a global health massacre

I'm hearing from experts around the world about what the destruction of USAID is meaning: "a global health massacre." Millions of malnourished children left to starve. Babies born with neural tube defects. Programs against schistosomiasis abandoned. HIV positive patients left without ARV's. Surveillance against Ebola and bird flu set back. USAID should be reformed, but this Trump/Musk demolition is cruel and incompetent, killing children just as wonderful as our own. —Nick Kristof

Exam 1 study guide (preliminary)

Here's your AUDIO REVIEW for exam 1 on Thursday March 6...

==

Here's your preliminary study guide for Thursday's Exam 1, simply an aggregation of the daily questions so far (not including Tuesday's). I'll post a streamlined AUDIO REVIEW soon.

What is Bioethics? (Basics 1); Premonition Intro/prologue/1

"Bioethics" just means what?


What 40-year U.S. study denied information and treatment to its subjects?


What did Ivan Ilich warn about in Medical Nemesis?


In what issues has the WHO been very active?


How has Bioethics broadened its horizons?


Bioethics has broken free of what mentality?


With what must the main method of Bioethics be concerned?


Are there any important bioethical issues you think Campbell has neglected to mention in ch.1





Lewis's previous book asked what question?


What did The Lancet point out about the COVID death rate in the U.S.?


Bob Glass learned what, that he'd had no idea of, in The Great Influenza? Did you know that, before COVID?


How did young Charity Dean cheer herself up?



1. (T/F) In Anna's story, why did she wish not to be resuscitated?

2. Which theory has been dominant in bioethics and often used by many health professionals?

3. In deontological theory, what is the difference between hypothetical and categorical imperatives?

4. What ethical principle (and whose), in the name of rational consistency, absolute dutifulness, and mutual respect, "requires unconditional obedience and overrides our preferences and desires" with respect to things like lying, for example?

5. What would Kant say about Tuskegee, or about the murderer "at our door"?

6. What more do we want from a moral theory than Kant gives us?

7. What is the distinctive question in virtue ethics?

8. What Greek philosopher was one of the earliest exponents of virtue ethics?

9. What is the Harm Principle, and who was its author?

10. Name one of the Four Principles in Beauchamp and Childress's theories on biomedical ethics?




[Premonition...]

11. What was Dr. Hosea's diagnostic style? (And of what classic Greek philosopher might it remind you?)

12. What misleading practice of self-promotion did doctors of orthopedic medicine engage in?

13. How did Dr. Dean learn to persuade elected officials to finance disease control?

14. What was the root of the CDC's reluctance to support Dr. Dean's decisions?

15. What famous ethical problem did the Casa Dorinda mudslide resemble?




Perspectives (Basics 3); Premonition 3. Share your thoughts, questions (etc.) in the comments section below.

1. Chapter 3 begins by asking if our bioethical perspective ("vision") is skewed by _____... (a) cultural assumptions, (b) gender bias, (c) religious faith, (d) all of the above
2. What's the leading global cause of death among women of reproductive age?
3. (T/F) The "feminist critique" says bioethics has been dominated by culturally masculine thinking.
4. What ethical perspective did Nel Noddings (supported by Carol Gilligan's research) describe as the "feminine approach"?
5. What's a furor therapeuticus?
6. Does Campbell consider the outlawing of female genital mutilation culturally insensitive?
7. What's allegedly distinctive about "Asian bioethics"?
8. What western ethical preconception is "somewhat alien" in the eastern dharmic traditions?
9. What gives Buddhists and Hindus a "whole new perspective" on bioethical issues?
10. What does Campbell identify as a "tension in the Christian perspectives" on bioethics?




Premonition

1. What book "more of less" led to the invention of U.S. pandemic planning? Have you read it? Will its lessons again be forgotten before the next pandemic?

2. Who is Richard Hatchett? Do you think many people in health care possess the souls of poets?

3. What did Hatchett not know about "social distance"? Is that the best term for what it purports to describe?

4. What did Carter Mecher "notice" about most medical students? Would you expect a higher percentage of those who choose a medical career to be calm and collected in a health emergency than the general population, or better at learning from their mistakes?

5. What did Mecher think was a good way to reduce medical error?

6. What was the gist of Mecher's Lessons Learned report to the VA?




Clinical Ethics (Basics 4); Premonition 4

Basics

1. (T/F) Dignity, respect, and confidentiality are among the aspects of the clinical relationship which emphasize the importance of trust.

2. What (according to most recognized oaths and conventions) must always be the deciding factor guiding professional decisions?

3. The idea that the doctor always knows best is called what?

4. Is a diagnosis of mental illness grounds for establishing a patient's lack of capacity to render competent consent to treatment?

5. What general principle allows breach of confidentiality?

6. What term expresses the central ethical concern about "designer babies"? What poet implicitly expressed it?

7. Why have organizations like the WHO opposed any form of organ trading?

8. Besides the Kantian objection, what other major ethical issue currently affects regenerative medicine?

9. What does palliative medicine help recover?

10. What would most of us consider an unwelcome consequence of not retaining the acts/omissions distinction with respect to our response to famine (for example)?




