MA/MPH pandemic prep/global health policy. professor @NYU @bardglobalnyc; former @cfr_org @eurasiagroup @100rescities @rockefellerfdn @yalesph
Joined April 2013
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I weighed in on this whole PANDEMIC IS OVER thing.
thehill.com/opinion/healthca…
I wrote something
contrarian.substack.com/p/th…
Looking forward to some overwhelmingly positive feedback here about my life choices, my physical appearance, and my last name.
scott rosenstein retweeted
This is the point I don't hear often enough:
Countries that rapidly rolled out widespread testing & contact tracing for covid, didn't have to close down businesses and schools.
Instead of lockdown debates, we should be figuring out how to avoid them w/out massive death.
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scott rosenstein retweeted
.@NEJM paper: H5N1 bird flu virus can survive pasteurization
The more virus there is in milk, the longer/hotter pasteurization needs to be to kill all the virus.
We don't know what % of dairy cows have no/minimal symptoms from bird flu & whose milk is entering the milk supply.
scott rosenstein retweeted
“Ocular inoculation of a clade 2.3.4.4b highly pathogenic avian influenza A(#H5N1) virus caused severe and fatal infection in ferrets. Virus was transmitted to ferrets in direct contact. The results highlight the potential capacity of these viruses to cause human disease after either respiratory or ocular exposure”
wwwnc.cdc.gov/eid/article/30…
scott rosenstein retweeted
It seems like yet again we have to try and pull back from the two polar extremes and be more balanced in the discussion on H5N1 trends in 2024 while also discussing the shorter-term agricultural and economic implications of wider virus distribution 7/
scott rosenstein retweeted
I’ve let this sit and ferment internally for the last 24hr or so but we really need to think about the polarization of infectious disease messaging. So far, I’ve seen the two polar opposites: I) H5N1 isn’t real; and II) start stockpiling antivirals 1/
scott rosenstein retweeted
An important finding, highlighting the value of genomic sequence data. Bad news for fatal outcome of patient. Reassuring that virus was likely from local poultry outbreak and not from U.S. dairy cow outbreak of #H5N1 & not from a mix w/ human viruses. Imp to find virus source & do human serology tests of all patients contacts.
Appreciate the data transparency by scientists in Mexico.
scott rosenstein retweeted
A randomized trial for #LongCovid testing Paxlovid (15-days) vs placebo showed no benefit
Just published @JAMAInternalMed
jamanetwork.com/journals/jam…
scott rosenstein retweeted
It’s like @usda was like: “You know how govt screwed up comms during the pandemic? Let’s do that again.”
Little transparency with a dash of paternalism—keep it simple; public doesn’t need to know.
This is exactly how you lose trust. Unbelievable.
scott rosenstein retweeted
Everything that is wrong with TwiXter in two Tweets:
The post from the Telegraph mischaracterizing the paper gets 1.5 million views.
xitter.cf/Telegraph/status/17979…
The correction from the British Medical Journal gets 6,700.
xitter.cf/bmj_company/status/179…
Statement in response to misreporting of BMJ Public Health @BMJPublicHealth research on excess deaths since the COVID-19 pandemic.
Link: bit.ly/3RfBJGA
This is another one of these epidemiological debacles, along with the cochrane mask review and so called “Johns Hopkins” lockdown study that belongs in the time capsule, filed under “Why it all went so wrong”
In the conclusion, the authors place vaccines on equal footing with COVID-19 as a potential driving factor of excess deaths in the pandemic, which is likely what motivated the media reports to produce their misleading click-bait headlines that I am sure earned them lots of clicks and $$.
However, there is nothing in the paper to link vaccines to excess deaths beyond speculation about adverse events in the introduction and discussion.
They provide no evidence from any studies showing increased risk of death after vaccination, and certainly not at the levels required to make substantive effects on global excess deaths data.
These facts and the frequent misrepresentation of this study's results in various news articles are likely what motivated BMJ to add this statement of concern to the paper today:
I’m no virology expert. What’s unfortunate is that this has become so politicized and tribal that experts on both sides will likely be dismissed as overly biased in their assessments of this kind of analysis for the foreseeable future.
This was a very very small win for multilateralism and the best possible outcome for Biden’s reelection. There was no upside for him trying to sell a new pandemic agreement to Congress during this election.
In an historic development, the #WHA77 today agreed a package of critical amendments to the International Health Regulations (2005) (IHR), and made concrete commitments to completing negotiations on a global pandemic agreement within a year.
⬇️
bit.ly/4bElM55
H5N1 in 2024 is a perfect test case. Does surveillance matter? Can investment in testing and genomic analysis mitigate the damage from a mostly theoretical risk to human health turning into a very real risk to human health? And can this be done in our current political climate?
scott rosenstein retweeted
A working group established to reflect on the work of two other working groups (WGIHR/INB) and decide whether to create more working groups (PABs, financing).
It’s almost like MS want to waste time on modalities so they don’t have to deal with the big stuff.
WHO Member States at the World Health Assembly #WHA77 agree way forward to conclude Pandemic Agreement & strengthen the International Health Regulations (IHR, 2005), which aim to boost the world’s ability to better able to prevent and respond to the threat of future pandemics bit.ly/3KkHcbu
scott rosenstein retweeted
It also shows it’s difficult for journalists & anyone other than the farms, vets, or the gov to test their own milk for the virus to understand what the risk is.
What could the risk be?
The big risk is that someone with the (human) flu catches bird flu, and the flu mutates…
When people ask why the Covid response in the US and elsewhere was such a disingenuous bad faith circus, point to the Cochrane study. It has everything in there - clout chasing, cherry picking, methodological hijinks, etc
The new review showing the effectiveness of masks addresses the flawed Cochrane study, which was deliberately misinterpreted by anti-maskers & some media to spread misinformation around masks.
This new review will serve as a gold standard reference to debunk mask misinformation.
ALT The need for a new review on masks was highlighted by a widely publicized polarization in scientific opinion. The masks section of a 2023 Cochrane review of non-pharmaceutical interventions (9) was—controversially—limited to randomized controlled trials (RCTs). It was interpreted by the press and by some but not all of its own authors to mean that “masks don’t work” and “mask mandates did nothing” (10). Cochrane’s editor-in-chief felt the need to state publicly that in Cochrane’s view, the review’s findings did not support such a conclusion (11). Some scholars were quick to question the review’s methodology, especially key flaws in the meta-analysis and omission of a vast body of non-RCT evidence (12–16).
scott rosenstein retweeted
Scientists have managed to generate a full genetic sequence of #H5N1 #birdflu from store-bought milk, suggesting commercial milk products could be a way to monitor the outbreak in cows, given the lack of cooperation from dairy farmers. statnews.com/2024/05/21/bird…
