Category: Science: The Softer Side

  • Closed Borders Will Not Keep Out More Infectious Forms of COVID

    Border closing efforts serve as a distractions. We need to focus on known methods of disease control — vaccination, masks and social distancing. Read the rest at USA Today.

  • Vaccine Administration Is Much Harder than It Seems

    Substantial logistical challenges and vaccine refusal by health care providers have contributed to a slow vaccine rollout. Better policies could fix this. Read the rest at USA Today.

  • The Geopolitics of Vaccine Distribution

    Inoculations are a welcome development, but the public should temper its excitement. Read the rest at Geopolitical Futures.

  • Cyberattacks as a Public Health Threat

    The first known death from a cyberattack raises the prospect that malware could be more than just a financial crime. Read the rest at Geopolitical Futures.

  • The Trouble With a Premature Vaccine

    Hope is beginning to fade that the world will have a safe and effective coronavirus vaccine before the predicted “second wave” arrives that will further suppress economic activity and recovery. Despite an unprecedented global effort, a deliverable vaccine might still be months away. Almost certainly it won’t be ready by October as many hoped. Dr.…

  • Book Review: Twelve Diseases That Changed Our World

    Modern society is far removed from the reality of death. That was not the case for the vast majority of human history, when parents would produce multiple offspring in the hope that a few might survive to adulthood. Well into the 20th century, infectious diseases cut lives tragically short, often in gruesome ways, radically transforming…

  • The Geopolitical Importance of the WHO

    In 1958, the Soviet Union proposed a global effort to eradicate smallpox, a disease that kills roughly a third of those it infects, including 300 million in the 20th century alone. On Dec. 9, 1979, it was completely eradicated. This public health triumph – perhaps the greatest in the history of mankind – would not have…

  • Will the Coronavirus Forge a Brave New World?

    Of all the major geopolitical players on the planet, Mother Nature may be the toughest adversary. Nature has neither imperatives nor constraints to guide its behavior. Rather, it operates off general patterns that occur under various conditions. While the patterns provide broad strokes of expected behavior, it strikes mostly randomly. Even predictable phenomena, such as the Atlantic…

  • Mother Nature as a Geopolitical Force

    History is biased, and not just because the victors tend to write it. The study of history is largely the study of humankind – specifically, the geopolitical events that have shaped human actions (and vice versa) over millennia. It’s true that to learn from the past, we must study ourselves. But what if we’re missing…

  • Four Coronavirus Lessons That We Will (or Won’t) Learn

    When a patient dies in a hospital, it’s not uncommon for doctors to convene what is known as a morbidity and mortality conference, the goal of which is to determine what went wrong and why. In the months and years following a national crisis, we engage in a somewhat similar process. Over time, official investigations…