The Post-Partisan Emporium

  ‘Expresso Vaccines’ and Lessons from the American Chestnut Tree Why a vaccine designed in two days faced less regulatory scrutiny than a venerable nut tree that sustained life for centuries Dr. Mathew Maavak A tree that once fed multitudes now faces a decade of federal red tape before a single seed can touch wild soil, while a brand-new genetic vaccine, cooked up in 48 hours and injected into billions, sailed through approval in under a year. One restores a vanished forest, the other rewrote human cells on a planetary scale. Both are genetic modifications, yet one is treated as a potential ecological threat while the other is hailed as a modern miracle. Welcome to the “expresso lane” of modern biotechnology, where speed, risk, and scrutiny depend entirely on whose veins are on the line. Reign of the Chestnut King In the ancient forests of Appalachia, the American Chestnut (Castanea dentata) once towered as the unmatched monarch. Stretching from the southern ridges to southern Can...

  WHO Deploys National Pandemic Influenza Surveillance Grid in Egypt—270 Officers Trained for Real-Time Monitoring Across 30 Sentinel Sites As countries engineer avian influenza bird flu pathogens without restraint. Jon Fleetwood The World Health Organization and Egypt’s Ministry of Health just completed a national-scale workshop training nearly 300 surveillance officers to expand real-time monitoring of influenza and other respiratory pathogens across the country. The move comes as this website has been tracking multiple governments performing gain-of-function experiments on avian influenza “bird flu” pathogens (see below this article), raising worries of another orchestrated, man-made pandemic. The WHO  announcement  frames the workshop as routine and annual, masking the scale of the expansion and the integration of surveillance functions under WHO guidance. “The annual meeting and accompanying workshop on integrated surveillance of acute respiratory infections (ARIs), ...