Premonition

1. What's the "real waste" in government?

2. What misdirected pandemic narrative did Bob Glass think Homeland Security got "wrapped up" in?

3. What hit Richard Hatchett like a lightning bolt or thunderclap?

4. What was the biggest difference between Expert and computer models of disease?

5. What in Rajeev's mind made Hatchett a "philosopher type"?

6. There's no better system for transmitting disease than what?

7. Who is least capable of original thought?

8. Why was the 1918 St. Louis death rate half of Philadelphia's?

9. What was the moment when the CDC accepted social distancing as a viable tool in a pandemic?




Research (Basics 5); Premonition 5

1. Name one of the basic requirements agreed upon by all codes devised to protect individuals from malicious research.

2. What decree states that consent must be gained in all experimentation with human beings?

3. Name one of four areas of research discussed in the book.

4. Which famous contemporary ethicist is a sharp critic of speciesism?

5. Name one of four R's used in international legislation pertaining to animal rights in research?

6. Dilemmas in epidemiological research illiustrate what general point?

7. What did Hwang Woo-suk do?

8. What is the term for altering the numbers in a calculation to make the hypothesis more convincing, with no justification form the research findings for such members?

9. What categories of human enhancement does Campbell enumerate, and what does he identify as its "extreme end"?

10. What is the "10/90 Gap"?




Premonition

1. Watching "smart" people leave the White House, what did Carter learn about governmental inefficiency?

2. What happened when President Obama visited Mexico, prompting his meeting with Carter?

3. Why did Richard keep a detailed journal in the White House?

4. What was this book's eponymous "premonition"?

5. What Presidential decision "worked out" but was nonetheless wrong, in Richard's view?

6. What strange childhood experience altered Carter's thinking about pandemic preparednes?

7. Despite her academic adviser'sssuggestion that she drop science, Charity Dean fell in love with microbiology and learned what?

8. The U.S really doesn't have what, according to Charity?




1. What are the two major spheres of justice discussed by Campbell?

2. (T/F) Vaccination/immunization and restricted mobility are two of the measures used by preventive medicine to counter the spread of disease.

3. Another name for the micro-allocation of health care, concerned with prioritizing access to given treatments, is what? (HINT: This was hotly debated and widely misrepresented ("death panels" etc.) in the early months of the Obama administration.)

4. What "perverse incentive" to health care practitioners and institutions do reimbursement systems foster, as illustrated by excessive use of MRIs?

5. What is the inverse care law?

6. What is meant by the term "heartsink patients"?

7. How are Quality Adjusted Life Years (QALYs) supposed to address and solve the problem of who should receive (for instance) a transplant?

8. Who propounded a theory of justice that invokes a "veil of ignorance," and what are its two fundamental principles?

9. Under what accounts of health might we describe a sick or dying person as healthy?

10. Name two of the "capabilities" Martha Nussbaum proposes as necessary to ensure respect for human dignity?

==
Premonition
1. What grant to Joe DeRisi led to his "Red Phone"?
2. The new coronavirus Joe's lab identified in 2003 caused what syndrome?
3. Joe went "down the rabbit hole" to talk to who?
4. Joe said analyzing genetic sequences with the Virochip was like trying to find what?
5. What is the dark matter of genomic sequencing?
6. How does Joe think science is misunderstood?
7. How was the DeRisi lab like Willy Wonka?
8. What's an example of "screwed up incentives" inside the medical-industrial complex?
9. What is the Chan Zuckerberg Biohub's "preposterous goal"?






Beyond Bioethics Foreword, Introduction, 1; Premonition 7

1. Concern for individual autonomy and personal sovereignty can obscure what other issue?
2. Why should we expand our notion of bioethics to biopolitics?
3. What popular sentiment on human reproductive cloning did Planned Parenthood not adopt, "fortunately"?
4. As the field of Bioethics evolved, to what approach did it stake a claim?
5. Name two of the distinctive concerns of the "new biopolitics" marking its difference from mainstream bioethics.
6. What "strand in the identification of the undeserving poor" is enjoying a revival?
7. Who was the Social Darwinists' leading spokesperson, and what did conservatives oppose in his name?
8. To whom did German eugenicists say they owed a debt?
9. Who said "low intelligence is a stronger precursor of poverty than low socioeconomic background"?
10. What assumption, according to a cited philosopher, encourages people to treat differences as pathologies?




Premonition

1. What's CEPI, who ran it, and who funded it?

2. What tacit rule did the Trump White House inherit from the Reagan administration?

3. What large gathering did the Chinese government allow in January 2020, after what WHO announcement?

4. Redneck epidemiology is academically ____.

5. What was shocking about the rate of viral reproduction of the novel coronavirus, compared to 1918?

6. What was Carter's favorite metaphor to convey people's inability to conceive exponential growth?

7. What could James Lawler not quite believe about the repatriation of Americans from Wuhan?

8. What was Carter's idea for a fishing expedition?

9. Who did Duane Caneva tell the Wolverines about on Feb 6, 2020?




Premonition

1. What was sometimes as persuasive to Charity as data? Do you share her attitude, have you had a similar experience? Do you think health care providers and public health officers should?

2. Who sent Charity to the border, and why? Should the administration have been held accountable for its immigration policy?

3. What was "the money question"?

4. Why wasn't Charity promoted to top CA public health officer? Is it unethical for politicians to appoint important officials on the basis of considerations other than credentials and competence? How can they be prevented from doing so?

