the worst outbreak in history. Was it possible that global warming had changed something important about the ecological balance in Africa and turned it into an optimal, continent-sized petri dish for breeding that virus?

...because she remembered saying It seems like it's been fairly well contained, but here's an epidemiological question: if you're talking about outbreaks of infectious disease, isn't fairly well contained essentially the same thing as not contained at all? ... A virus is either contained or it isn't. It's a binary condition.

Trying to play my part and stay home, Burying my nose in a book like a gnome, But I know how Rapunzel felt in the tower When she wanted to feel the rain shower... It's like being in your forties out of a fort When your forte is dancing barefoot... Instead of being trapped I chose to cut short, To leave the port, And not go kaput!

The IRF had just been completed, after nine years of construction. The facility is part of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, which in turn is a part of the National Institutes of Health, or NIH. The IRF’s mission is to develop experimental drugs and vaccines, called medical countermeasures, that could defeat lethal emerging viruses and advanced biological weapons.

virus, a single newspaper headline in Philadelphia saying “Don’t Go to Any Parades; for the Love of God Cancel Your Stupid Parade” could have saved hundreds of lives. It would have done a lot more than those telling people, “Don’t Get Scared!” Telling people that things are fine is not the same as making them fine. This failure is in the past. Journalists and editors had their reasons. Risking jail time is no joke. But learning from this breakdown in truth-telling is important because the fourth estate can’t fail again. We are fortunate today to have organizations like the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the World Health Organization that track how diseases are progressing and report these findings. In the event of an outbreak similar to the Spanish flu, they will be wonderful resources. I hope we’ll be similarly lucky to have journalists who will be able to share necessary information with the public. The public is at its strongest when it is well informed. Despite Lippmann’s claims to the contrary, we are smart, and we are good, and we are always stronger when we work together. If there is a next time, it would be very much to our benefit to remember that.

He could now see the problem only too clearly: The local people didn’t believe that Ebola was real. The virus was out there, it was spreading, and the local people would become violent if the team tried to find it. It was very clear to him—after nearly being killed in a village—that his nation was heading for a disaster. All he could do, personally, was just keep working and try to keep his family safe.

When she started working at USAMRIID, Hensley had no knowledge of space suits and no interest in working in a hot zone; she planned to do research on a mild virus that causes common colds, especially in children. This kind of cold virus infects many kinds of wild animals. Hensley thought that one of the wild cold viruses could jump out of an animal into a person somewhere on earth and start a global outbreak of a fatal, emerging cold.

billionaire’s death. After all, the people of Planet Earth had other concerns. The ongoing energy crisis. Catastrophic climate change. Widespread famine, poverty, and disease. Half a dozen wars. You know: “dogs and cats living together … mass hysteria!” Normally, the newsfeeds didn’t interrupt everyone’s interactive sitcoms and soap operas unless something really major had happened. Like the outbreak of some new killer virus, or another major

The red zones of Doctors Without Border were, in effect, giant plastic bags in which people infected with emergent Ebola were kept. This technique trapped the virus inside the plastic bag, where it would work its way through the human bodies in the bag, killing many of them—but the virus couldn’t escape from the bag. The red zones were artificial walls placed around hot spots of Ebola in order to break the growing chains of infection in the human species.

Viruses more powerful and dangerous than Ebola were going to emerge in the future, and medical people were going to have to deal with them. “If we don’t help, what message are we sending our children?” Hensley would later say. “Our children are going to inherit these problems, and people are dying. Part of the responsibility of a parent is to teach our children how to be responsible. We have to set the example for our staff, our families, and the patients in Africa.

By now, the warriors who stand at the gates of the virosphere understand that they face a long struggle against formidable enemies. Many of their weapons will fail, but some will begin to work. The human species carries certain advantages in this fight and has things going for it that viruses do not. These include self-awareness, the ability to work in teams, and the willingness to sacrifice, traits that have served us well during our expansion into our environment. If viruses can change, we can change, too.

Everything nowadays moves around the planet faster, including viruses. If SARS had conformed to the perverse pattern of presymptomatic infectivity, its 2003 emergence wouldn’t be a case history in good luck and effective outbreak response. It would be a much darker story. The much darker story remains to be told, probably not about this virus but about another. When the Next Big One comes, we can guess, it will likely conform to the same perverse pattern, high infectivity preceding notable symptoms. That will help it to move through cities and airports like an angel of death.

If they would have acknowledged this [SARS] early, and we could have seen the virus as it occurred in south China, we probably could have isolated it before it got out of hand,” explained one infectious disease expert. “But they completely hid it. They hide everything. You can’t even find out how many people die from earthquakes.”2438 The foundation of the theoretical models is openness and cooperation for rapid detection of outbreaks of influenza. “Would they admit to it if it was here?” one Asian diplomat asked. “That’s the big question, since they deny everything left, right and center.

Nobody knew then, nor does anybody know now, where emerging viruses are going or what one of them might become. The human host has been gathering itself into gigantic supercities, teeming urban megahives packed with tens of millions of individuals jammed into a small space, who are breathing one another’s air and touching one another’s bodies. The supercities are growing larger all the time. Many of the world’s largest supercities are crowded with people who have little or no access to doctors and medical care. The cities are connected by airline routes, and the human host has zero immunity to any emerging virus.

To study its effect on a living, struggling human body, he meant. To do that, you would need the right combination of hospital facilities, BSL-4 facilities, dedicated and expert professionals, and circumstances. You couldn’t do it during the next outbreak at a mission clinic in an African village. You would need to bring Ebola virus into captivity—into a research situation, under highly controlled scrutiny—and not just in the form of frozen samples. You would need to study a raging infection inside somebody’s body. That isn’t easy to arrange. He added: “We haven’t had an Ebola patient yet in the US.” But for everything that happens, there is a first time.

