The Joe Nocera/Bethany McLean piece posted late Wednesday, "COVID Lockdowns Were a Giant Experiment. It Was a Failure. A key lesson of the pandemic." mentioned Donald Henderson and his arguments against lockdowns. Unfortunately for the world he died five years before Covid-19 began its rampage. He was a Professor of Medicine and Dean of the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health. One of his gigs was eradicating smallpox.
He probably should have received a Nobel Prize in Medicine.
A repost from October 2022:
The author of this piece, Aaron Kheriaty, M.D. was a professor at the University of California-Irvine School of Medicine and director of the Medical Ethics Program at UCI Health for 15 years. He was fired. If interested here is his side of that story: "Farewell, University of California"
And here is his article on the guy who led the smallpox eradication effort, Donald Henderson, M.D., MPH. He was also a Professor and Dean of the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health.
I first became aware of Henderson in the security/biosecurity frenzy that followed the mass murders of September 11, 2001. I knew he was one of the biggies but I did not know just how big.
Combining the Johns Hopkins In Memoriam
and the piece below I realized that everyone in the field who had read
Dr. Henderson's work knew how wrong the lockdowns were; and how much it
would have changed the world had Dr. Henderson lived five more years.
From Dr. Kheriaty's Human Flourishing substack, May 9:
Donald Henderson, who died in 2016, was a giant in the field of epidemiology and public health. He was also a man whose prophetic warnings from 2006 we chose to ignore in March of 2020.
Dr. Henderson directed a ten-year international effort from 1967–1977 that successfully eradicated smallpox. Following this, he served as Dean of the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health from 1977 to 1990. Toward the end of his career, Henderson worked on national programs for public health preparedness and response following biological attacks and national disasters. In 2006, Henderson and his colleagues at the University of Pittsburgh Center for Health Security, where Henderson also maintained an academic appointment, published a landmark paper with the anodyne title, “Disease Mitigation Measures in the Control of Pandemic Influenza,” in the journal Biosecurity and Terrorism: Biodefense Strategy, Practice, and Science.
This paper reviewed what was known about the effectiveness and practical feasibility of a range of actions that might be taken in attempts to lessen the number of cases and deaths resulting from a respiratory virus pandemic. This included a review of proposed biosecurity measures, later utilized for the first time during covid, such as “large scale or home quarantine of people believed to have been exposed, travel restrictions, prohibitions of social gatherings, school closures, maintaining personal distance, and the use of masks”. Even assuming a case fatality rate (CFR) of 2.5%, roughly equal to the 1918 Spanish flu but far higher than the CFR for covid, Henderson and his colleagues nevertheless concluded that these mitigation measures would do far more harm than good.
They found the most helpful strategy would be isolating symptomatic individuals (but not those who had merely been exposed) at home or in the hospital, a strategy that had long been part of traditional public health. They also cautioned against reliance on computer modeling to predict the effects of novel interventions, warning that, “No model, no matter how accurate its epidemiologic assumptions, can illuminate or predict the secondary and tertiary effects of particular disease mitigation measures.”....
....MUCH MORE
The last named author, Dr. Tara O'Toole went on to be Senior Vice-President of the CIA's venture capital arm, In-Q-Tel.
Here's our last visit with her:"The Biorevolution: Its Implications for U.S. National Security, Economic Competitiveness, and National Power"
