CONTACT:
- John Norris
- 617-680-3127
- John.Norris@Safely2Prosperity.com
- https://www.safely2prosperity.com
January 5, 2024 – (BOSTON)
I am a former FDA COO and Harvard faculty member, and a decades-long infectious disease spread risk management expert. (It’s the rate, depth, and breadth of “spread” that counts.) At the FDA, I co-led its last major internal reform. At Harvard, I taught policy, law, and management courses, including risk management.
It seems my nearly full-time job today is to repeatedly blow the whistle on where America is and where it now continues to head when protecting its people from the ravages of the next wave of pandemic, endemic, local, or enterprise sized deadly pathogenic attack, whether the attack is nature-made or human-manufactured. The story is not good.
America and the world have improved little in this regard over the ages, from killing up to as many as half the world’s population by not controlling the spread of the bubonic plague in the Middle Ages, at least 675,000 Americans (and 21M more worldwide) from not controlling the spread of the Flu in 1918, and at least 1.6M Americans (and as many as 5.2M more worldwide) from not controlling the spread of COVID-19 in 2019.
And yet, we continue to use mostly the same old strategies and tools today. Let’s wake up ourselves and others. Given Iran’s current eagerness to support terrorist groups in committing atrocities, the human-manufactured bio-attack dangers today are far greater than they were even in 2019.
Nature keeps blasting us. And now we also have a significant risk of lone-wolf, group, and nation-state terrorism to deal with. It is believed by some that there are as many as 3,000 Iranian agents embedded in the US, just waiting to launch a chemical or bio attack on America.
The long-held belief of a high risk of nuclear attack is now passe. Given its overwhelming power and easy traceability, only an insane nation-state would use (or enable or allow to be used) a nuclear weapon today. And we can do nothing to prevent, mitigate, or control the damages from that big an attack.
The second leg of devastation, the use of chemical weapons, can happen, but their use is far less impactful than nuclear attacks. And chemical attacks, no matter how large, do not spontaneously and vastly grow once seeded.
On the other hand, a well-planned bioattack keeps growing and growing, like a fire does. However, bio spread is different and far more likely to be spread more swiftly and broadly because each infected individual carries the pathogenic torch everywhere they go–office to office, plant to plant, town to town, city to city, and state to state. And given the hyper-connectivity of nations provided by modern aircraft, every nation to every nation in less than a day.
If 3,000 agents gave birth to just one bio-terrorist attack each (by one method and means or another) in 3,000 of America’s critical infrastructure government agencies and companies, and America is unprepared to prevent, mitigate, and control the spread of the pathogen or multiple pathogens within and among its
critical agencies and companies and their employees and families, it would be brought to its knees.
Over the past few years, I have published over 100 articles and posts on the preparation, prevention, mitigation, and control of infectious disease spread. The pace, depth, and breadth of spread count the most. Of course, the deadliness of the pathogen also counts.
But even using the deadliest of pathogens, you only kill 100M Americans, a truly devastating result if the spread is vast and almost totally uncontrolled within (and by) government agencies and companies, both for-profit and not-for-profit.
Many critical government agencies need to do a better job of protecting themselves and the people they serve. And many critical companies must do the same. Their employees, families, and taxpayers/customers continue to be at high risk. And their highly skilled protection is essential to our national security and defense.
Of great importance: front-line workers in high-risk jobs, who consist primarily of poorly paid Hispanic, Black, and White people and represent most employees in many companies, are the least protected. CEOs care about them. But even if they do not, they care about themselves and their own families.
So, every industry, every organization, every leader, every union, every employee, every family member, every investor, every insurer, every bank, and every advisor owns the problem. Regrettably, everyone is looking to someone else to solve the problem. Instead, we must all stick together and address it just as we did when nuclear weapons were the most significant threat.
Regrettably, lockouts did far more harm than good, and vaccinations saved three million Americans but did not save one-and-a-half million more. The strategy and the tools were not good enough.
My teammates and I have invented and developed a significant part of the solution. But everyone must now kick in. You can reach me at John.Norris@Safely2Prosperity.com if you want to learn more. (c) Safely2Prosperity LLC and Dr. John Norris. All Rights Reserved.
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