Almost a year after the start of the corona crisis, how is the mental health of the population? MD: For the time being, there are few figures that show the evolution of possible indicators such as the intake of antidepressants and anxiolytics or the number of suicides. But it is especially important to place mental well-being in the corona crisis in its historical continuity. Mental health had been declining for decades. There has long been a steady increase in the number of depression and anxiety problems and the number of suicides. And in recent years there has been an enormous growth in absenteeism due to psychological suffering and burnouts. The year before the corona outbreak, you could feel this malaise growing exponentially. This gave the impression that society was heading for a tipping point where a psychological 'reorganization' of the social system was imperative. This is happening with corona. Initially, we noticed people with little knowledge of the virus conjure up terrible fears, and a real social panic reaction became manifested. This happens especially if there is already a strong latent fear in a person or population. The psychological dimensions of the current corona crisis are seriously underestimated. A crisis acts as a trauma that takes away an individual's historical sense. The trauma is seen as an isolated event in itself, when in fact it is part of a continuous process. For example, we easily overlook the fact that a significant portion of the population was strangely relieved during the initial lockdown, feeling liberated from stress and anxiety. I regularly heard people say: "Yes these measures are heavy-handed, but at least I can relax a bit." Because the grind of daily life stopped, a calm settled over society. The lockdown often freed people from a psychological rut. This created unconscious support for the lockdown. If the population had not already been exhausted by their life, and especially their jobs, there would never have been support for the lockdown. At least not as a response to a pandemic that is not too bad compared to the major pandemics of the past. You noticed something similar when the first lockdown came to an end. You then regularly heard statements such as "We are not going to start living again like we used to, get stuck in traffic again" and so on. People did not want to go back to the pre-corona normal. If we do not take into account the population's dissatisfaction with its existence, we will not understand this crisis and we will not be able to resolve it. By the way, I now have the impression that the new normal has become a rut again, and I would not be surprised if mental health really starts to deteriorate in the near future. Perhaps especially if it turns out that the vaccine does not provide the magical solution that is expected from it.

On the other hand, irrational fears are difficult, if not impossible, to quantify. Here’s an example: when 152 people were infected with swine flu in Mexico in 2009, people around the world, prodded by the media’s manufactured hysteria, erupted in fear of an epidemic. We were warned that the threat was everywhere—that everyone was potentially at risk; however, the data showed these fears to be completely unwarranted. Weeks into the “outbreak,” there were around 1,000 reported cases of the virus in 20 countries. The number of fatalities stood at 26—25 in Mexico, and one in the United States (a boy who had just traveled to Texas from Mexico). Yet schools were closed, travel was restricted, emergency rooms were flooded, hundreds of thousands of pigs were killed, hand sanitizer and face masks disappeared from store shelves, and network news stories about swine flu consumed 43% of airtime.9 “There is too much hysteria in the country and so far, there hasn’t been that great a danger,” commented Congressman Ron Paul in response. “It’s overblown, grossly so.”10 He should know. During Paul’s first session in Congress in 1976, a swine flu outbreak led Congress to vote to vaccinate the entire country. (He voted against it.) Twenty-five people died from the vaccination itself, while only one person was killed from the actual virus; hundreds, if not more, contracted Guillain-Barre syndrome, a paralyzing neurological illness, as a result of the vaccine. Nearly 25 percent of the population was vaccinated before the effort was cancelled due to safety concerns.

The virosphere permeates the earth’s atmosphere, which is filled with viruses blowing in the wind. Around ten million virus particles land on every square meter of the earth each day, drifting down from the air. Viruses saturate the soil and the sea. A liter of seawater contains more virus particles than any other form of life. Viruses exist in vast numbers in the human gut, infecting all of the four thousand different kinds of bacteria that live naturally in a person’s intestines. Viruses can sometimes infect other viruses. A giant virus named the Mamavirus, which was discovered infecting amoebae that live in a water-cooling tower in Paris, gets infected by a small virus called the Sputnik. A Mamavirus particle with Sputnik disease is one sick virus—deformed and unable to replicate very well.

A virus particle is a very small capsule made of proteins locked together in a mathematical pattern. The pattern of the interlocking proteins in a virus is far more complicated than a snowflake. The protein capsule is sometimes wrapped in an oily membrane. Inside the capsule there is a small amount of DNA or RNA, the molecules that contain the genetic code of the virus. The genetic code is the virus’s operating system, or wetware, the complete set of instructions for the virus to make copies of itself. Unlike a snowflake or any other kind of crystal, a virus is able to re-create its form. It would be as if a single snowflake started copying itself as it falls, and those copies of the snowflake copy themselves, creating ever-growing numbers of identical copies of the first snowflake, until the air is filled with falling snow, and each flake is a perfect replica of the first flake.

To summarise, an outbreak of mysterious pneumonia in a copper mine, more than 1,800 kilometres by road from Wuhan, led to patient samples being sent to Wuhan for analysis. A 2013 medical thesis concluded, after incorporating results shared by the WIV, that these miners had likely been infected by a SARS-like coronavirus from bats in the mine. An expedition by Wuhan virologists to seek the viral cause brought back hundreds of samples from bats. Their repeated visits to the mine turned up a bat-borne coronavirus in 2013, which was recognised to be a novel SARS-like coronavirus. The WIV team partly sequenced this new virus in 2017 and then fully sequenced it in 2018. When its sequence was found to closely match the sequence of the virus causing Covid-19, the Wuhan scientists published it under a new name and failed to cite their own paper detailing its discovery or to reveal that they had been studying the virus over the past few years or to mention that it had come from a mine where there had been a fatal outbreak of pneumonia.

By the time that paper appeared, the SARS epidemic of 2003 had been stopped, with the final toll at 8,098 people infected, of whom 774 died. The last case was detected and isolated in Taiwan on June 15. Hong Kong had been declared “SARS-free.” Singapore and Canada had been declared “SARS-free.” The whole world was supposedly “SARS-free.” What those declarations meant, more precisely, was that no SARS infections were currently raging in humans. But the virus hadn’t been eradicated. This was a zoonosis, and no disease scientist could doubt that its causal agent still lurked within one or more reservoir hosts—the palm civet, the raccoon dog, or whatever—in Guangdong and maybe elsewhere too. People celebrated the end of the outbreak, but those best informed celebrated most guardedly. SARS-CoV wasn’t gone, it was only hiding. It could return. In late December, it did. Like an aftershock to a quake, a new case broke in Guangdong. Soon afterward, three more. One patient was a waitress who had been exposed to a civet. On January 5, 2004, the day the first case was confirmed, Guangdong authorities reversed policy again, ordering the death and disposal of every masked palm civet held at a farm or a market in the province. Wild civets were another question, left unanswered.

