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What was life really like before vaccines? The story of 8-year old George Williams offers us a glimpse.
Dr Ellie Murray, ScD
56K posts
Dr Ellie Murray, ScD
@EpiEllie
Epidemiologist and science communicator | cohost @casualinfer podcast | Newsletter: E is for Epi at newsletter.epiellie.com
- Some of y’all forget the reason we have food safety regulations is because companies used to do things like adding chalk to spoiled milk so it looked normal. Regulations don’t exist because governments enjoy them. They exist because pure unadulterated capitalism would kill us.
- I love twitter bc where else can I, an person with two graduate degrees from Harvard in both infectious disease epidemiology and biostatistics, be assured I am wrong about infectious disease epi and statistics by a software engineer who has “read multiple FDA package inserts”
- I did a couple raw milk posts this week, and a frequent comment was: “if babies can drink raw milk, why can’t adults?” It shouldn’t need to be said but: Human mothers are NOT cows. Human milk is NOT the same as cow milk. NEVER give a human baby “raw” cow milk.
- My dentist’s first question to me, knowing I’m an epidemiologist, was “when will this all be over”. Was super unsatisfying for us both for me to have to answer, “whenever we want, if the government would just take concerted & decisive action”
- People love to claim to we can’t change people’s behavior. But did you know the idea of “designated drivers” is only normal in America thanks to the work of a group of Harvard scholars? Here’s 5 reasons they succeeded.Responsible designated driver ensuring a safe journey home
00:00 - COVID fatigue is a real & we’re all exhausted, but I suspect a lot is actually *decision* fatigue. The absence of clear rules, information, and guidance means having to think through our every action to decide what feels safest. Good leadership would give us all a break.
- Everyone keeps talking about covid becoming endemic, but as I listen to the conversation, it’s becoming more & more clear to me that very few of you know what “endemic” means. So here’s a thread on how pandemics end.
GIF - Mask wearing is literally the same type of thing as refrigerators, sunscreen, bug spray, spaying your pets, cancer screening, seatbelts. NONE of those things work perfectly all the time. But ALL of them help reduce harms some of the time. Harm reduction is the goal.
- The idea that “everyone has already gotten COVID at least once” is just the latest attempt to make you forget about the risks it poses and go back keeping the economy afloat. Sure, some infections are asymptomatic, but that doesn’t mean everyone who hasnt been sick was infected.
- just because you never heard of something when you were a kid doesn’t mean it didn’t exist, maybe you were stupidRFK JR: ADD, ADHD… Tourette syndrome, Narcolepsy, Autism.. All of these are injuries that I never heard of when I was a kid.
00:00 - We are dealing with a massive public health crisis on a scale none of us has ever lived through before, and yet many senior public health folks are shushing junior folks who speak out & warning us to think of our careers. But what is my career for, if not to speak up now?
- The MMR vaccine does not, in fact, contain any aborted fetus debris.RFK Jr on measles: "The MMR vaccine contains a lot of aborted fetus debris."
00:00Readers added contextThe rubella component of the MMR vaccine was developed using the WI-38 cell line, derived from fetal lung tissue obtained from an aborted fetus in the 1960s. This cell line is used to grow the weakened rubella virus. The vaccine is purified and doesn’t contain fetal cells. chop.edu/vaccine-educat… - If you *are* at a Super Bowl party right now, please don’t forget to quarantine for the next 11-14 days. You might have decided the risk to yourself is worth it, but everyone else you would normally interact with didn’t get that choice.
