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Ivan Iriarte's avatar

Great article as usual, Jessica. You know my hat is off to you for everything you do. The point I am going to comment is indirectly related to your point. Since day 1 of the "pandemic" I was confused about why "they" decided to "contact trace" people for a viral respiratory pathogen. I am an MD, MS in Preventive Medicine with a 30+ years career as an educator in the field of Epidemiology. For decades, it has been an accepted principle that we do not "contact trace" people for respiratory viral diseases, because the patterns of "transmission" are so complex, and in theory, anyone can "spread" the infection to anyone anywhere they go. It doesn't make any sense to try to "contact trace" or try to figure out from whom anyone "caught" the disease. If you add to that the complexity of mutations and "variants" (we used to call them strains)... contact tracing does not make any sense. We do contact tracing for diseases such as STDs and food borne diseases. Even if someone is a sexually promiscuous person, it is a reasonable task to try and identify sexual contacts, and try to control the "spread"... likewise if you got a food borne infection; it is reasonable to try to identify people who ingested a common food source. Not so with supposed "respiratory viruses". TB is a different matter, because it appears to "spread" within contained environments, not in the open community.

Nowadays, after 30+ years of being a medical doctor and epidemiologist, I am starting to question some of the concepts about infectious diseases that I took for granted as "true"... but that is another matter... some of my colleagues will accuse me of "heresy".

The point is that even if we accept the conventional medical-public health model, with COVID they reinvented every principle we had accepted for decades. Sorry for the long blurb.

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Robert's avatar

Impressive as usual. The lack of response is telling on its own.

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