This outbreak is the result of several forces coming together. The enemy is not just the virus itself. We ourselves are also our own worst enemies in this fight. Or at the very least, we are accomplices to the crime. I'm told that there are a lot of people who are now suddenly waking up to just how meaningless it is to go around every day shouting empty slogans about how awesome our country is. They know that those cadres who go around giving speeches on political education, but who never take concrete action are utterly useless. We refer to them as people who live off the labor of their mouths. And they certainly know that a society that lacks common sense and fails to pursue the facts as they present themselves, not only ends up harming people through words, but can actually result in the loss of human lives. Many, many human lives. This is a lesson that resonates deeply. And also comes with a heavy weight. Even though we have all lived through the SARS epidemic of 2003, it seems we have all quickly forgotten the lessons we supposedly learned then. Now fast forward to 2020. Will we forget again? The devil is always on our heels and if we aren't careful, he will catch up to us again and torture us until we finally wake up. The real question is, do we even want to wake up?

In the introduction, I wrote that COVID had started a war, and nobody won. Let me amend that. Technology won, specifically, the makers of disruptive new technologies and all those who benefit from them. Before the pandemic, American politicians were shaking their fists at the country’s leading tech companies. Republicans insisted that new media was as hopelessly biased against them as traditional media, and they demanded action. Democrats warned that tech giants like Amazon, Facebook, Apple, Alphabet, and Netflix had amassed too much market (and therefore political) power, that citizens had lost control of how these companies use the data they generate, and that the companies should therefore be broken into smaller, less dangerous pieces. European governments led a so-called techlash against the American tech powerhouses, which they accused of violating their customers’ privacy. COVID didn’t put an end to any of these criticisms, but it reminded policymakers and citizens alike just how indispensable digital technologies have become. Companies survived the pandemic only by allowing wired workers to log in from home. Consumers avoided possible infection by shopping online. Specially made drones helped deliver lifesaving medicine in rich and poor countries alike. Advances in telemedicine helped scientists and doctors understand and fight the virus. Artificial intelligence helped hospitals predict how many beds and ventilators they would need at any one time. A spike in Google searches using phrases that included specific symptoms helped health officials detect outbreaks in places where doctors and hospitals are few and far between. AI played a crucial role in vaccine development by absorbing all available medical literature to identify links between the genetic properties of the virus and the chemical composition and effects of existing drugs.

A virus particle is a very small capsule made of proteins locked together in a mathematical pattern. The pattern of the interlocking proteins in a virus is far more complicated than a snowflake. The protein capsule is sometimes wrapped in an oily membrane. Inside the capsule there is a small amount of DNA or RNA, the molecules that contain the genetic code of the virus. The genetic code is the virus’s operating system, or wetware, the complete set of instructions for the virus to make copies of itself. Unlike a snowflake or any other kind of crystal, a virus is able to re-create its form. It would be as if a single snowflake started copying itself as it falls, and those copies of the snowflake copy themselves, creating ever-growing numbers of identical copies of the first snowflake, until the air is filled with falling snow, and each flake is a perfect replica of the first flake. Many virologists feel that viruses are not truly living things. At the same time, viruses are obviously not dead. Virologists like to describe them as life forms. The term is a contradiction: How can something be a form of life that isn’t alive? Viruses carry on their existence in a misty borderland that lies between life and death, a gray zone where the things we encounter are neither provably alive nor certainly dead. One way to understand viruses is to think about them as biological machines. A virus is a wet nanomachine, a tiny, complicated, slightly fuzzy mechanism, which is rubbery, flexible, wobbly, and often a little bit imprecise in its operation—a microscopic nugget of squishy parts. Viruses are subtle, logical, tricky, reactive, devious, opportunistic. They are constantly evolving, their forms steadily changing as time passes. Like all kinds of life, viruses possess a relentless drive to reproduce themselves so that they can persist through time. When a virus starts copying itself strongly and rapidly in a host, the process is called virus amplification. As a virus amplifies itself in its host, the host, a living organism, can be destroyed. Viruses are the undead of the living world, the zombies of deep time. Nobody knows the origin of viruses—how they came into existence or when they appeared in the history of life on earth. Viruses may be examples or relics of life forms that operated at the dawn of life. Viruses may have come into existence with the first stirrings of life on the planet, roughly four billion years ago. Or they may have arisen after life started, during the time when single-celled bacteria had already come into existence—nobody knows.

flicker?" He points to the screen and pauses the vid. "That's when they switched the footage." I stare at the screen. "How do I know you're not the ones lying?" "You saw it yourself on the street," Meyer says. I glance up from the pad and lock eyes with Meyer. "What else are they lying about?" Jayson chuckles. "Well… that's going to take longer than we have." "Here's one," Meyer says. "Remember that last viral outbreak that killed a bunch of Level Ones?" "3005B?" My heart races. That's the virus that ultimately killed Ben thirteen years ago. "That's it. The one they use in all the broadcasts to remind citizens how important it is to get your MedVac updates? It wasn't an accident." We were always told a virus swept through Level One because they hadn't gotten their updated VacTech yet. Hundreds of people died in the day it took to get everyone up to date. "My brother died because of that." Everything I've found out over the last week suddenly grips me with fear. This can't be real. My breath shortens, and suddenly my head starts slowly spinning. Everything goes blurry. Then black. ~~~ "It's all right, kid," a distant voice, which must be Jayson's, echoes in the back of my mind. The room swirls around me. Their faces blur in and out of focus. "Meyer, get her." Blinking a couple of times, I try to sit up. I guess I fell. Meyer's warm hands rest on the back of my neck, my head in his lap. "Don't stand. You could pass out again," he says. He helps me sit up. "Are you okay?" "No, I'm not okay," I mumble. "This is too much." I feel like I should be crying, but I'm not. The reality is that the anger I feel is so much greater than any sadness. Neither Meyer nor Jayson speak, and let me mull over what I've just heard. "Why did they do that?" I eventually ask. "Two reasons, kid," Jayson says. "To cull the Level Ones, and to scare Elore into taking the VacTech. If viral outbreaks are still a threat, no one questions it, and continues believing inside the perimeter is the safest place for them." "I'm sorry about your brother," Meyer says as he stands, offering me his hand. His words are genuine, filled with the emotions of someone who has also experienced loss. "I hate to end this," Jayson interrupts, "but it's time to go." Meyer eyes Jayson, and then me. "I understand if you're not ready, but you need to choose soon. Within the next few days." I take his hand and pull myself to my feet. Words catch somewhere between my heart and throat. The old me wants to tell them to get lost and to never bother me again. It's so risky. Then again, I can't stand by while Manning and Direction kill people to keep us in the dark. Joining is the right thing to do. Feelings I've never experienced before well inside my chest, and I long to shout, When do we start? Instead, I stuff them down and stare at the ground. Subtle pressure squeezes my hand, bringing me back to the present. I never let go of Meyer's hand. How long have we been like that? He releases my hand as he mutters and steps back. The heat from his touch still flickers on my skin. You didn't have to go. I clear my throat and turn toward Meyer. Our eyes lock. "I've already decided," I tell him. "I'll do it. For Ben. Direction caused his death, and there's no way I'm standing by and letting them do this to more people." I barely recognize my own voice as I ask, "What do I do?" A slap hits my back and I choke. Jayson. "Atta girl. Meyer and I knew you had it in you." "Jayson, you have to give Avlyn some time." Meyer steps toward me and holds his handheld in the air toward Jayson. "I'll bring her up to speed." "Sure thing." Jayson throws his hands in the air and walks to the other side of the room. "Sorry," Meyer murmurs. "Jayson is pretty… overwhelming. At least until you know him. Even then…" "Oh, it's fine." A white lie. "He's a nice guy. Now, why don't you tell me the instructions

