Quotes from Jeremy Brown

Today, we know that viruses are submicroscopic entities twenty times smaller than a bacterium. They contain a core of genetic material covered by a protein capsule, and they reproduce exclusively within living cells.

The most useful definition we have is that an epidemic is a severe local outbreak, while a pandemic is a global outbreak that makes people very sick, and spreads rapidly from a point of origin.

Antigenic shift generated the deadly 1918 influenza virus and the swine flu outbreak of 2009.

The 2009 "pandemic," which was not really a pandemic at all, taught us that language is both a weapon and a handicap when waging a campaign against influenza.

We now think that the majority of deaths in the 1918 pandemic resulted from these secondary infections, not from the flu virus itself.

The third explanation for 1918's lethality is that the flu virus triggered an overreactive immune response that turned the body against itself.

Today, influenza kills fewer than 0.1 percent of those who catch it. Nearly everyone recovers. In the 1918 pandemic most still recovered, but the death rate was twenty-five times greater. So many died in the U.S. that the average life expectancy in 1918 fell from fifty-one to thirty-nine years.

The history of the 1918 influenza pandemic is depressing reading. It's like watching a horror movie that you have seen before. You know who the killer is, but you can't jump in and save the victim.

If it is hot enough to barbecue," a patient of mine once told me as I sutured the knife wounds on his chest, "it's hot enough to stab someone.

Hopkirk, like many physicians of his day, also prescribed quinine to treat the flu. "In quinine," he wrote with great certainty, "we have a drug that not only controls fever-producing processes allied to fermentations, but also exerts a definite anti-toxic action on the specific virus of influenza itself.

All this tinkering was creating superviruses that did not exist outside the lab and that might be more easily transmissible between different species, or more virulent, or more resistant to any influenza vaccine. Most researchers were insistent that these "gain of function" studies were needed to better understand how the flu virus might evolve, but the federal government saw things differently. These experiments were a security risk.