Book Deadliest Enemy

[Drareg]

Has anyone read this book?
https://www.amazon.com/Deadliest-En...89036133&sprefix=Deadliest+ene,aps,246&sr=8-1

I was reading this article by a journalist I suspect is a shill by his views on DNA.
When will we get the Covid-19 vaccine? - UnHerd

Some quotes from the book author in the article-

"One trouble will be funding it. Pharma companies are throwing money at this at the moment, but they are in the end commercial enterprises, and vaccines are often not very commercial things: they are given once, and need to be given to people who can’t easily pay for it. Plus, they’ve been burned before — in his book Deadliest Enemy, the epidemiologist Mike Osterholm says that they rushed to get a vaccine for Sars in 2003, urged on by governments and philanthropic bodies; then, when Sars burnt itself out, the governments and philanthropic bodies lost interest"


"At Sanofi we rushed to make a Sars vaccine,” says Almond. “It got to the point we could test it in primates after 11 months, and by then it had gone away, and we’d spent tens of millions of euros on it never to get it back. The industry does it, but it knows it’s losing money, and it can’t do that too much.”

“I’m not sure how scarred pharma was by that,” says Shattock, “but they’ve certainly been bruised by other projects: Ebola, Sanofi with the dengue programme, GSK with malarial vaccines. They’re not seeing big returns.” It may be different with Covid-19 if it’s around for years, especially if it needs yearly doses, but it may not.

Osterholm in his book suggests that public-private partnerships — like the US defence contractor model, in which governments put out a specification for a jet fighter, and firms compete to build one in the knowledge that the most suitable will be richly rewarded — may be the best system. That’s probably for future outbreaks, though; this one will be driven by funding from the Gates Foundation, Wellcome, the World Bank, and by goodwill from the pharma companies. “Yes there’s a risk the companies will make a loss,” says Almond, “and on smaller things they might need incentivisation, but on this one they’ll dive in and do the best they can.”

I find these quotes alarming, governments put out a specification for a virus ,firms compete to build one in anticipation it will occur in the future.
So big pharma have been loosing money on vaccines and were losing interest in them because the payoff wasn’t guaranteed, they want more of a guarantee it will pay off and here we are in the midst of an exaggerated hysterical flu season.

 

[Drareg]

Below is an article written is 2005 by Michael T. Osterholm the author of Deadliest Enemy.

The World's Youngest Failed State

Some quotes from the article-


"The arrival of a pandemic influenza would trigger a reaction that would change the world overnight. A vaccine would not be available for a number of months after the pandemic started, and there are very limited stockpiles of antiviral drugs. Plus, only a few privileged areas of the world have access to vaccine-production facilities. Foreign trade and travel would be reduced or even ended in an attempt to stop the virus from entering new countries—even though such efforts would probably fail given the infectiousness of influenza and the volume of illegal crossings that occur at most borders. It is likely that transportation would also be significantly curtailed domestically, as smaller communities sought to keep the disease contained. The world relies on the speedy distribution of products such as food and replacement parts for equipment. Global, regional, and national economies would come to an abrupt halt—something that has never happened due to HIV, malaria, or TB despite their dramatic impact on the developing world"

"The closest the world has come to this scenario in modern times was the SARS (severe acute respiratory syndrome) crisis of 2003. Over a period of five months, about 8,000 people were infected by a novel human coronavirus. About ten percent of them died. The virus apparently spread to humans when infected animals were sold and slaughtered in unsanitary and crowded markets in China's Guangdong Province. Although the transmission rate of SARS paled in comparison to that of influenza, it demonstrated how quickly such an infectious agent can circle the globe, given the ease and frequency of international travel. Once SARS emerged in rural China, it spread to five countries within 24 hours and to 30 countries on six continents within several months"

"The SARS experience teaches a critical lesson about the potential global response to a pandemic influenza. Even with the relatively low number of deaths it caused compared to other infectious diseases, SARS had a powerful negative psychological impact on the populations of many countries. In a recent analysis of the epidemic, the National Academy of Science's Institute of Medicine concluded: "The relatively high case-fatality rate, the identification of super-spreaders, the newness of the disease, the speed of its global spread, and public uncertainty about the ability to control its spread may have contributed to the public's alarm. This alarm, in turn, may have led to the behavior that exacerbated the economic blows to the travel and tourism industries of the countries with the highest number of cases."

