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A litmus test I use for "Why my X field of study is the way to prevent the next COVID-19" papers - and you can use it too! - is that if they don't say up front their solution is still less important than basic public health, they're 100% grifting you.
Including scientists.
Including scientists.
For instance, I just read a compelling argument about emerging diseases - by some teams that have shaped my thought process over the years - but the end of the article is just a pitch to better fund museum collections and bioinformatics. No public health arg/authors? In the bin.
This even applies to climate change!
Climate change will cause an unprecedented reassortment of the global virome. It will be the greatest threat to public health ever. The most foundational solution to that isn't climate mitigation - it's public health capacity.
Climate change will cause an unprecedented reassortment of the global virome. It will be the greatest threat to public health ever. The most foundational solution to that isn't climate mitigation - it's public health capacity.
A couple reasons why:
1. Climate change is already killing people today, and has been for multiple decades.
2. Mitigating climate change will take decades to return to baseline.
3. Environmentally-linked diseases will kill no matter what. Public health is always step 0.
1. Climate change is already killing people today, and has been for multiple decades.
2. Mitigating climate change will take decades to return to baseline.
3. Environmentally-linked diseases will kill no matter what. Public health is always step 0.
(I don't think it's all malicious, but I do think it's easy enough to pull off a grift that - if you don't know a single thing about public health, but do know enough about COVID-19 to tell a nice story - goes pretty smoothly. Regardless of intentions.)
