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BOSTON: I am a former FDA COO and Harvard faculty member who is a decades-long infectious disease spread risk management expert.
Given my background, I have recently felt a calling to write open letters (this is the first in a series) to my academic, business, and government agency colleagues and selected US government and business leaders regarding the breakdown of world order that is exposing us all to significant danger and steps we must take to deal with it effectively and efficiently.
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Here is my open letter:
“Dear Colleagues --
The US and world’s recent years grappling with the first wave of COVID-19 and this fall and winter’s new experience with its recurrence as part of the “CDC-Tripledemic,” where the CDC couples it with significant outbreaks of the Flu and RSV, have taught us lessons we can no longer ignore. And we expect additional vital lessons are hidden just around the corner.
We now know that significant COVID-19 spread will likely reoccur annually. In other words, many more harmful COVID-19 waves are to come, just like our over 100 annual experiences—wave after wave—with the 2018 Flu that first struck massively so many years ago and remains a significant danger to this very day.
This annual or more frequent reoccurrence of COVID-19 (at least periodic if it is nature-made and possibly more frequent if human-manufactured through terrorist or hostile-nation attacks) presents a critical human health services crisis for all humankind.
Accordingly, I am proposing today to the health policy, management, risk management, financial, and scientific communities, where I have served for almost 50 years, that we create a new category of health-related solutions used in service to humankind.
I am calling this new category: “Pandemic Safety Solutions.” With its related human and financial costs, this annual engagement threatens to be larger than the other two categories (including conventional wars) combined. The relatively recent deaths of 1.1 million Americans might just be the starting point.
This new category of health-related solutions is readily distinguishable, and I now distinguish it, from the two traditional categories of human-health solutions:
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