"SARS provided a taste of the impact a killer influenza pandemic would have on the global economy. Jong-Wha Lee, of Korea University, and Warwick McKibbin, of the Australian National University, estimated the economic impact of the six-month SARS epidemic on the Asia-Pacific region at about $40 billion. In Canada, 438 people were infected and 43 died after an infected person traveled from Hong Kong to Toronto, and the Canadian Tourism Commission estimated that the epidemic cost the nation's economy $419 million. The Ontario health minister estimated that SARS cost the province's health-care system about $763 million, money that was spent, in part, on special SARS clinics and supplies to protect health-care workers. The SARS outbreak also had a substantial impact on the global airline industry. After the disease hit in 2003, flights in the Asia-Pacific area decreased by 45 percent from the year before. During the outbreak, the number of flights between Hong Kong and the United States fell 69 percent. And this impact would pale in comparison to that of a 12- to 36-month worldwide influenza pandemic"

"The SARS epidemic also raises questions about how prepared governments are to address a prolonged infectious-disease crisis—particularly governments that are already unstable"

"Widespread infection and economic collapse can destabilize a government; blame for failing to deal effectively with a pandemic can cripple a government. This holds even more for an influenza pandemic. In the event of a pandemic influenza, the level of panic witnessed during the SARS crisis could spiral out of control as illnesses and deaths continued to mount over months and months. Unfortunately, the public is often indifferent to initial warnings about impending infectious-disease crises—as with HIV, for example. Indifference becomes fear only after the catastrophe hits, when it is already too late to implement preventive or control measures"


"What should the industrialized world be doing to prepare for the next pandemic? The simple answer: far more. So far, the World Health Organization and several countries have finalized or drafted useful but overly general plans. The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services has increased research on influenza-vaccine production and availability. These efforts are commendable, but what is needed is a detailed operational blueprint for how to get a population through one to three years of a pandemic. Such a plan must involve all the key components of society. In the private sector, the plan must coordinate the responses of the medical community, medical suppliers, food providers, and the transportation system. In the government sector, the plan should take into account officials from public health, law enforcement, and emergency management at the international, federal, state, and local levels"

"A blueprint forces leaders to rehearse their response to a crisis, preparing emotionally and intellectually so that when disaster strikes the community can face it"

"Then, the decision would likely be made to close most international and even some state or provincial borders—without any predetermined criteria for how or when those borders might be reopened. Border security would be made a priority, especially to protect potential supplies of pandemic-specific vaccines from nearby desperate countries. Military leaders would have to develop strategies to defend the country and also protect against domestic insurgency with armed forces that would likely be compromised by the disease. Even in unaffected countries, fear, panic, and chaos would spread as international media reported the daily advance of the disease around the world"

"In short order, the global economy would shut down. The commodities and services countries would need to "survive" the next 12 to 36 months would have to be identified. Currently, most businesses' continuity plans account for only a localized disruption—a single plant closure, for instance—and have not planned for extensive, long-term outages. The private and public sectors would have to develop emergency plans to sustain critical domestic supply chains and manufacturing and agricultural production and distribution. The labor force would be severely affected when it was most needed. Over the course of the year, up to 50 percent of affected populations could become ill; as many as five percent could die. The disease would hit senior management as hard as the rest of the work force. There would be major shortages in all countries of a wide range of commodities, including food, soap, paper, light bulbs, gasoline, parts for repairing military equipment and municipal water pumps, and medicines, including vaccines unrelated to the pandemic. Many industries not critical to survival—electronics, automobile, and clothing, for example—would suffer or even close. Activities that require close human contact—school, seeing movies in theaters, or eating at restaurants—would be avoided, maybe even banned"

"With today's limited production capacity, that means that less than 500 million people—about 14 percent of the world's population—would be vaccinated within a year of the pandemic. In addition, because the structure of the virus changes so rapidly, vaccine development could only start once the pandemic began, as manufacturers would have to obtain the new pandemic strain. It would then be at least another six months before mass production of the vaccine"

"In the United States, for example, there are 105,000 mechanical ventilators, 75,000 to 80,000 of which are in use at any given time for everyday medical care. During a routine influenza season, the number of ventilators being used shoots up to 100,000. In an influenza pandemic, the United States may need as many as several hundred thousand additional ventilators"

"A similar situation exists in all developed countries. Virtually every piece of medical equipment or protective gear would be in short supply within days of the recognition of a pandemic. Throughout the crisis, many of these necessities would simply be unavailable for most health-care institutions. Currently, two U.S.-based companies supply most of the respiratory protection masks for health-care workers around the world. Neither company would be able to meet the jump in demand, in part because the component parts for the masks come from multiple suppliers in multiple countries"

"The initiative must be a top priority of the group of seven industrialized nations plus Russia (G-8), because almost nothing could inflict more death and disruption than a pandemic influenza"

"The world must form a better understanding of the potential for the emergence of a pandemic influenza strain. A pandemic is coming. It could be caused by H5N1 or by another novel strain. It could happen tonight, next year, or even ten years from now"

"The population explosion in China and other Asian countries has created an incredible mixing vessel for the virus"

"This is a critical point in history. Time is running out to prepare for the next pandemic. We must act now with decisiveness and purpose. Someday, after the next pandemic has come and gone, a commission much like the 9/11 Commission will be charged with determining how well government, business, and public health leaders prepared the world for the catastrophe when they had clear warning. What will be the verdict?

I think we all know how to answer the final paragraph, we need a commission to investigate the 9/11 commission , I think we all know at this point who really did 9/11......