5. What was Charity really doing at her whiteboard?

6. Why did her boss ban her from using the word pandemic?

7. Why did Charity think she'd end up in the White House?

8. What did she like to say about leadership?




Beyond 2-3
1. What kind of "motherhood" did Indiana officially promote in the '20s and '30s?
2. What was every child's right, in Indiana?
3. What dismaying transfer of power did Ada Schweitzer inadvertently facilitate?
4. What led to the "exponential" expansion of the Infant and Child Hygiene division?
5. What did Schweitzer call the Better Baby Contest at the fair?
6. Half of what occurred in California before WWII?
7. What role was played by corporate philanthropies and academics in the promotion of eugenics?
8. What happened in Lincoln, IL?
9. What was Hitler's "bible"?
10. How did California eugenicists re-brand themselves after the war?




1. German lawyers meeting in Berlin in 1934 debated bringing what from the statutes of thirty U.S. states to the Third Reich?

2. Hitler thought the U.S. had made progress toward the creation of what kind of society?

3. What is the real problem of disability?

4. What concept did Quetelet derive from the astronomical "law of error"?

5. Galton's work led directly to what?

6. What state's "fitter families" contest declared that "a sound mind in a sound body is the most priceless of human possessions"?

7. "The Galton Institute" was originally called what?

8. Many scientists continued to believe in what core tenet of eugenics even after the atrocities of WWII?

9. What did Robert Edwards say he learned from the development of IVF?

10. What connects old-school eugenics with more recent "market" versions?




Premonition

1. What happened a week after Charity "railed about the idiocy" of CDC rules?

2. What would have happened if the first infected passenger on the Diamond Princess had flown to the U.S. and then home?

3. What mental model did Carter have wrong?

4. What CDC guidance regarding social gatherings defied common sense? Was it a good thing for people to not know what was about to happen, in early March 2020?

5. Why did Charity ignore her boss's order about emails?

6. What had Japanese public health authorities figured out about contact tracing?

7. What was Charity's interpretation of Nancy Messonier's public statement?

8. What's the simple truth about herd immunity?

9. What's an L6?

10. What did Charity insist was the single most important part of her COVID response plan?




1. What did Joe DeRisi tell the governor about his lists?

2. Why were local public health officers so slow to accept Biohub's offer of free testing?

3. What were the big takeaways from the test results?

4. In February '21 the US was doing less of what than any other industrialized country?




Beyond

1. The advent of what common metric made it possible to calculate the efficacy of selling?

2. What was lacking in the '60s that Principlism offers to provide?

3. What was the final impetus for government intervention in research ethics?

4. What would be the key problem of letting each Institutional Review Board determine its own principles?




Premonition

1. What was the CDC's greatest trick?

2. Who makes the hard decisions in public health?

3. What's so embarrassing to Carter about the US pandemic response?

4. From the point of view of American culture, what's the trouble with disease prevention?




Beyond
1. Some researchers see sex selection leading to what?
2. What does Catherine Myser mean by "whiteness"?
3. Decentering whiteness would enable bioethics to do what?
4. What obvious bioethical significance in Freddie Gray's death was generally ignored by the bioethical community?
5. Who "invented" Bob Dole?

Five Years Ago, We Were Terrified of Covid. We Were Right to Be Afraid.

Five years since a novel virus spread everywhere, its hard to remember what the beginning was like.

It's been five years, and more than 20 million deaths globally. The first official case was in December 2019. The World Health Organization designated Covid-19 a public health emergency at the end of January 2020, the U.S. government declared it a national emergency on March 13, and every single state ordered or recommended schools close at some point between March 16 and March 27. What followed was trauma: years of mass mortality, inescapable infection and deep disruption, even to the lives of the relatively safe.

Next week I'll be publishing an essay reflecting on where that world-historical whirlwind eventually left us, focused less on the emergency itself than on all the ways, both obvious and subtle, an unthinkable — even unbelievable — mortality event transformed our world. But today I just want to remind us where things started, half a decade ago now.

My first hint came via Twitter on Dec. 31, 2019, when I saw the health and medicine journalist Helen Branswell warning of "unexplained pneumonias" in China. The plot beats that would follow were, in certain ways, familiar enough, Hollywood and science fiction having taught us all about global health emergencies and what might be done to stop them. But although I could easily imagine a pandemic unfolding onscreen, I couldn't really believe we'd end up living through one, so deep were my intuitions that plagues were — at least in the wealthy world — a thing of the past. Whatever I'd heard from scientists about the risks of this or that future outbreak, I was living firmly in epidemiological denial...

Five years later, though the world has been scarred by all that death and illness, it is considered hysterical to narrate the history of the pandemic by focusing on it. Covid minimizers and vaccine skeptics now run the country’s health agencies, but the backlash isn’t just on the right. Many states have tied the hands of public health authorities in dealing with future pandemic threats, and mask bans have been implemented in states as blue as New York. Everyone has a gripe with how the pandemic was handled, and many of them are legitimate. But our memories are so warped by denial, suppression and sublimation that Covid revisionism no longer even qualifies as news. When I come across an exchange like this one from last weekend, in which Woody Harrelson called Fauci evil on Joe Rogan’s show, or this one from last year, in which Rogan and Tony Hinchcliffe casually attribute a rise in excess and all-cause mortality to the aftereffects of vaccination, I don’t even really flinch.

To be clear, their suggestion is spurious. (Ironically, the vaccines are the reason we can even entertain such speculation.) In some countries where vaccination was more universal than here, such as the U.K., shots effectively brought an end to the pandemic emergency...