Kjell Gunnar Beraas/Doctors Without Borders Doctors Without Borders workers at an Ebola treatment center in Guinea in April, shortly after the virus was recognized. By DENISE GRADY and SHERI FINK Patient Zero in the Ebola outbreak, researchers

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, less than half of us get the annual flu vaccine, even though each year in the United States the flu kills up to twenty thousand people and lands over one hundred thousand in the hospital, and the vaccine can typically prevent or at least soften the blow of the virus if it’s contracted. In a bad year, when the flu is especially virulent, up to sixty thousand people in the United States will die if they are unvaccinated. Tens of thousands of Americans perish in car crashes each year, and more than half of those people weren’t wearing seat belts. Nearly a quarter of teenagers in fatal accidents are distracted by their cell phones; every day eleven teenagers die as a result of texting while driving (car crashes are the leading cause of death of teens in the United States). And vanity must trump sanity when it comes to tanning: more than 3.5 million individuals are diagnosed with skin cancer yearly and nearly ten thousand of them die. Today one in five deaths in the United States is now associated with obesity. Over the two-year period of the Ebola virus “outbreak,” there was one U.S. death. So, indeed, éclairs are scarier than Ebola.

By April 23, 2014, thirty-four cases and six deaths from Ebola in Liberia were recorded. By mid-June, 16 more people died. At the time it was thought to be malaria but when seven more people died the following month tests showed that was the Ebola virus. The primary reason for the spreading of the Ebola virus was the direct contact from one person to the next and the ingesting of bush meat. Soon doctors and nurses also became infected. On July 2, 2014, the head surgeon of Redemption Hospital was treated at the JFK Medical Center in Monrovia, where he died from the disease. His death was followed by four nurses at Phebe Hospital in Bong County. At about the same time two U.S. health care workers, Dr. Kent Brantly and a nurse were also infected with the disease. However, they were medically evacuated from Liberia to the United States for treatment where they made a full recovery. Another doctor from Uganda was not so lucky and died from the disease. Arik Air suspended all flights between Nigeria and Liberia and checkpoints were set up at all the ports and border crossings. In August of 2014, the impoverished slum area of West Point was cordoned off. Riots ensued as protesters turned violent. The looting of a clinic of its supplies, including blood-stained bed sheets and mattresses caused the military to shoot into the crowds. Still more patients became infected, causing a shortage of staff and logistics. By September there had been a total of 3,458 cases of which there were 1,830 deaths according to the World Health Organization. Hospitals and clinics could no longer handle this crisis and patients who were treated outside died before they could get help. There were cases where the bodies were just dumped into the Mesurado River. The Ivory Coast out of compassion, opened carefully restricted humanitarian routes and resumed the previously suspended flights to Liberia. Ellen Johnson Sirleaf the president of Libera sent a letter to President Barack Obama concerning the outbreak of Ebola that was on the verge of overrunning her country. The message was desperate, “I am being honest with you when I say that at this rate, we will never break the transmission chain and the virus will overwhelm us.” Having been a former finance minister and World Bank official, Johnson Sirleaf was not one for histrionics however she recognized the pandemic as extremely dangerous. The United States responded to her request and American troops came in and opened a new 60-bed clinic in the Sierra Leone town of Kenema, but by then the outbreak was described as being out of control. Still not understanding the dangerous contagious aspects of this epidemic at least eight Liberian soldiers died after contracting the disease from a single female camp follower. In spite of being a relatively poor country, Cuba is one of the most committed in deploying doctors to crisis zones. It sent more than 460 Cuban doctors and nurses to West Africa. In October Germany sent medical supplies and later that month a hundred additional U.S. troops arrived in Liberia, bringing the total to 565 to assist in the fight against the deadly disease. To understand the severity of the disease, a supply order was placed on October 15th for a 6 month supply of 80,000 body bags and 1 million protective suits. At that time it was reported that 223 health care workers had been infected with Ebola, and 103 of them had died in Liberia. Fear of the disease also slowed down the functioning of the Liberian government. President Sirleaf, had in an emergency announcement informed absent government ministers and civil service leaders to return to their duties. She fired 10 government officials, including deputy ministers in the central government who failed to return to work.

If you have ulcers (or fever blisters), you probably have the herpes simplex virus (it is usually HVS type 1 but it can also be HVS type 2). Here are some more important herpes outbreak triggers that encourage the outbreak of this virus.

Unfortunately, it was far too late to contain the virus. It was already nationwide.

As far as they were concerned, big changes were coming on the horizon. The virus was playing a huge role in that. They had to see the full picture. This was about their ultimate survival.

