This year’s speaker was Louise Ivers MD, MPH, Executive Director, MGH Center for Global Health, Professor of Medicine, Professor of Global Health and Social Medicine, Harvard Medical School
Partnership in Global Health Outbreak Response: from Cholera to COVID-19 in Haiti
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…”
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…”
“The unvaccinated may ask whether they should now get vaccinated to protect themselves and their families. Meanwhile, some who have been vaccinated wonder whether a booster shot is in order, sooner rather than later, especially given the rise in the delta variant. The answer is not yet clear. Data from Israel, the U.S. and elsewhere suggest that the current COVID-19 vaccines offer less protection against the delta variant than earlier versions of the virus. Early reports from Pfizer support the effectiveness of a booster shot against the delta variant while a review of safety data is pending. In the meantime, we must avoid jeopardizing the effectiveness of the first vaccine doses against original variants as well as the delta variant. The timing and efforts become a balancing act. What has been glaringly clear throughout the pandemic is the need to trust and follow the science in real-time. That means, in part, don’t jump the gun and make assumptions. Yet, it also means making the most informed public health decisions possible at any given moment.”
co -written by Mark C. Poznansky, MD, PhD, Marc Seigel, MD and Jacqueline A. Hart, MD.
“Millions of researchers, clinicians, public health officials, volunteer EMTs and vaccinators have devoted innumerable hours to developing and deploying a solution to the COVID-19 pandemic at an astoundingly rapid pace — not only in vaccine discovery and production, but also in complicated systems and processes established and nimbly adapted as necessary to deliver on a vaccination timetable. This work is rooted in evidence-based information. That means clinical and public health decisions rely on the best data we have at any given time to deliver the best care for individuals, communities and the population at large. That principle fosters the most edified management possible.”
In an effort to promote COVID vaccine confidence and dispel harmful myths and misinformation, Mass General Brigham (MGB) doctors and other healthcare providers are bringing answers and information directly to residents in our hotspot communities. By meeting people where they are at, we aim to address longstanding, well-earned mistrust of the medical community and encourage them to receive the vaccine as soon as they are eligible.
Dr. Michael V. Callahan and Dr. Mark C. Poznansky interviewed by Dr. Dara Udo.
Dara Udo, M.D., MPH, is the chief media correspondent for the Vaccine Immunotherapy Center (VIC) at Massachusetts General Hospital and an urgent and immediate care physician at Westchester Medical Group, White Plains (N.Y.) Hospital and Greenwich (Conn.) Hospital.
Michael V. Callahan, MD, MSPH, DTM&H, former Covid-19 special advisor to the assistant secretary for public health preparedness at the Department of Health and Human Services, and was incident commander for nine international highly dangerous pathogen outbreaks. He is the director of Clinical Translation at the Vaccine and Immunotherapy Center at Massachusetts General Hospital.
Mark C. Poznansky, MD, PhD infectious diseases physician and director of the Vaccine and Immunotherapy Center at Massachusetts General Hospital and an associate professor at Harvard Medical School.