The pandemic response wasn’t perfect. But the pandemic itself was real, and punishing. Above all, it revealed our vulnerability — biological, social and political. And in the aftermath of the emergency, Americans have largely looked away, choosing to see the experience less in terms of death and illness than in terms of social hysteria and even public health overreach. For many, the main lesson was that in the world of humans, as in the world of microbes, it’s dog-eat-dog out there... David Wallace-Wells

Thinking back on the past five years, what were the biggest long-term effects of the Covid-19 pandemic on you? In what ways did it change you or your perception of the world? Click here to respond...

UFO religions & a free lunch

 The Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies

Religious Studies Colloquium

Thursday, February 27, 2025, at 11:30 AM

Student Union Room 220

 

 

DR. BENJAMIN ZELLER

Professor of Religion, Lake Forest College

 

“Why UFO Religions Matter”

 

The 20th century saw flying saucers and UFOs enter not only the world of pop culture, but religion as well. During the “flying saucer craze,” religious movements such as the Unarius Academy of Science and the Aetherius Society formed and promoted beliefs in extraterrestrial contact. Now, there are and have been numerous such groups, e.g., the Raelian movement, Heaven’s Gate, and the Valley of the Dawn.

UFO religions and broader UFO spirituality are worth considering because they raise fundamental questions about the nature of religious identity, belief, community, and practice. They show that the search for the transcendent is broader than traditional forms of belief in the supernatural, and that the lines between religious belief, scientific knowledge, and spiritual claims is permeable.

This talk analyzes how such movements address those questions, situating them in their religious, social, and cultural contexts and arguing that analysis of these movements is important, demonstrating the transformations of modern religious thought in the space age and beyond.

 

* This event is free and open to the public. Free boxed lunches will be available (first-come, first-served).

Like Charity

Americans are learning a fact "too often overlooked — that one of our country's greatest and least-appreciated assets has been public faith and trust in a variety of highly complex systems staffed by experts whose names we'll never know," Brooke Harrington, a professor of economic sociology, writes.

https://www.threads.net/@nytopinion/post/DGhCuVKs0RZ?xmt=AQGzs92lmMlF_QO-Mm8_GvqCOWk-h-LQowkk8bWsVfqrRw

Phil.Oliver@mtsu.edu

👣Solvitur ambulando

💭Sapere aude

Questions FEB 27

Presentation: David

(We can adjourn to the conference room again if it gets loud downstairs... or if we just want to.)

Beyond 9-12; Premonition 11/epilogue. PRESENTATIONS: 1. Julianna, “Ethical Care of Underserved Patients"; 2. Pierce, HIV pandemic

Premonition
1. What was the CDC's greatest trick?

2. Who makes the hard decisions in public health?

3. What's so embarrassing to Carter about the US pandemic response?

4. From the point of view of American culture, what's the trouble with disease prevention?

DQs

• Why doesn't the US have the institutions it needs to save itself? 279
• What should be done about the CDC?
• If you were the chief public health officer for the US, what would be your top priorities?
• 
  

Beyond

1. Some researchers see sex selection leading to what?

2. What does Catherine Myser mean by "whiteness"?

3. Decentering whiteness would enable bioethics to do what?

4. What obvious bioethical significance in Freddie Gray's death was generally ignored by the bioethical community?

5. Who "invented" Bob Dole?

DQs

• Has disability rights become an effective movement? Will its stature rise in the future?
• What "animal farm bioethics" issues concern you?
• Who should decide the meaning of "cosmetic"?
• Is disease a social construct?
• What's your initial response to any of Myser's questions of origin & knowledge? 118
• What do you think of James Baldwin's statement about whiteness? 121
• Is "decentering whiteness" liable to make white people, especially politicians, uncomfortable?
• Did the Obama presidency do anything to dismantle the historical legacy of equating American-ness with whiteness? Will the Drumpf presidency unintentionally have that impact, eventually?
• Is there something inherently wrong, unseemly, or troubling about bioethicists who are also entrepreneurs? 
• Are bioethicists overly fixated on technology? 130
• Is there something inherently troubling about bioethicists like  Glenn McGee starting their own businesses? 132
• Did Arthur Caplan do the right thing with his Celera stock options? 133
• Should financial incentives for participation in clinical trials be regulated, reduced, or eliminated? 
• Do you think the Nashvillian who participated in Eli Lilly's drug tests was typical? 135
• Is it unwise to prognosticate, particularly with respect to future developments in biotechnology? Was Glenn McGee just a little ahead of the curve in his forecast? 140
• Are IRBs effective? How might they be improved? 143
• Is our culture's seeming obsession with ED symptomatic of more deeply rooted issues?
• 
  

Five Things I Wish I’d Known Before My Chronic IllnessBy Tessa Miller
Finding out you have a chronic illness — one that will, by definition, never go away — changes things, both for you and those you love.

Seven Thanksgivings ago, I got sick and I never got better.

What I thought was food poisoning turned out to be Crohn’s disease, a form of inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) that doesn’t have a cure. It fools my immune system into attacking my digestive system, resulting in what I can only describe as the attempted birth of my intestines through my butthole. It’s a cruel and often debilitating disease.

