Many thanks @EricaRHill @JohnBerman for hosting me on @NewDay this #LaborDay with @joelockhart I explained why there’s no path to release an effective safe #covid19 vaccine to the public ahead of the election, and my support of the pharma pledge
Also my concern about a post #LaborDayWeekend2020#COVIDー19 surge due to weekend gatherings, forced K-12 school + college openings. We’re still at 40,000 new cases per day (7 d rolling average) it won’t take much to return us to the 65,000 new cases level we saw a few weeks ago
FYI my use of the term “belts and suspenders” I got that from my mentor Maj Gen Philip K Russell MD, former head of @wrair and a giant in American virology
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PolitiFact | Yes, there have been placebo-controlled studies on childhood vaccines. Good article by @PolitiFact FYI I recently did a PubMed @NLM_NIH search on placebo-controlled RCT and other trials approved for vaccines. Lists attached politifact.com/factchecks/202…
This is what I found for MMR vaccine, this is not intended to be comprehensive, but to debunk the idea that there are no such trials. You can do this yourself, it’s an open access database and just takes a minute. There are many, in fact:
H5N1 not a reason to be terrified. We know a lot about zoonotic flu, have been preparing for it 20 yrs (unlike when COVID began), + we have candidate vaccines, antivirals, diagnostics
It was actually the leadership of the W Bush Admin that prioritized a national response to zoonotic flu in 2000s, recruited my mentors, like DA Henderson, Maj Gen Phil Russell, Stewart Simonson, WI Gov. Tommy Thompson, Mike Osterholm, Bruce Gellin, Peggy Hamburg, to name some
So we can defeat H5N1, but it will need to be made a national priority
Another reminder: in U.S. we must now expect a regular cadence of pandemic threats: SARS in 2002, SARS-2/Covid in 2019, likely SARS-3; avian flu; Nipah; Ebola 2014, 2019; Zika 2016, soon dengue, YF. So we can’t screw around, the Trump Admin needs serious players for CDC, FDA, NIH
The Trump Administration and the Republican-led Congress must take this seriously. If we’re going to have a chance vs this onslaught of pandemic threats - and they are coming - we cannot waste time with ideologues, lightweights, propagandists, and antivaccine activists
In his first term in office: they missed the entry of the SARS-2 virus into NYC from Southern Europe bc they focused on travel from China, couldn’t organize testing and tracing, lost time and lives bc of fake hydroxychloroquine cures that didn’t work. We can’t do that again
1/n I’m concerned: the health disinformation empire has begun accelerating with this new RFK Jr GOP partnership, also worried about the muted/invisible response from our U.S. HHS agencies, health professional societies/academic health centers. Troubling pics in this thread…
1/n Tomorrow or soon, I will do a Tweet X thread on how the antivaccine, health & wellness, nutrition supplements industries joined forces with far right American politics to generate “crisis of chronic illness” propaganda. It’s an interesting story 25+ years in the making
2/n This is a slide from a PowerPoint I made years ago, looking at how the antivaccine movement has evolved (or devolved), it ends with "Chronic illness", which is really a desperation measure from the antivaccine movement after the scientific community debunked everything else
3/n I call it “moving the goalposts” or “whack-a-mole” and it stems from my Rachel book written in 2018. What happens is antivaccine groups make an outlandish assertion about a vaccine(s), we debunk it, and so they just make up something else, we debunk again and repeat…
1/n Pediatricians 'exhausted' as vaccinations drop in DeSantis' Florida.
As I sometimes say, this situation was both predicted and predictable. My papers attached. I’m so concerned about our fragile vaccine ecosystem both in U.S. and globally tallahassee.com/story/news/loc…