• America’s Abandonment of Syria - The New-Yorker
    Many Syrians thought that the U.S. cared about them. Now they know better.

    Since October, even the visits have stopped. Reached by phone recently, Ali said that he is deeply worried about the possibility of a COVID-19 outbreak in Raqqa. “We can take care of one or two patients, at most,” he explained. The hospital has two ventilators—eight were lost to air strikes.

    #Covid19#Syrie#USA#Guerre#Déplacés_internes#Santé#Camp#migrant#réfugiés#migration

    https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/04/27/americas-abandonment-of-syria

  • How Anthony Fauci Became America’s Doctor | The New Yorker
    https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/04/20/how-anthony-fauci-became-americas-doctor

    Ah le plaisir de lire des bio-hagiographies ;-)

    Anthony Fauci certainly did not. At seventy-nine, Fauci has run the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases for thirty-six years, through six Administrations and a long procession of viral epidemics: H.I.V., SARS, avian influenza, swine flu, Zika, and Ebola among them. As a member of the Administration’s coronavirus task force, Fauci seemed to believe that the government’s actions could be directed, even if the President’s pronouncements could not. At White House briefings, it has regularly fallen to Fauci to gently amend Trump’s absurdities, half-truths, and outright lies. No, there is no evidence that the malaria drug hydroxychloroquine will provide a “miracle” treatment to stave off the infection. No, there won’t be a vaccine for at least a year. When the President insisted for many weeks on denying the government’s inability to deliver test kits for the virus, Fauci, testifying before Congress, put the matter bluntly. “That’s a failing,” he said. “Let’s admit it.”

    When Trump was not dismissing the severity of the crisis, he was blaming others for it: the Chinese, the Europeans, and, as always, Barack Obama. He blamed governors who were desperate for federal help and had been reduced to fighting one another for lifesaving ventilators. In one briefing, Governor Andrew Cuomo, of New York, said, “It’s like being on eBay with fifty other states, bidding on a ventilator.” Trump even accused hospital workers in New York City of pilfering surgical masks and other vital protective equipment that they needed to stay alive. “Are they going out the back door?” Trump wondered aloud.

    As a reporter who writes mainly on science and public-health issues, I’ve known Fauci since the H.I.V./AIDS epidemic exploded, in the mid-eighties. He once explained to me that he has developed a method for dealing with political leaders in times of crisis: “I go to my favorite book of philosophy, ‘The Godfather,’ and say, ‘It’s nothing personal, it’s strictly business.’ ” He continued, “You just have a job to do. Even when somebody’s acting ridiculous, you can’t chide them for it. You’ve got to deal with them. Because if you don’t deal with them, then you’re out of the picture.”

    Since his days of advising Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush, Fauci has maintained a simple credo: “You stay completely apolitical and non-ideological, and you stick to what it is that you do. I’m a scientist and I’m a physician. And that’s it.” He learned the value of candor early. “Some wise person who used to be in the White House, in the Nixon Administration, told me a very interesting dictum to live by,” he told me in 2016, during a public conversation we had at the fifty-year reunion of his medical-school class. “He said, ‘When you go into the White House, you should be prepared that that is the last time you will ever go in. Because if you go in saying, I’m going to tell somebody something they want to hear, then you’ve shot yourself in the foot.’ Now everybody knows I’m going to tell them exactly what’s the truth.”

    #Epidémiologie #Préparation #Anthony_Fauci

  • The MacGyvers Taking on the Ventilator Shortage | The New Yorker
    https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/04/06/the-macgyvers-taking-on-the-ventilator-shortage

    But Rosie the Riveter isn’t gone—she’s just working from home. The other day, Bruce Fenton, of Portsmouth, New Hampshire, posted a call for volunteers on the Web site Medium. He was leading something called the Ventilator Project—a crowdsourced effort to address the shortage. The project’s two goals, Fenton wrote, were to help existing ventilator manufacturers ramp up production, and to design an open-source plan for a cheap and simple emergency ventilator that hospitals can use. As inspiration, he reminded everyone that the Apollo 13 astronauts created a carbon-dioxide scrubber from spare parts.

    The Ventilator Project’s three hundred and fifty volunteers do most of their brainstorming on the chat app Slack. A few proposals: repurposing CPAP machines (sleep-apnea masks) as ventilators, rigging single ventilators to treat multiple patients, and using grounded airplanes as treatment facilities, in order to take advantage of the overhead oxygen masks. Many participants are medical professionals, such as Stuart Solomon, a Stanford anesthesiologist who is mobilizing equipment that functions similarly to ventilators (like anesthesia machines). Fenton has also recruited lawyers, in the hope that, should a solid design emerge from the project, mass production of these ventilators—and their use in hospitals—won’t be stalled by regulators such as the F.D.A. And he has called on “engineers, builders, and MacGyver types who can build a legit ventilator” out of “Home Depot type parts.”

    #Crowdsourcing #Respirateurs

  • How Does the Coronavirus Behave Inside a Patient? | The New Yorker
    https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/04/06/how-does-the-coronavirus-behave-inside-a-patient

    The temple was two hundred and fifty years old, the attendant informed me. That would date it to around the time when accounts first appeared of a mysterious sect of Brahmans wandering up and down the Gangetic plain to popularize the practice of tika, an early effort at #inoculation. This involved taking matter from a smallpox patient’s pustule—a snake pit of live virus—and applying it to the pricked skin of an uninfected person, then covering the spot with a linen rag.

    The Indian practitioners of tika had likely learned it from Arabic physicians, who had learned it from the Chinese. As early as 1100, medical healers in China had realized that those who survived smallpox did not catch the illness again (survivors of the disease were enlisted to take care of new victims), and inferred that the exposure of the body to an illness protected it from future instances of that illness.

    #immunisation