Since that first hospital stay, I’ve had colonoscopies, biopsies, CT scans, X-rays, blood and stool tests, enemas, suppositories, rectal foams, antiemetics, antidiarrheals, antivirals, antibiotics, anti-inflammatories, opiates, steroids, immunoglobulin, biologics and three fecal transplants (if you want to hear a story about my 9-year-old poop donor and a blender, find me on Twitter).

My disease is managed now thanks to an expensive drug called infliximab, but the future is unpredictable. IBD works in patterns of flares and remissions, and little is known about what causes either.

When I was diagnosed, I didn’t know how much my life would change. There’s no conversation about that foggy space between the common cold and terminal cancer, where illness won’t go away but won’t kill you, so none of us know what “chronic illness” means until we’re thrown into being sick forever...
==
A Better Path to Universal Health Care

By Jamie Daw
Dr. Daw teaches health policy and management at Columbia University.

The United States should look to Germany, not Canada, for the best model.
As a Canadian living and studying health policy in the United States, I’ve watched with interest as a growing list of Democratic presidential candidates — Senators Bernie Sanders, Kamala Harris, Elizabeth Warren, Kirsten Gillibrand and Cory Booker — have indicated support for a Canadian-style single-payer plan with little or no role for private insurance. Approval of such a system has become almost a litmus test for the party’s progressive base.

But rather than looking north for inspiration, American health care reformers would be better served looking east, across the Atlantic.

Germany offers a health insurance model that, like Canada’s, results in far less spending than in the United States, while achieving universal, comprehensive coverage. The difference is that Germany’s is a multipayer model, which builds more naturally on the American health insurance system.

Although it receives little attention in the United States, this model, pioneered by Chancellor Otto von Bismarck in 1883, was the first social health insurance system in the world. It has since been copied across Europe and Asia, becoming far more common than the Canadian single-payer model. This model ensures that all citizens have access to affordable health care, but it also incorporates age-old American values of choice and private competition in health insurance...

Questions FEB 25

Presentation: Jaxon 

Premonition

1. What did Joe DeRisi tell the governor about his lists?

2. Why were local public health officers so slow to accept Biohub's offer of free testing?

3. What were the big takeaways from the test results?

4. In February '21 the US was doing less of what than any other industrialized country?

DQs

• Are you surprised at the response to Biohub's call for volunteers? 243
• Why does financial ambition interfere with science and progress? 246 
• How do we fix the screwed-up incentive structure of the medical-industrial complex? 249
• How can the Strategic National Stockpile be made more functional and responsive to a crisis? 
• 
  

Beyond

1. The advent of what common metric made it possible to calculate the efficacy of selling?

2. What was lacking in the '60s that Principlism offers to provide?

3. What was the final impetus for government intervention in research ethics?

4. What would be the key problem of letting each Institutional Review Board determine its own principles?

DQs

• Has feminist theory been successful?
• Do you agree with Simone de Beauvoir that women are made (by objectifying societal expectations), not born? 
• Are most surgeons really "uncaring"? Why do so many patients say they feel "abandoned"?
• Is the culture of business healthy, on balance, for healthcare?
• Why is the medical profession so slow to respond to whistle-blowing like Henry Beecher's "Ethics and Clinical Research"? What might make it more responsive and generally more vigilant in policing itself?
• Is the culture of mistrusting authority in our society good for healthcare and the regulation of healthcare?
• Is there a general problem with individuals and aggregates of individuals (committees, boards, states...) determining their own principles of conduct? Is there a problem with them not doing so? Is there a solution to the dilemma?
• Have you ever questioned the "system" of a committee of which you were a member? How did that go?  92
• Can you give an example of gender bias resulting in unethical behavior by health practitioners?
• Have we moved significantly away from androcentrism in your lifetime? Will we move further?
• Can the medical profession, or any particular profession, become less gender-biased if the larger society remains relatively moreso? As women increasingly join the ranks of physicians, will that happen?
•  What do you think of the stereotypical "association of women with emotion and men with reason"? 100
• Do you associate emotion more with the body than the mind? How in general does the classic mind-body problem relate, in your thinking, to gender issues (if at all)?
• Do you think sex selection and disability deselection are ethically equivalent or commensurable? Is any stipulated difference between them arbitrary or "hierarchical"?
• How do you define "cosmetic" (vs. "medical")?
• How do you define "disease"?
• 
  

==

How Each of Us Can Prepare for the Next Pandemic

The COVID pandemic has killed more than half a million people in the United States and caused the greatest economic crisis since the Great Depression. If this pandemic taught us one thing, it's that we weren't ready for it. The scientific and medical community wasn't ready. The government, the military and industry weren't ready. And most of us at home weren't ready either: scrambling for basic supplies, regretting not having a deeper pantry and struggling with the financial fallout... (Scientific American, continues)

==

Cousin Jamie

 Jamie Oliver's Ministry of Food... "We've gotta start teaching our kids about food in schools. Period."

 

 

It's not always excellent to be Jamie Oliver...

==
Health news... Health news quiz...
==
‘The Unwinding of the Miracle’ Is About How to Die — and Live

She didn’t know it then, but Julie Yip-Williams began her memoir, “The Unwinding of the Miracle” — which enters the list at No. 8 — in July 2013. That’s when the 37-year-old mother of two, in the E.R. with stomach pains and nausea, learned she had Stage 4 colon cancer.

