Dex
Constitutional Patriot
It was a pretty standard Q&A session with select "experts" and "select" media/science community.
The questions, comments and answers were pretty run of the mill vanilla flavor soft ball stuff. A couple of the "authorities" were knowledgeable but some of the others were just bureaucratic types from DHS and OSHA, what have you.
The most knowledgeable sounding of the panel was a Navy Medical guy who was probably CIA or Naval Intelligence. His bottom line was that there are varying opinions on how PPE should be used as well as differences of perception of transferability of the virus; the airborne thing was touch upon.
There were some good comments and questions from the audience but I got the feeling that even now the country is no where near prepared. The HC units just don't have the PPE and are wrapped in the red tape of getting it.
Anyway, the dean of GW University who was chairing the event was trying to wrap it up but ended up allowing "just one more, one more question" for this guy who seemed just itching to get up there and spew something.
He said he was from Rocky Mtn Research NSAID, had a heavy accent, hard to place Eastern European and immediately launched into a comment about how Ebola is a regulated "agent" and there were laws in place preventing him from doing "his" particular work. My impression was that he was a bio-warfare research scientist who was looking at the outbreak as a bio-weapon. He finished his short session of nearly illegible babbling by saying that it would take him "two years" to do anything.
He really had no business getting up and saying anything at all for several reasons. It seemed apparent that he was probably working on a classified project in the bio-warfare category he was talking about the 1972 treaty that is supposed to prevent nation states from even doing research but we all know they have been. I think they are allowed to research according to making vaccines and combating bio-war but the lines get blurred and the depth that they can go is limited.
This guy was really "out there" sounded like he had a secret that he could barely contain himself to keep and wasn't talking about dealing with the immediate public health issue but was maybe worried about what they could do if this epidemic is the result of a bio-war/terrorism attack or being used as a spring board for attack.
If it is indeed a weapon or is being transformed into a weapon, it changes alot of how the medical community needs to approach the outbreak and adds ramifications at the state secret level as well as national security.
If you have read this far, have completed reading my post and have any curiosity about what I'm talking about, please speak up and I will post the hasty video I took with the micro hobby camera I had handy that I grabbed to take the video of as it was being broadcast on CSPAN.
If nobody speaks up I'm not going to bother because it will take me a few minutes as well as soak up my host accounts bandwidth (134mb per viewing) and I only want to post it if anybody is actually interested.
The questions, comments and answers were pretty run of the mill vanilla flavor soft ball stuff. A couple of the "authorities" were knowledgeable but some of the others were just bureaucratic types from DHS and OSHA, what have you.
The most knowledgeable sounding of the panel was a Navy Medical guy who was probably CIA or Naval Intelligence. His bottom line was that there are varying opinions on how PPE should be used as well as differences of perception of transferability of the virus; the airborne thing was touch upon.
There were some good comments and questions from the audience but I got the feeling that even now the country is no where near prepared. The HC units just don't have the PPE and are wrapped in the red tape of getting it.
Anyway, the dean of GW University who was chairing the event was trying to wrap it up but ended up allowing "just one more, one more question" for this guy who seemed just itching to get up there and spew something.
He said he was from Rocky Mtn Research NSAID, had a heavy accent, hard to place Eastern European and immediately launched into a comment about how Ebola is a regulated "agent" and there were laws in place preventing him from doing "his" particular work. My impression was that he was a bio-warfare research scientist who was looking at the outbreak as a bio-weapon. He finished his short session of nearly illegible babbling by saying that it would take him "two years" to do anything.
He really had no business getting up and saying anything at all for several reasons. It seemed apparent that he was probably working on a classified project in the bio-warfare category he was talking about the 1972 treaty that is supposed to prevent nation states from even doing research but we all know they have been. I think they are allowed to research according to making vaccines and combating bio-war but the lines get blurred and the depth that they can go is limited.
This guy was really "out there" sounded like he had a secret that he could barely contain himself to keep and wasn't talking about dealing with the immediate public health issue but was maybe worried about what they could do if this epidemic is the result of a bio-war/terrorism attack or being used as a spring board for attack.
If it is indeed a weapon or is being transformed into a weapon, it changes alot of how the medical community needs to approach the outbreak and adds ramifications at the state secret level as well as national security.
If you have read this far, have completed reading my post and have any curiosity about what I'm talking about, please speak up and I will post the hasty video I took with the micro hobby camera I had handy that I grabbed to take the video of as it was being broadcast on CSPAN.
If nobody speaks up I'm not going to bother because it will take me a few minutes as well as soak up my host accounts bandwidth (134mb per viewing) and I only want to post it if anybody is actually interested.
