Trail..

Free..

 

Down..

 

Pox..

 

In 1977, the last case of smallpox was diagnosed in the wild.   

That moment came at the end of a decades-long campaign to eradicate smallpox a deadly infectious disease that killed about 30 percent of those who contracted it from the face of the earth.    Around 500 million people died of smallpox in the century before it was annihilated.

But in 1978, the disease cropped back up in Birmingham, in the United Kingdom. Janet Parker was a photographer at Birmingham Medical School. When she developed a horrifying rash, doctors initially brushed it off as chicken pox. After all, everyone knew that smallpox had been chased out of the world.

Parker got worse and was admitted to the hospital, where testing determined that she had smallpox after all. She died of it a few weeks later.

It turned out that the building that Parker worked in also contained a research laboratory, one of a handful where smallpox was studied by scientists who were trying to contribute to the eradication effort. 

Some papers reported that the lab was badly mismanaged, with important precautions ignored because of haste. (The doctor who ran the lab died by suicide shortly after Parker was diagnosed.) 

Somehow, smallpox escaped the lab to infect an employee elsewhere in the building. Through sheer luck and a rapid response from health authorities, including a quarantine of more than 300 people, the deadly error didn’t turn into an outright pandemic.

Photo OP.

 

Lukewarm .

 

Biden seemed, to many, to be the man who could provide it, the man who could loosen Trump’s stranglehold on our society. 

Democrats were afraid to take too much of a chance with their nominee. Wanting too much, let alone demanding it, felt dangerous.

So we settled on the elder statesman. The straight white man. The middle-of-the-roader: not too hot, not too cold, lukewarm.

He was the “scrappy kid from Scranton,” the unapologetic “union man” who could win back the pixies of politics: the working-class white voters who could back Barack Obama in one election and Trump in the next.

Biden pitched electability moderation rather than transformation and voters liked it.

However, now there is a new realization. 

There is a hardening perception that the president isn’t even being silently productive, but voiceless and vacant.

A new poll from Morning Consult and Politico finds that 42 percent of registered voters say that Biden has accomplished less than they expected. More than a quarter of Democrats felt this way.

Target..

 

A leading expert who helped create the Oxford-AstraZeneca Covid-19 vaccine said giving everyone in the world booster shots multiple times a year is not feasible.

"We can't vaccinate the planet every four to six months. It's not sustainable or affordable," Professor Andrew Pollard, the director of the Oxford Vaccine Group and head of the UK's Committee on Vaccination and Immunization, told The Daily Telegraph in an interview published Tuesday.

Pollard also stressed the "need to target the vulnerable" going forward, rather than administering doses to everyone age 12 and older. 

More data is needed to ascertain "whether, when and how often those who are vulnerable will need additional doses," 

Pollard also said he thought further evidence was needed before offering a fourth Covid-19 shot to people in the UK, which is currently rolling out third shots to healthy people 18 and older, and at-risk people 16 and older.

Sigh..

 

With..

 

Incompetance..