The next month, she started a blog, partly as a record for her daughters, Mia and Belle (“especially if this cancer-fighting journey doesn’t end in the way we all hope it ends”), and partly, she wrote, “to carve out my own little space out there to express my sadness, anger, joy, hope, despair and a slew of other emotions that come with living with cancer.”

Mark Warren, her editor at Random House, says, “Julie was my friend for a couple of years before the prospect of a book even came up. It was in the last year of her life, when her health was turning toward its end, and she was resolving all she could resolve, that we began to contemplate whether the blog could be a book.” Yip-Williams had been searching for a book that would help her prepare to die, but she hadn’t found one. “She was unnerved by the level of denial that she found in the culture at large,” Warren recalls...
==
Embryo ‘Adoption’ Is Growing, but It’s Getting Tangled in the Abortion Debate
As evangelical Christians, Paul and Susan Lim believe that life begins at conception. So when they decided to have a third child, in vitro fertilization was out of the question, since the process often yields extra embryos.

But “adopting” the frozen embryos of another couple who had gone through I.V.F. was not.

Dr. Lim called it a “rescue operation.” To him, transferring donated embryos to his wife’s uterus was akin to saving a life. “These children are being abandoned in a frozen state,” he said. “If they don’t get adopted, they’re dead.”

As I.V.F. becomes more widespread and the number of spare embryos rises, giving birth with donated embryos is becoming more popular, especially among couples who oppose abortion and are struggling with infertility. But many of the agencies that offer donated embryos, including a vast majority of those supported by federal grants, are affiliated with anti-abortion rights or Christian organizations, leading some people to question whether single people, gay couples and others who might be interested could be missing out.

Even the term “embryo adoption” is caught up in the rhetoric of debate over abortion.

“The issue in the medical community is that by calling it ‘adoption,’ we give too much personhood to the embryo,” said Kimberly Tyson, the marketing and program director at Snowflake Embryo Adoption in Loveland, Colo...

==

A Mother Learns the Identity of Her Child’s Grandmother. A Sperm Bank Threatens to Sue.
The results of a consumer genetic test identified the mother of the man whose donated sperm was used to conceive Danielle Teuscher’s daughter. Legal warnings soon followed.

Danielle Teuscher decided to give DNA tests as presents last Christmas to her father, close friends and 5-year-old daughter, joining the growing number of people taking advantage of low-cost, accessible genetic testing.

But the 23andMe test produced an unexpected result. Ms. Teuscher, 30, a nanny in Portland, Ore., said she unintentionally discovered the identity of the sperm donor she had used to conceive her young child.

The mother of the donor was identified on her daughter’s test results as her grandmother. Excited and curious, Ms. Teuscher decided to reach out.

“I wrote her and said, ‘Hi, I think your son may be my daughter’s donor. I don’t want to invade your privacy, but we’re open to contact with you or your son,’” she recalled. “I thought it was a cool thing.” (continues)

“Yes, and..."

The best account I've read of the real difference between "no, but..." and "yes, and..."

(from Randall Collins' The Sociology of Philosophies)

https://substack.com/@agnescallard/note/c-95408348?r=35ogp&utm_medium=ios&utm_source=notes-share-action

Phil.Oliver@mtsu.edu

👣Solvitur ambulando

💭Sapere aude

I, Human

Don't flatten your mind.

"…The writing teachers I know struggle to persuade their students not to use these tools. They are everywhere now, impossible to swat away. Who could blame a young writer for wondering how using these "assistants" is any different from using spell check or letting Siri supply the next word in a text? Besides, if they don't use these tools, won't they be falling behind the many students who do? It's a fair point.

But letting a robot structure your argument, or flatten your style by removing the quirky elements, is dangerous. It's a streamlined way to flatten the human mind, to homogenize human thought. We know who we are, at least in part, by finding the words — messy, imprecise, unexpected — to tell others, and ourselves, how we see the world. The world which no one else sees in exactly that way..."

Margaret Renkl https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/24/opinion/i-human.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare

Phil.Oliver@mtsu.edu

👣Solvitur ambulando

💭Sapere aude

Covid lessons unlearned

Listen to "Ed Yong Wants to Show You the Hidden Reality of the World"

https://www.nytimes.com/audio/app/2025/02/22/magazine/ed-yong-interview.html?referringSource=sharing

Phil.Oliver@mtsu.edu

👣Solvitur ambulando

💭Sapere aude

"Our greatest responsibility is to be good ancestors."

"It was on this day in 1954 that the first mass inoculation of children for polio began in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. The vaccine was developed by Jonas Salk, a doctor at the University of Pittsburgh.

Polio was first described in the 18th century, but it wasn't identified until 1909. Throughout the first half of the 20th century, regular polio outbreaks terrified Americans — polio was highly contagious and mostly affected children. In 1921, the disease struck 39-year-old Franklin Delano Roosevelt. His wife, Eleanor, said, "Probably the thing that took most courage in his life was his mastery and his meeting of polio." Roosevelt's money and fame transformed the fight against polio. He created a foundation called the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis, which later became the March of Dimes. He convinced his good friend and law partner, Basil O'Connor, to run the foundation. Throughout the war years, the March of Dimes gained public support with Roosevelt as its public image, Hollywood celebrities and war generals promoting it, grassroots chapters, and a simple fundraising platform: a dime at a time.