There’s a curious correlation between these sunspot peaks and flu epidemics. In the twentieth century, six of the nine sunspot peaks occurred in tandem with massive flu outbreaks. In fact, the worst outbreaks of the century, killing millions in 1918 and 1919, followed a sunspot peak in 1917. This might just be coincidence, of course. Or it might not. Outbreaks and pandemics are thought to be caused by antigenic drift, when a mutation occurs in the DNA of a virus, or antigenic shift, when a virus acquires new genes from a related strain. When the antigenic drift or shift in a virus is significant enough, our bodies don’t recognize it and have no antibodies to fight it—and that spells trouble. It’s like a criminal on the run taking on a whole new identity so his pursuers can’t recognize him. What causes antigenic drift? Mutations, which can be caused by radiation. Which is what the sun spews forth in significantly greater than normal amounts every eleven years.

In March 1942, the Office of the Surgeon General noted a growing incidence of jaundice (yellowing of the skin caused by liver disease) among US Army personnel stationed in California, England, Hawaii, Iceland, and Louisiana. All of those jaundiced had recently received a yellow fever vaccine, which, in addition to containing yellow fever vaccine virus, contained human serum as a stabilizing agent. On April 15, 1942, the surgeon general ordered that yellow fever vaccination be discontinued and that all existing lots be recalled and destroyed. Shortly thereafter, manufacturers made a yellow fever vaccine with water instead of serum, but it was too late. The serum used to stabilize the yellow fever vaccine had been obtained from nurses, medical students, and interns at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, several of whom had a history of jaundice and one of whom was actively infected at the time of the donation. By June 1942, fifty thousand US servicemen had been hospitalized with severe liver disease, and 150 had died from what would later be known as hepatitis B. Of the 141 lots of yellow fever vaccine provided to the army, seven were definitely contaminated. Among those who received one of those seven lots, 78 percent became infected. When the dust settled, 330,000 servicemen had been infected and one thousand had died. This was then and remains today one of the worst single-source outbreaks of a fatal infection ever recorded.

The first SARS outbreak had ended because those infected had been isolated quickly and prevented from infecting others. Those capable of infecting others were easy to identify because they were so obviously ill. There were few, if any, asymptomatic spreaders. The virus had not vanished, however. “It’s still out there,” said Joe. “It didn’t come from outer space. There’s a very meaningful probability that it can arise again.

The second most important discovery that Josh found was the shift in the proportion of excess mortality from old to young that occurred from 2020 to 2021. In 2020 there were 592,000 excess deaths with 126,000 under the age of 65 (approximately 21%). In the second year of the outbreak, there were 512,000 excess deaths with 181,000 under the age of 65 (approximately 35%). The millennials saw the greatest percent increase in mortality of 45% from 42,000 to 61,000. This shift in mortality to younger groups cannot be due to COVID, because the virus was already mutating and becoming less virulent, and we had already determined that the virus killed mostly older people with comorbidities.

An E. coli outbreak at Chipotle Mexican Grill outlets in October 2015 left fifty-five customers ill and shattered the restaurant chain’s reputation. Sales plummeted, and Chipotle’s share price dropped 42 percent to a three-year low, where it languished through the summer of 2017. At the heart of the Denver-based company’s crisis was the ever-present problem faced by companies that depend on multiple outside suppliers to deliver parts and ingredients: a lack of transparency and accountability across complex supply chains. Many Chipotle patrons probably assumed the outbreak stemmed from poor practices at one of the chain’s restaurants or facilities. But, as painful as that would be for the company’s reputation, the reality was actually worse: Chipotle had no way to pinpoint where the dangerous virus got into its food offerings; it only knew that it came from one of its many third-party beef suppliers. Five months later, the best management could come up with was that it “most likely” came from contaminated Australian beef. At the heart of the problem was the lack of visibility that Chipotle—like any food provider—has over the global supply chain of ingredients that flow into its operations. That lack of knowledge meant that Chipotle could neither prevent the contamination before it happened, nor contain it in a targeted way after it was discovered.

In 2001 the entire cattle and sheep industry of Great Britain was thrown into chaos by the discovery of foot-and-mouth disease in Northumberland. Within nine months, 3.8 million animals had been slaughtered to prevent the spread of the disease; and massive damage to agriculture was compounded by an estimated £10 billion of income lost by the tourist industry due to restrictions on travel in rural areas, and the concomitant discouragement of visitors to Great Britain in general. For a time, the army was required to manage the slaughter of herds suspected of infection, along with the disruption to transport, communications, villages and towns all across the country. All this was demanded, not by the threat of a potentially lethal disease, but by international regulations governing agricultural transport and exchange – for as Franklin points out, foot-and-mouth ‘is harmless to humans and rarely infects them’, while even to sheep it is rarely fatal, and usually ‘no more severe than the common cold’. It mainly causes problems in dairy herds, where (although once again seldom lethal) it reduces milk yield; hence its economic impact, which is massively compounded by the inability of affected countries to trade with countries where the virus is absent or at least quiescent. Sheep are therefore slaughtered during a foot-and-mouth outbreak only because they can transmit unprofitability to other agricultural sectors. Foot-and-mouth disease is ‘only lethal to domestic animals because it is economically intolerable to humans’.

The Snohomish case probably did not spark the outbreaks in California, Connecticut, and elsewhere. Rather, that case was likely a dead end, with no onward transmission, thanks to quick, firm containment measures taken in Washington.

After decades of war and months of virus-fueled isolation, the people of Uíge did not waste energy.

Two epidemics swept the world in 1918. One was Spanish influenza, the first recorded outbreak of which was at a Kansas army base in March 1918. As if to mock the efforts of men to kill one another, the virus spread rapidly across the United States and then crossed to Europe on the crowded American troopships.

