This gem is from 1998. It should be clear as day today that the WHO is a business and they are not sad when new diseases emerge. pic.twitter.com/idOqRpEH2w
— Suzanne Humphries (@DrSuzanneH7) March 10, 2025
GPV's DAILY LIFE VS. EVOLUTION
[GPV stands for "World Health Organization Global Program for Vaccines and Immunizations (GPV)."]
Looks like we're going to be in business for sometime.
Almost every day we hear about a new microbe inflicting a new syndrome on an unprepared population prion disease, viral hemorrhagic fevers like Ebola, Marburg, hantivirus Lassa dengue, or tick-borne diseases; or a new kind of flu; not to speak of AIDS and the potential or actual resurgence of tuberculosis, measles, and many other infections that threaten us.
To people outside the international vaccine community, that's bad news. As geneticist and Noble Laureate, Joshua Lederberg puts it in a nutshell,
The odds are stacked against us we cannot compete with microorganisms whose populations are measured in exponents of 10 to the 12th power a million million 10 14 10 18 over periods of days and who are living in a sea of mutagenic influences.
To people like me and my GPV colleagues, it's good news.
All right, we have a daunting task and maybe we won't win in the end. Maybe as vaccine researcher and developer, Stanley Plotkin, said, "Prevention by vaccine is the El Dorado of research in infectious disease."
. . . the reason why we shouldn't succeed. Just three years ago, there were only about 150 candidate vaccines in development; today, only 4 years after GPV was created, there are about 240.
Yes, indeed, the news for us in the vaccine business is good.
And, yes, we are human beings and have got to eat, and the continual emergence of new diseases means our jobs aren't likely to disappear in the near future. And as a human beings, we do share concerns about how life on our planet will evolve, and we do realize that scientists and health policy makers that are decisions could have a profound impact on future generations . . . .