The March of Dimes devoted a lot of its budget to research. Researchers had been hard at work on a "live" version of the vaccine — using the living virus, but weakening it so much in a lab that it wouldn't cause disease. But live vaccines were hard to stabilize, and progress was slow. March of Dimes director Basil O'Connor was interested in another approach — a "killed" vaccine, in which the virus was inactivated with heat, chemicals, or radiation before being made into a vaccine. A killed vaccine would be less potent and require booster shots, but it was easier to stabilize, didn't require refrigeration, and was safer because there was no danger that it might revert back to the original virus. Most promising, there had been a successful killed vaccine for influenza during World War II. O'Connor talked to the doctor who had pioneered the influenza vaccine, and that doctor suggested young Dr. Salk as a good candidate to work on a polio vaccine. So the March of Dimes recruited Salk.

Meanwhile, the polio epidemic was growing worse. Various attempts at controlling the disease were not working, including quarantining children or putting them in metal respirator tunnels called iron lungs. The worst outbreak in America's history hit in 1952, with 58,000 cases reported; more than 3,000 people died and more than 21,000 were left with some degree of paralysis. Schools closed, the public grew desperate, and pressure on scientists increased. That same year, Salk announced that he had discovered an effective vaccine but that he needed to test it on a large scale. So he set up a field trial involving more than 220,000 volunteers, 20,000 physicians, and 1.8 million schoolchildren. On this day in 1954, the first group of children were vaccinated, 137 students at Arsenal Elementary School in Pittsburgh. Dr. Salk gave each vaccination personally in a makeshift lab set up in the gymnasium.

On April 12, 1955, the monitors of the test held a press conference and made an official announcement: the vaccine was safe and effective. The announcement was a huge national event. Stores broadcast the event on loudspeakers, and judges even stopped trials in the middle so that everyone could listen. After they heard the news, churches across the country rang their bells, factories took a break for a moment of silence, and spontaneous celebrations broke out all over the country. It was 10 years to the day after the death of Franklin Roosevelt.

When asked whether he had applied for a patent for the vaccine, Salk replied: "There is no patent. Could you patent the sun?" Salk has been praised for this selfless approach, and it may have been his personal belief, but also the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis had already looked into applying for a patent and determined that it would not qualify.

Salk said: "Our greatest responsibility is to be good ancestors."

https://open.substack.com/pub/thewritersalmanac/p/the-writers-almanac-from-sunday-february-00b?r=35ogp&utm_medium=ios

Phil.Oliver@mtsu.edu

👣Solvitur ambulando

💭Sapere aude

paradise of fools

On Monday, James Marriott of The Times, published in London, noted that the very stability and comfort of the post–World War II liberal order has permitted the seeds of its own destruction to flourish. A society with firm scientific and political guardrails that protect health and freedom, can sustain "an underbelly of madmen and extremists—medical sceptics, conspiracy types and anti-democratic fantasists."

"Our society has been peaceful and healthy for so long that for many people serious disaster has become inconceivable," Marriott writes. "Americans who parade around in amateur militia groups and brandish Nazi symbols do so partly because they are unable to conceive of what life would actually be like in a fascist state." Those who attack modern medicine cannot really comprehend a society without it. And, Marriott adds, those who are cheering the rise of autocracy in the United States "have no serious understanding of what it means to live under an autocratic government."

Marriott notes that five Texas counties that make up one of the least vaccinated areas in the U.S. are gripped by a measles outbreak that has infected at least 58 people and hospitalized 13. It may be, Marriot writes, that "[t]he paradise of fools is coming to an end."
…

HCR
https://open.substack.com/pub/heathercoxrichardson/p/february-20-2025?r=35ogp&utm_medium=ios

Questions FEB 20

Presentation: Vuk

1. German lawyers meeting in Berlin in 1934 debated bringing what from the statutes of thirty U.S. states to the Third Reich?

2. Hitler thought the U.S. had made progress toward the creation of what kind of society?

3. What is the real problem of disability?

4. What concept did Quetelet derive from the astronomical "law of error"?

5. Galton's work led directly to what?

6. What state's "fitter families" contest declared that "a sound mind in a sound body is the most priceless of human possessions"?

7. "The Galton Institute" was originally called what?

8. Many scientists continued to believe in what core tenet of eugenics even after the atrocities of WWII?

9. What did Robert Edwards say he learned from the development of IVF?

10. What connects old-school eugenics with more recent "market" versions?

Premonition

1. What happened a week after Charity "railed about the idiocy" of CDC rules?

2. What would have happened if the first infected passenger on the Diamond Princess had flown to the U.S. and then home?

3. What mental model did Carter have wrong?

4. What CDC guidance regarding social gatherings defied common sense? Was it a good thing for people to not know what was about to happen, in early March 2020?