SAFARI tents remain zipped, hotel pools are empty, game guides idle among lions and elephants. Tour operators across Africa are reporting the biggest drop in business in living memory. A specialist travel agency, SafariBookings.com, says a survey of 500 operators in September showed a fall in bookings of between 20% and 70%. Since then the trend has accelerated, especially in Botswana, Kenya, South Africa and Tanzania. Several American and European agents have stopped offering African tours for the time being. The reason is the outbreak of the Ebola virus in west Africa, which has killed more than 5,000 people. The epidemic is taking place far from the big safari destinations in eastern and southern Africa—as far or farther than the

DENGUE FEVER (BREAKBONE FEVER) Dengue fever is a viral infection found throughout Central America. In Costa Rica outbreaks involving thousands of people occur every year. Dengue is transmitted by aedes mosquitoes, which often bite during the daytime and are usually found close to human habitations, often indoors. They breed primarily in artificial water containers such as jars, barrels, cans, plastic containers and discarded tires. Dengue is especially common in densely populated, urban environments. Dengue usually causes flulike symptoms including fever, muscle aches, joint pains, headaches, nausea and vomiting, often followed by a rash. Most cases resolve uneventfully in a few days. Severe cases usually occur in children under the age of 15 who are experiencing their second dengue infection. There is no treatment for dengue fever except taking analgesics such as acetaminophen/paracetamol (Tylenol) and drinking plenty of fluids. Severe cases may require hospitalization for intravenous fluids and supportive care. There is no vaccine. The key to prevention is taking insect-protection measures. HEPATITIS A Hepatitis A is the second-most-common travel-related infection (after traveler’s diarrhea). It’s a viral infection of the liver that is usually acquired by ingestion of contaminated water, food or ice, though it may also be acquired by direct contact with infected persons. Symptoms may include fever, malaise, jaundice, nausea, vomiting and abdominal pain. Most cases resolve without complications, though hepatitis A occasionally causes severe liver damage. There is no treatment. The vaccine for hepatitis A is extremely safe and highly effective. You should get vaccinated before you go to Costa Rica. Because the safety of hepatitis A vaccine has not been established for pregnant women or children under the age of two, they should instead be given a gammaglobulin injection. LEISHMANIASIS Leishmaniasis occurs in the mountains and jungles of all Central American countries. The infection is transmitted by sand flies, which are about one-third the size of mosquitoes. Most cases occur in newly cleared forest or areas of secondary growth. The highest incidence is in Puerto Viejo de Talamanca. It causes slow-growing ulcers over exposed parts of the body There is no vaccine. RABIES Rabies is a viral infection of the brain and spinal cord that is almost always fatal. The rabies virus is carried in the saliva of infected animals and is typically transmitted through an animal bite, though contamination of any break in the skin with infected saliva may result in rabies. Rabies occurs in all Central American countries. However, in Costa Rica only two cases have been reported over the last 30 years. TYPHOID Typhoid fever is caused by ingestion of food or water contaminated by a species of salmonella known as Salmonella typhi . Fever occurs in virtually all cases. Other symptoms may include headache, malaise, muscle aches, dizziness, loss of appetite, nausea and abdominal pain. A pretrip vaccination for typoid is recommended, but not required. It’s usually given orally, and is also available as an injection. TRAVELER’S DIARRHEA Tap water is safe and of a high quality in Costa Rica, but when you’re far off the beaten path it’s best to avoid tap water unless it has been boiled, filtered or chemically disinfected (iodine tablets). To prevent diarrhea, be wary of dairy products that might contain unpasteurized milk; and be highly selective when eating food from street vendors.

We know that the backbone virus in SARS-CoV-2 is a horseshoe bat coronavirus,” he explains. “Those horseshoe bats live in southern China. Wuhan is well beyond their range. Wuhan doesn’t have horseshoe bats. This pandemic began in the middle of winter. But what Wuhan does have is China’s only level-4 virology institute, with the world’s largest collection of bat coronaviruses, that was doing aggressive gain-of-function research, including to make those highly pathogenic viruses more transmissible to human cells. We know that when the outbreak began, the SARS-CoV-2 virus was almost perfectly adapted for transmission to humans.

Yu realised the gravity of what he was reading – the world’s premiere coronavirus laboratory was in the same city as the outbreak of a novel coronavirus – and he knew instinctively what it could mean. The very city where the outbreak began is home to a Biosafety Level 4 (BSL-4) virology laboratory genetically manipulating coronaviruses in a dangerous way. Yu found the Wuhan Institute of Virology was one of only two BSL-4 laboratories in China. The second is the Harbin Institute of Veterinary Research, where work on animal viruses is conducted.

Yu set to work, night and day, investigating the laboratories, China’s bioweapons programs and the early whistleblowers, and scouring Chinese-language news sites. “This was a time when everyone was busy responding to the Covid outbreak,” Yu recalls. “Very few people were looking at the reason for the outbreak, let alone to establish the culpability of the CCP on this. I knew we had to find out the origin of this, we had to find out who is responsible for the spread of this virus. The overarching point was, we have to find out if China is responsible enough to keep bio-research safe.” It would be a several-months-long effort that Yu would finally present to Pompeo in April, with a long list of strong circumstantial evidence against the Wuhan Institute of Virology and an emphasis on the Chinese lab’s substandard and negligent biosafety practices.

This wasn’t even China’s first cover-up of a coronavirus. Global health authorities and world leaders should have, from the very get-go, been more alert to the possibility of a cover-up of the contagion from China, given immediate past experience from SARS in late 2002 and 2003. Back then, China had faced international condemnation for covering up the virus outbreak and failing to alert global health authorities. In China, public health information is classed as a “state secret” until the Ministry of Health approves its release.

Chinese authorities started systematically removing any mention of the virus online. This began on December 31, when technology services in China censored key words linked to the pandemic. The live-streaming platform YY censored words including “unknown Wuhan pneumonia” and “Wuhan Seafood Market”. WeChat censored phrases related to the pandemic, banned both speculative and factual information related to the outbreak, and removed even “neutral references to Chinese government efforts to handle the outbreak that had been reported on state media”, according to the Citizen Lab’s March 2020 report. The CCP censorship alarmed doctors and Chinese health authorities, who knew the precise opposite approach should be taken in order to save lives. This crucial point clearly shows China’s deliberate, intentional and clear-eyed decision to cover up the virus; to stop their own people and those internationally from finding out about it.

When the pandemic struck, Ghana, with a population of 31 million, had only 67 ventilators in its public hospitals. The number of ministers of state was more than twice the number of ventilators available to face the pandemic. Medical experts said ventilators were vital in treating the respiratory conditions occasioned by the virus. However, the nation bought less than 70 ventilators during the outbreak. That brings us to the next question. If the core fight against the pandemic did not receive the needed funding, then where did all the borrowed and domestic funds go? On what did Ghana spend so much that COVID-19 continues to feature as the main reason for the Akufo-Addo government's economic woes?

Corona Virus will never go away or find a cure, if there are people who are making lot of money out of it. If it seize to stop. They would even make their own, because to them is profit over people lives. We will go from pandemic, to endemic and to an outbreak, As long they are making money out of this virus.

massive outbreak of an engineered, highly contagious, highly deadly virus would not only excuse martial law to “limit the spread of the disease”, it would eliminate millions, if not ultimately billions of humans from the planet.

