IBD Patients Like Eric Prompt More Questions About COVID-19

A piece on Crohn’s written by Student intern at VIC, Eric Chen. 

“I began to feel ill the night of my eighth birthday. Less than a month later, I was diagnosed with Crohn’s disease. Having just barely finished second grade, I didn’t know what this disease meant or its severity — let alone what the condition had in store for me. Since my diagnosis nearly a decade ago, I have luckily required relatively minimal treatment and experienced no subsequent flare-ups. Now, living through the COVID-19 pandemic as a high-school senior, the potential implications of the virus have caused newfound worry for me and my loved ones…”

View Article Via Covid-Recovery

A Virus-Hunter’s Advice on Dealing with China’s Resistance on Covid

A Politico piece authored by Michael Callahan, Director of Clinical Translation at VIC

Hardball is the wrong technique to get China to open up about the early spread of the pandemic. A successful but little-known global disease program offers a much smarter approach.

“The origins of the pandemic have huge importance to science, to medicine and to global security, but nearly two years after the first known infection, the search is stalled. The high-profile release last month of the U.S. intelligence community’s report to President Joe Biden only confirmed how little progress has been made: After a 90-day investigation, it offered two long-familiar theories. Either the virus originated from natural human exposure to an infected animal, or it escaped from a biocontainment laboratory. There was no consensus on which was more likely.

There’s a good reason we don’t know more: The government of China has consistently obscured the events around the early coronavirus outbreak and resisted providing key information to American investigators and even to the World Health Organization.

This doesn’t automatically mean China was…”

View Article Via Politico