Keep the Folks Terrified

The NY Times seems to have taken the role of the promoter of abject terror amidst this pandemic. The most reckless one in my opinion is the current article stating that a vaccine will not be available until May 2036. Yes, you heard it, shelter in place for the next sixteen years!

Perhaps the Pulitzer Prize winner should glance at the pictures in Nature. They are cartoon like and may be simple enough for the writer.

Let's take AIDS/HIV. AZT came out in 1987 just 7 years after the Air Canada Patient Zero started his spreading around. That was on top of the fact that the basic science was still in its infancy. David Baltimore had done seminal work on reverse transcriptase but was sidelined by Congressman Dingell in the Congressman's pursuit of haughty scientists. Imagine if there were no Dingell, but I leave that to the imagination.

So from the first infection to the FDA approval was seven years, yet it was not really till 1985 that the epidemic hit full steam.

Go back to polio, for those of us old enough to be part of the Salk vaccine children, that took just a couple of years.

Now what in God's name will take 16 years? Lots of graphics but in my opinion and in my experience no real facts.

This will reverberate for a while and add another layer of terror, perhaps another Pulitzer....