And where will this plague of yours come from?” “It will make the jump from animals to humans in a place where sanitary conditions leave something to be desired. A Chinese wet market, for example. It will start slowly, a cluster of local cases. But because we are so interconnected, it will spread around the globe like wildfire. Chinese tourists will bring it to Western Europe in the early stages of the outbreak, even before the virus has been identified. Within a few weeks, half of Italy’s population will be infected, perhaps more. What happens then, Cesare?

Researchers were able to sequence the DNA of the SARS virus within thirty-one days of the outbreak—compared to fifteen years for HIV.

The “blood vomit” disease also sounds very similar to the effects caused by the Ebola virus. Several outbreaks of this virus have occurred since 1993 such as in 2000, 2001, 2004, and 2007. In fact, there have been more outbreaks of Ebola since 1993 than in all previous years. In this time period there were 18 known outbreaks that killed over 1,000 people. The mortality rate is staggering with the disease, which kills between 51%-83% of those who become infected. If this pathogen mutates so that it is more easily transmissible the world could have another Black Death on its hands. A global death toll between 51%-83% would not be the end of the world but would certainly be the end of the world as we know it.

They evaluated—and ultimately rejected—the idea of closing schools for the rest of the year, but worked with school districts, businesses, and state and local officials to make sure that everyone had the resources they needed to respond in the event of an outbreak. Although the United States did not escape unscathed—more than 12,000 Americans lost their lives—we were fortunate that this particular strain of H1N1 turned out to be less deadly than the experts had feared, and news that the pandemic had abated by mid-2010 didn’t generate headlines. Still, I took great pride in how well our team had performed. Without fanfare or fuss, not only had they helped keep the virus contained, but they’d strengthened our readiness for any future public health emergency—which would make all the difference several years later, when the Ebola outbreak in West Africa would trigger a full-blown panic.

In a February 5, 2020 email, for example, he advised his putative former boss, President Obama’s Health and Human Services Secretary, Sylvia Burwell, on the futility of masking the healthy.2 On February 17, he invoked the same rationale in an interview with USA Today: A mask is much more appropriate for someone who is infected and you’re trying to prevent them from infecting other people than it is in protecting you against infection. If you look at the masks that you buy in a drug store, the leakage around that doesn’t really do much to protect you. Now, in the United States, there is absolutely no reason whatsoever to wear a mask.3 During a January 28 speech to HHS regulators, he explained the fruitlessness of masking asymptomatic people. The one thing historically people need to realize, that even if there is some asymptomatic transmission, in all the history of respiratory borne viruses of any type, asymptomatic transmission has never been the driver of outbreaks. The driver of outbreaks is always a symptomatic person. Even if there’s a rare asymptomatic person that might transmit, an epidemic is not driven by asymptomatic carriers.4

Wayna Qhapaq died in the first smallpox epidemic. The virus struck Tawantinsuyu again in 1533, 1535, 1558, and 1565. Each time the consequences were beyond the imagination of our fortunate age. “They died by scores and hundreds,” recalled one eyewitness to the 1565 outbreak. “Villages were depopulated. Corpses were scattered over the fields or piled up in the houses or huts.… The fields were uncultivated; the herds were untended [and] the price of food rose to such an extent that many persons found it beyond their reach. They escaped the foul disease, but only to be wasted by famine.

During a January 28 speech to HHS regulators, he explained the fruitlessness of masking asymptomatic people. The one thing historically people need to realize, that even if there is some asymptomatic transmission, in all the history of respiratory borne viruses of any type, asymptomatic transmission has never been the driver of outbreaks. The driver of outbreaks is always a symptomatic person. Even if there’s a rare asymptomatic person that might transmit, an epidemic is not driven by asymptomatic carriers.4

Although, yes, countries that have dealt with the public health threat well have been rewarded with better economic performance relative to others, all have seen downturns relative to what might have been expected before the pandemic. And in countries with large outbreaks of the virus, the GDP cost of getting the pandemic under control can be huge in the short term.

One of the more fascinating examples came when a reader sent me a 1973 paper from what at the time was the Journal of Hygiene (now known as Epidemiology and Infection). The paper reported on an outbreak of respiratory illness in 1969 at a British research base in Antarctica—in the middle of the Antarctic winter, after 17 weeks of complete isolation. Out of nowhere, six of the twelve researchers at the base had developed colds. Despite intensive study, the researchers never figured out how the illness had started or what pathogen was behind it. I linked to the piece on Twitter as an example of the absurdity of hoping that lockdowns could ever completely contain a respiratory virus.12

In all, SARS-1 had been the subject of six outbreaks since its last-known natural occurrence, each one the consequence of its escape from a laboratory: one time each in Singapore and Taiwan, and then four separate escapes from the same lab in Beijing.69 Another instance where an experiment in China had gone awry, and triggered the global spread of a novel virus, had occurred in 1977 and involved a strain of H1N1 influenza.

Antigenic shift generated the deadly 1918 influenza virus and the swine flu outbreak of 2009.

Coronavirus affects not only humans, but also animals as well. That is a fact as seen from around the world both in the wild and in enclosed habitats like zoos. Cats, dogs, minks, tigers, hyenas, hippos, leopards, just to name a few. There also seems to be direct correlation to outbreaks of avian flu, but the so called experts seem to think there is no coincidence between the two. I beg to differ. The avian outbreaks seem to occur within so called coronavirus hot spots. That is a coincidence to big to rule out. Captive birds like chickens have close contact with man, so there may be something there, but wild birds usually shun man. That means there must be another cause. Sewerage outflows can carry the corona virus to low water areas where wild birds drink, bathe and eat. As I have said, it is a too big a coincidence to rule out. Let's hope I'm wrong, but I just have that feeling...

The reality of the COVID-19 pandemic is you are likely getting daily exposures to the virus during peak outbreaks.

