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Epi’s don’t have luxury of solving the origin mystery of Pandemics. The best of us are smoke jumpers. We rush to the line of the inferno and leverage data to carve out pockets of control.
Although I appreciate the authors dogged dedication to lab leaks I think there’s more than enough blame to go around in every direction. What makes the lab leak more attributable to the SARS-CoV-2’s spread than the shoddy quarantine of cruise passengers or insider backstabbing of trained Public Health information experts by politicians and business interests?
What difference does it make if a lab leak created the first 15 cases if the Trump administration’s incompetence and misinformation brokers produced the first million cases.
We must stop wasting what little time and resources we have left to blame a single negligible lab or institution and instead figure out how we can stop the U.S. DHHS Director for example from cancelling a Moderna Avian Influenza vaccine when such a scientific discovery will be most useful to protection of our society.
We need to make communicable disease surveillance as accessible as white bread or breaking news about Trumps last tantrum.
We need more accessible, available, and higher quality surveillance systems that get us as close to the front of outbreaks as possible. Internationally governments and industry need to work together like bacteria discarding the obsolete junk that distracts us and transferring whatever is missing to the gaps in our lines. We must stop rewarding the cheaters.
We must protect the population centers where our vulnerable neighbors struggle because Pandemic agents know no better tender for epidemic explosions. We need oceans of new vaccines, antivirals, and antibiotics and deep wastewater surveillance networks because the pathogens are getting more infectious and deadly every second and our certainty of extinction from climate change and disease is increasing at a similar clip.