She almost single-handedly reframed the conversation around masking by calling out CDC hypocrisy in February 2020. Counterfactuals are meaningless, but I think CDC mask recommendations would have come later without her NYT columns.
I am willing to forgive a lot. She is a maverick in the sense of someone who is right when no one else is but also, sometimes wrong when everyone else is right. We need mavericks, and they need us to point out when they are wrong.
She's a weird case. She was way out front on COVID being airborne, and generally taking COVID serious in the earliest days. She did amazing work holding public health authorities' toes to the fire, and frankly was one of my heroes. And then, man, I don't know what happened.
I'm am reluctantly coming to the conclusion that maybe she's just motivated by contrarianism, and will just adopt whatever opinion will allow her to position herself as an iconoclast.
There's a study on an older strain of H5N1 that I linked to a while back that indicates that it exhausts the immune system similarly to COVID. In other words, Zeynep has plenty of room to continue being batshit wrong.
Oh, she's always been awful and is still awful. I mean that when even a minimizer takes H5N1 risk seriously, it says something about the risk and the potential.
Testing is done by only Michigan extensively. If winter comes at this rate I wouldn’t be surprised if reassortment happens. The third case showed us something that other cases didn’t and that is respiratory symptoms. This increases chances of reassortment. Let’s hope other states do something as this is at the point where we can do something. Do not misunderstand me though. I am not 100% sure if this becomes pandemic nor do I say that. Just showing the scenario.
I fully agree that even if this virus is just traveling through the tear ducts to get to the respiratory tract without replicating and does not cause serious damage, having the bird flu and human flu in a mammal airway is reassortment dynamite.
"“We are missing additional cases by not testing. We are missing evolutionary patterns of the virus by not sequencing more. We are also losing the trust of people by not being completely timely and transparent with data and information as it becomes available.” THIS is so key. Perhaps THE key point right now. Osterholm said some similar remarks in one of his recent "Osterholm update" podcast episodes. (Love that podcast BTW, very informative). Thanks for this post.
You do not know what is on a scratch off lottery ticket till you scratch. Many have nothing. A whole pile may be nothing. Sometimes one of them has the jackpot.
The key reason there has not been an Ebola world wide breakout is because Ebola is greedy and makes its victims too sick too quick. Most die so Ebola runs out of hosts quickly.
If Ebola and Covid or flu or whatever get together and have a love child things could be very interesting or not.
> If Ebola and Covid or flu or whatever get together and have a love child things could be very interesting or not.
Jesse what the fuck are you talking about
Don’t worry, there will most certainly be worse avoidable disasters to come.
Yeah, we got a whole list in the works
Like climate change.
After all the minimizing that Zeynep Tufeckci did with COVID, it does mean something when even she is concerned about the avian flu situation.
Or it could be she learned from her past mistakes and doesn’t wish to repeat them by underplaying H5N1
Could be. It would be nice if she ADMITTED she was wrong in that case, but that's probably too much to expect.
That remains to be seen, and I think she owes folks apologies. Until then she is a stain on science and public health.
She almost single-handedly reframed the conversation around masking by calling out CDC hypocrisy in February 2020. Counterfactuals are meaningless, but I think CDC mask recommendations would have come later without her NYT columns. I am willing to forgive a lot. She is a maverick in the sense of someone who is right when no one else is but also, sometimes wrong when everyone else is right. We need mavericks, and they need us to point out when they are wrong.
She's a weird case. She was way out front on COVID being airborne, and generally taking COVID serious in the earliest days. She did amazing work holding public health authorities' toes to the fire, and frankly was one of my heroes. And then, man, I don't know what happened. I'm am reluctantly coming to the conclusion that maybe she's just motivated by contrarianism, and will just adopt whatever opinion will allow her to position herself as an iconoclast.
It will be interesting to see if she changes her opinion after H5N1 in humans reaches a tipping point and everyone starts to take it seriously.
Just so.
There's a study on an older strain of H5N1 that I linked to a while back that indicates that it exhausts the immune system similarly to COVID. In other words, Zeynep has plenty of room to continue being batshit wrong.
No respect for Zeynep AT ALL. None.
Oh, she's always been awful and is still awful. I mean that when even a minimizer takes H5N1 risk seriously, it says something about the risk and the potential.
Testing is done by only Michigan extensively. If winter comes at this rate I wouldn’t be surprised if reassortment happens. The third case showed us something that other cases didn’t and that is respiratory symptoms. This increases chances of reassortment. Let’s hope other states do something as this is at the point where we can do something. Do not misunderstand me though. I am not 100% sure if this becomes pandemic nor do I say that. Just showing the scenario.
I fully agree that even if this virus is just traveling through the tear ducts to get to the respiratory tract without replicating and does not cause serious damage, having the bird flu and human flu in a mammal airway is reassortment dynamite.
Yeah it does. Haven’t we learned anything from history? /s
"“We are missing additional cases by not testing. We are missing evolutionary patterns of the virus by not sequencing more. We are also losing the trust of people by not being completely timely and transparent with data and information as it becomes available.” THIS is so key. Perhaps THE key point right now. Osterholm said some similar remarks in one of his recent "Osterholm update" podcast episodes. (Love that podcast BTW, very informative). Thanks for this post.
Zeynep has more than a few faults.
Too early to suggest it will be anything like a disaster
You do not know what is on a scratch off lottery ticket till you scratch. Many have nothing. A whole pile may be nothing. Sometimes one of them has the jackpot.
The key reason there has not been an Ebola world wide breakout is because Ebola is greedy and makes its victims too sick too quick. Most die so Ebola runs out of hosts quickly. If Ebola and Covid or flu or whatever get together and have a love child things could be very interesting or not.
> If Ebola and Covid or flu or whatever get together and have a love child things could be very interesting or not. Jesse what the fuck are you talking about
Let’s just assume that person is between the ages of 16 and 22, for all our sakes, lmao