5. Why did Charity ignore her boss's order about emails?

6. What had Japanese public health authorities figured out about contact tracing?

7. What was Charity's interpretation of Nancy Messonier's public statement?

8. What's the simple truth about herd immunity?

9. What's an L6?

10. What did Charity insist was the single most important part of her COVID response plan?

DQs

• Does the extent of U.S. influence on Nazism shed any light on current events? Does it deserve significantly greater attention? Is its relative obscurity a stain on our educational establishment?
• COMMENT: "it's no great surprise that [Nazis] believed that what had made America great was American racism."
• Were you familiar with the views of Jefferson and Lincoln cited on p.62? Are you surprised?
• What do you think of the various euphemisms in current circulation that refer not to disability but to differently abledness, and the like? Do they represent an evolution of awareness and sensitivity? Do they reflect a failure to come to grips with the problem of creating and sustaining a genuinely open and just society? Or...?
• What do you think of the author's analysis of norms and ideals ? (64)
• Norms of the kind the author is concerned with, that make life more difficult for the disabled, are clearly problematic in an ethical sense. But what about the norms that have been flouted lately by the current U.S. president and his administration? Isn't that also ethically problematic-or just wrong? (See Adam Gopnik, "Norms and Cliffs in Drumpf's America")
• Is it significant, if true, that all the early statisticians were eugenicists? (66)
• Is it true that Darwinian evolutionary theory repudiates the disabled as "defectives to be surpassed by natural selection," (67) in view of the fact that culture now competes with pre-cultural nature for selective influence? (Put another way: culture is an ever-growing part of nature, making the fate and fortunes of the disabled a matter of cultural decision as much as natural default.)
• Is the impulse to perfect the human race entirely misplaced?
• Is men sana in corpore sano a good approach to health and social justice?
• Was Robert Edwards right that soon it will be widely considered a "sin" to have a child with genetic disease?
• Will it ever be widely acceptable to "select the features of future generations much like we currently configure...a new car"? 

Trump Cuts Target Next Generation of Scientists and Public Health Leaders

The notices came all weekend, landing in the inboxes of federal scientists, doctors and public health professionals: Your work is no longer needed.

At the National Institutes of Health, the nation's premier biomedical research agency, an estimated 1,200 employees — including promising young investigators slated for larger roles — have been dismissed.

At the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, two prestigious training programs were gutted: one that embeds recent public health graduates in local health departments and another to cultivate the next generation of Ph.D. laboratory scientists. But the agency's Epidemic Intelligence Service — the "disease detectives" who track outbreaks around the world — has apparently been spared, perhaps because of an uproar among alumni after a majority of its members were told on Friday that they would be let go.

President Trump's plan to shrink the size of the federal work force dealt blows to thousands of civil servants in the past few days. But the cuts to the Department of Health and Human Services — coming on the heels of the coronavirus pandemic, the worst public health crisis in a century — have been especially jarring. Experts say the firings threaten to leave the country exposed to further shortages of health workers, putting Americans at risk if another crisis erupts...

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/18/us/politics/fda-cdc-health-department-trump.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare

Phil.Oliver@mtsu.edu

👣Solvitur ambulando

💭Sapere aude

Questions FEB 18

Presentation: Danny

Premonition

1. What was sometimes as persuasive to Charity as data? Do you share her attitude, have you had a similar experience? Do you think health care providers and public health officers should?

2. Who sent Charity to the border, and why? Should the administration have been held accountable for its immigration policy?

3. What was "the money question"? 

4. Why wasn't Charity promoted to top CA public health officer? Is it unethical for politicians to appoint important officials on the basis of considerations other than credentials and competence? How can they be prevented from doing so?

5. What was Charity really doing at her whiteboard?

6. Why did her boss ban her from using the word pandemic? 

7. Why did Charity think she'd end up in the White House?

8. What did she like to say about leadership?

Beyond 2-3

1. What kind of "motherhood" did Indiana officially promote in the '20s and '30s?

2. What was every child's right, in Indiana?

3. What dismaying transfer of power did Ada Schweitzer inadvertently facilitate?

4. What led to the "exponential" expansion of the Infant and Child Hygiene division?

5. What did Schweitzer call the Better Baby Contest at the fair?

6. Half of what occurred in California before WWII?

7. What role was played by corporate philanthropies and academics in the promotion of eugenics?

8. What happened in Lincoln, IL?

9. What was Hitler's "bible"?

10. How did California eugenicists re-brand themselves after the war?

DQs

• Is there an appropriate role for the state in promoting or mandating particular approaches to parenting?
• How would you articulate children's rights? Would you, for instance, include a right "to be brought up in the fear and admonition of the Lord"? (compare: Indiana child creed, Geneva Declaration of the Rights of the Child, Timeline of young people's rights...)
• Were the Suffragists wrong to "link the language of biology and bacteriology"? 35
• Are there enough female pediatricians? What difference does a physician's gender make?
• Is there still a marked division in this country between the "male medical establishment" and women in healthcare? (40)
• Is there any inoffensive way of expressing and defending the impulse to "raise better babies"?
• What do you think of Schweitzer's statement to "a Muncie reformer" (43)?
• How would you caption the photo in Figure 2.1 (46)?
• Was Francis Galton wrong about "talented people" (54)?
• Are you shocked to learn of the "lethal chamber"?
• 
  

California's dark legacy of sterilization... Eugenics and the Nazis-the California Connection

California was sterilizing its female prisoners as late as 2010 | Corey ...

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/.../california-female-prisoner-sterilization

▶ 17:25

Nov 8, 2013 - Uploaded by The Young Turks

Nor did I know that Nazi Germany consulted with California's eugenics leaders in the 1930s. I also was ...

State's little-known history of shameful science / California's role in ...

https://www.sfgate.com/.../State-s-little-known-history-of-shameful-science-2663925.ph...

▶ 1:00

Mar 10, 2003

"California was the second state to pass eugenics laws in 1909," two .... Record Office, in turn, had links to ...