The Vindication of D.A. Henderson
The Vindication of D.A. Henderson BY JEFFREY A. TUCKER e were going to invent pandemic planning.” Those were the words of Dr. Rajeev Venkayya in 2005 when he headed the White House bioterrorism study group under George W. Bush. “We want to use all instruments of national power to confront this threat,” Venkayya told colleagues in the administration, as reported by Michael Lewis in his book The Premonition . That was the birth of the idea of national lockdown for pathogenic threat. To mainstream epidemiologists, the idea seemed crazy and potentially ruinous at the time, a fact that only emboldened its creators. Venkayya’s colleague computer scientist Robert Glass told Lewis: I asked myself, “Why didn’t these epidemiologists figure it out?” They didn’t figure it out because they didn’t have tools that were focused on the problem. They had tools to understand the movement of infectious diseases without the purpose of trying to stop them. Another convert...