First Ever Virtual Annual Meeting of the National Academy of Medicine, on COVID and Climate Change

Oct. 18, 2020 (EIRNS)—The morning meeting of the National Academy of Medicine today featured various medical experts dealing with various aspects of the COVID pandemic. The lead speaker was Dr. Shao Yiming from China, followed by health professionals from South Africa, England, a former Health Minister from Peru, and an American epidemiologist, all of whom were quite competent and didn’t utter a word about climate nor attack China.

After the presentations, the other panelists had some questions for Dr. Shao:

Q: Why were you so successful in containing the pandemic?

A: “You need 90% cooperation of the public or you will not be able to contain the pandemic.” He gave an example of public cooperation by the fact that most of the 600 million people who travelled internally on Oct. 1, their national day, wore masks. Seventeen days later, still no increased COVID cases.

Asked about quarantine, he said: “We don’t encourage home quarantine..., the government prepared special places, with good conditions and (Chinese) food delivered; it’s only a 2-week quarantine; our people took it well.”

Q: Why have there been no spikes to speak of in China?

A: “You need more than ‘the three 90s’ for epidemic control. We cannot compromise; we moved towards 99% containment [i.e., 90% of the people infected know their status; 90% receive appropriate therapy, and 90% achieve undetectable viral load]. We had good consensus on what to do; good citizen collaboration—according to the old Chinese proverb, ‘a brief pain is always better than a long one.’ ”

The other medical panelists were good and somewhat interesting.

Boring and worse were the two climate hucksters. One proclaimed 11 million lives a year could be saved if we stop consuming red meat and dairy. He revealed that they had started feeding crickets to Harvard students, as a meat substitute.