Osterholm
Tuesday I had the real privilege of being able to listen in on a zoom cast for a group of retired Kiwanis members in Roseville MN.
I know one of the retired Kiwanians there, and he told me about the program featuring Dr. Michael Osterholm, a long time Minnesota PhD specializing in infectious diseases.
Tuesday, we were treated to a powerful hour. I don’t think it was recorded. The alternative is probably found at the link under his name (above). He has a new book in progress, scheduled for publication in 2025, to be titled “The Big One”, about the inevitability of future pandemics. Watch for it. (If you do a search for this you will find this title under Osterholm and Olshaker as a 9-hour audible book, so this may be a book in process, though not yet in print.)
The first big one, the one that brought Dr. Osterholm to my attention, was HIV AIDS. In the fall of 1987, my organization, the Minnesota Education Association, called a required meeting for all staff at a hotel conference room in suburban St. Paul. It was at a scary time – not unlike 2020 – and Dr. Osterholm was there to tell it like it was, and he did. Along with him was a Gay Man in later stages of AIDS, who also spoke to the group. The man died later in the year, I recall. He was a very profound witness to the then-reality.
It was a highly charged event. There were perhaps 100 of us, and it was mandatory, and there we were, stuck in a hotel conference room with somebody who had AIDS. As Larry, then Executive Director of the MEA and the person who called the meeting, recently remembered:
I think it could accurately be stated that at the time of the meeting, AIDS was probably more feared than Leprosy. It was a terminal illness, and no one was sure about anything, and there was no therapy yet available.
It was understandable that we would be apprehensive. At the same time, our job was to represent the needs of tens of thousands of public school teachers, who in turn were exposed to hundreds of thousands of students every day, and vice versa. The analogies to the Covid-19 pandemic are striking.
I asked Larry and Norm, the person who invited me to participate, for a couple of bullets from the talk. This is an impossible task, since so much ground was covered for this largely retired professional audience.
Larry offered: “I think his acknowledgement about the loss of trust in public health and the quandary about fixing it is true but troubling.
Norm, whose career was in public health in Minnesota, had this to say: “I asked Dr. Osterholm two questions to which he responded very well and, again, very thoughtfully
- Given the uncertainty with most scientific explanations of who’s on first and given the seeming fact that so many people are uncomfortable with uncertainty, how should public health deal with the many folks who reject science, aka public health in this case, because it cannot guarantee with 100% certainty that this vaccine or this therapy or this modality will work? I noted that I had encountered many people including several close family members who chose not to believe Dr. Fauci et al because “he would say one thing one day and a week later another thing that was sometimes different.” They wanted certainty like believing the claim that the visit to our shores by COVID-19 was all a hoax or that just gargling with Clorox would take care of the matter. Note: many people did just that and were able to make a few trips to the ER for treatment of throat burns as payment, if you will, for their strong desire for certaimty.
- What should or could public health do to restore trust in its recommendations and findings?”
Dick: Personally, as I recall, Dr. Osterholm opined that he doubted that it would ever be conclusively determined, the origin of the COVID-19 pandemic. He is, after all, a scientist, and that is his job to go beyond soundbites and speculation.
He felt the current vaccine therapy was perhaps useful only for a few months – that one cannot assume that one round of shots is enough. Every four or five months seemed his bottom line. He worries about disinformation, and about anti-vaxxers who refuse to get or authorize immunizations – the “nobody will tell me what to do” crowd, who in the process subject others to communicable diseases which are controllable.
Dr. Osterholm is a long-time colleague and friend of Dr. Anthony Fauci, and he recommended Dr. Fauci’s very recent book “On Call“, available everywhere, whose last 100 or so pages is on Covid-19. Some other sections of Fauci’s book (which I have) “The AIDS Era”; “The Wars on Terror and Disease”; “Expecting the Unexpected”.
I think Dr. Osterholm has a podcast, and I’d recommend it for those who are interested. As Larry notes, he’s a great teacher, and as we all learned in 1987, he’s a no-holds-barred kind of guy – he’s willing to deal with tough issues openly and honestly.
We aren’t out of the woods, here or anywhere in the world. Ours is an international and mobile and very complex society. We are fortunate to have the Osterholm’s and the Fauci’s of the world doing everything they can to keep us safe.
Leave a Reply
Want to join the discussion?Feel free to contribute!