Society can be thought of as a collection of overlapping nodal networks (things like companies and cultivars), with each node representing a person and their connections to other people. Historically, pop cultures, simple memetic viruses, evolved to target single nodes. These cultures would flip target nodes (convert them) by offering individuals an easy life and positive emotional subsets. While these viruses lowered the birth rates among the individual nodes they flipped and could sometimes lead to wild outbreaks, those outbreaks were always contained within single or closely-related nodal networks, meaning they were never really an existential threat to our species. . . .The supervirus evolved a new strategy. Instead of flipping individual nodes, it works to flip entire nodal networks. Instead of selling the promise of minimizing emotional suffering within a single node, it entices nodal systems with the prospect of minimizing negative emotion across the entire network. 

I’ll never forget that first report, the Cape Town outbreak, only ten minutes of actual reporting then a full hour of speculating about what would happen if the virus ever made it to America. God bless the news. I hit speed dial thirty seconds later. I met with some of my nearest and dearest. They’d all seen the same report. I was the first one to come up with a workable pitch: a vaccine, a real vaccine for rabies. Thank God there is no cure for rabies. A cure would make people buy it only if they thought they were infected. But a vaccine! That’s preventative! People will keep taking that as long as they’re afraid it’s out there!

There are hosts of other (lesser known) supposed extinction models that state the dinosaurs died because of: • An explosion of a nearby star that sent deadly cosmic radiation to earth • Diseases (like viruses or bacterial outbreaks) • Starvation • Climate change • Acid rain • Toxic foods • Tsunamis or other local floods • An ice age • Parasites • Rapid fungal outbreaks • Egg disorders • Magnetic field reversals • Mammals ate too many of their eggs • Volcanic eruptions • Aliens that invaded and killed or took them (yes, there are people who believe this) Notice that man hunting them and destroying their habitats to the point of extinction is not listed as a possible reason and not even considered an option by evolutionists (since humans and dinosaurs cannot live together in their secular story). And yet this was surely the case, after the Flood, up until dinosaurs went fully extinct.

From the mid-1970s, CDC was seeking to justify its existence by assisting state health departments to track down small outbreaks of rabies and a mouse disease called hantavirus, and by linking itself to the military’s bioweapons projects. Looking back from 1994, Red Cross officer Paul Cummings told the San Francisco Chronicle that “The CDC increasingly needed a major epidemic” to justify its existence.23 According to Peter Duesberg, author of Inventing the AIDS Virus, the HIV/AIDS theory was salvation for American epidemic authorities.

COVID-19 can live on surfaces like metal, glass, or plastic for anywhere from two hours to nine days. The following study showed that the virus could live on cardboard for up to 24 hours, on copper for up to 4 hours, and on plastic and stainless steel for two or even three days. That's a long time, but the review also found that those viruses can be "efficiently inactivated," via disinfection with "62–71% ethanol, 0.5% hydrogen peroxide or 0.1% sodium hypochlorite within 1 minute.

All governments must invest in adequate, country-wide disease surveillance and early reporting systems which feed information from the grass roots to WHO’s Outbreak and Emergencies Programme. In reality, to succeed this will require economic incentives for early reporting, and assurances from WHO that reporting will not result in trade and travel restrictions without justification (a fear that led governments to downplay the extent of the Ebola outbreak in 2014).

1986, American Physician Doctor Robert Strecker stated that HIV was not only a man-made bio-weapon created by the US military, but that it was disseminated by the WHO in Africa in the 1970’s by inserting the killer virus into smallpox vaccines. Strecker’s theory went on to suggest the distribution of HIV did not stop with Africa, but continued in the US. According to the doctor, the outbreak of AIDS

These farms, most often yeast cells, a virus, or a bacterium, were inoculated with a circular strand of recombined genetic material called a plasmid. One early plasmid host was the common bacterium, Escherichia coli. (With this in mind, think about the E. coli outbreaks during the past couple of decades). Since as far back as 1977, therapeutic treatments have been grown from chimeric plasmid colonies.

Before addressing those questions, we need to understand the commonalities of the few pandemics we have information about: 1889, 1918, 1957, 1968, and 2009. First, all five came in waves. (A few scientists argue that the difference in lethality between 1918’s first and second waves mean that these were caused by different viruses, but evidence showing otherwise seems overwhelming. For one thing, exposure to the first wave provided as high as 94 percent protection against the second wave, far better protection than the best modern vaccine affords, and that’s just one piece of the evidence that the same virus caused both waves.) In fact, some investigators now speculate that the 1918 virus circulated in humans for several years before mutations allowed it to spread easily. If true, this would of course explode the hypothesis that Haskell was the origin. The 1889 pandemic virus did follow this pattern, generating two and a half years of sporadic outbreaks around the world, including

Many factors contribute to the case fatality rate during an outbreak, including diet, economic conditions, public health in general, and the medical care available in the location where an outbreak occurs. It’s hard to isolate the inherent ferocity of a virus from those contextual factors.

With the outbreak of the H1N1 virus, moderns have been reintroduced to the threat of pandemics. We have always been susceptible, of course, but most of us have short memories. When the next plague strikes, do we cite Psalm 91:5-7?

One was that, as live viruses, the attenuated Sabin poliovirus strains always possessed the potential to revert by mutation to virulence and neurotropism, leading to outbreaks of “vaccine-associated paralytic polio.” This possibility—that the vaccine itself would unleash epidemic disease—is not simply theoretical. Outbreaks of vaccine-associated polio occurred in the Philippines (2001), Madagascar (2002), China (2004), and Indonesia (2005).

In 1902, the outbreak occurred in the New England States. In 1908 it originated in Detroit. The origin of each of these new outbreaks was traced to the importation of vaccine virus for the propagation of vaccine for use in vaccinating people against smallpox.

improving the scientific basis to improve readiness.” By “the scientific basis” he meant the understanding of which virus groups to watch, the field capabilities to detect spillovers in remote places before they become regional outbreaks, the organizational capacities to control outbreaks before they become pandemics, plus the laboratory tools and skills to recognize known viruses speedily, to characterize new viruses almost as fast, and to create vaccines and therapies without much delay. If we can’t predict a forthcoming influenza pandemic or any other newly emergent virus, we can at least be vigilant; we can be well-prepared and quick to respond; we can be ingenious and scientifically sophisticated in the forms of our response.

He continued his vicious assaults on West 135 Street attacking every person in sight and spreading the infection to nearly fifty other people, before his body began to die and he was reanimated as a zombie. Even then, he would continue to spread the virus over the weekend.

It became a domino effect, as infected people took foolish risks, knowing full well they could spread the virus.