Free Republic

COVID-19 has us all thinking about public health, but looking back, there have been many pandemics before, and we persist in spite of them. As of April 15, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) has reported 605,390 cases of COVID-19 in the United States. These have occurred across all 50 states and have resulted in 24,582 deaths. We are all feeling the effects of the pandemic. Schools are closed, businesses have shut their doors, and nobody knows what’s coming next. While COVID-19 is one of the largest pandemics of the 21st century, you might be wondering how it stacks up...

Affordable and reliable energy and electricity are essential for the world to alleviate the coronavirus pandemic. Without reliable electricity, hospitals can’t save lives, and without crude oil powering our modern world, the virus would overwhelm civilized nations. A movie released earlier this year titled “Juice: How Electricity Explains the World,” underscores how “economic development (and medicine) depends on reliable and affordable power.” Those holding degrees from elite universities now seem useless compared to farmworkers, truckdrivers, and warehouse stock clerks. These same university-educated folk believe renewable energy (sun and wind) can deliver “critical medical equipment, ultrasound systems, ventilators, CT systems, X-ray...

The types of financial shocks hospitals currently face illustrate the problems inherent in Democrats’ proposed expansions of government-run health care. The coronavirus pandemic has inflicted such vast damage on the American economy that one damaged sector has gone relatively unnoticed. Despite incurring a massive influx of new patients, the hospital industry faces what one executive called a “seismic financial shock” from the virus. The types of shocks hospitals currently face also illustrate the problems inherent in Democrats’ proposed expansions of government-run health care. Likewise, the pay and benefit cuts and furloughs that some hospitals have enacted in response to these...

It is untenable to lock down much of the country until a proven-safe vaccine is available in a year or more. Thus, we need to adapt and prepare for life in the time of coronavirus. By the time we get back to normal, normal will be different. The Chinese coronavirus is a once in a generation plague, perhaps once in a century. Humanity is better equipped to respond to it than at any time in history, but there is still no easy way through this pestilence. A time of death and economic hardship was inevitable once the Chinese communists tried...

In 1796, he carried out his now famous experiment on eight-year-old James Phipps. Jenner inserted pus taken from a cowpox pustule and inserted it into an incision on the boy's arm. He was testing his theory, drawn from the folklore of the countryside, that milkmaids who suffered the mild disease of cowpox never contracted smallpox, one of the greatest killers of the period, particularly among children. Jenner subsequently proved that having been inoculated with cowpox Phipps was immune to smallpox. He submitted a paper to the Royal Society in 1797 describing his experiment, but was told that his ideas were...

Click above for a video excerpt from The Ecclesiastical History of Evagrius describing a personal encounter with the dreaded Plague of Justinian. The thought of pandemic troubles many souls these days. It is well to keep in mind that as bad as things may seem with regard to the deaths caused by the COVID-19 virus, we are not even within shouting distance of the type of utter and absolute societal devastation caused by the typical catastrophic historical plague. One of these epic pestilential events was the so-called Plague of Justinian of the mid-to-late 6th century AD. Erupting in AD 542,...

Marcus Aurelius. Photo: © DEA Picture Library/Art Resource, NY. The year was 166 C.E., and the Roman Empire was at the zenith of its power. The triumphant Roman legions, under the command of Emperor Lucius Verrus, returned to Rome victorious after having defeated their Parthian enemies on the eastern border of the Roman Empire. As they marched west toward Rome, they carried with them more than the spoils of plundered Parthian temples; they also carried an epidemic that would ravage the Roman Empire over the course of the next two decades, an event that would inexorably alter the landscape of...

Did anyone listen to me? No. But they’re listening to me now. And I’ve suddenly become quite expensive. For 19 days, I lay in my bedroom, shades drawn, very still. I wasn’t sick, least not physically. This is just something I do when I need to think in times of crisis. Like a snake molting its skin, I must shed old ideas to come up with new ones. From down the hall, I could hear the endless hacking cough of my beleaguered manservant, Roger, punctuated by occasional moans and creakings in the hall, like he was Marley’s ghost rattling his...

The Plague of Cyprian, named after the man who by AD 248 found himself Bishop of Carthage, struck in a period of history when basic facts are sometimes known barely or not at all. Yet the one fact that virtually all of our sources do agree upon is that a great pestilence defined the age between AD 249 and AD 262. Inscriptions, papyri, archaeological remains, and textual sources collectively insist on the high stakes of the pandemic. In a recent study, I was able to count at least seven eyewitnesses, and a further six independent lines of transmission, whose testimony...

The theologian and author C.S. Lewis identifies three enemies we face during crises such as ours and mental exercises to defend against each. In the autumn of 1939, as Nazi Germany invaded Poland and ignited the fuse of World War II, the great British theologian C. S. Lewis preached a sermon called “Learning in War-Time.” Although written 81 years ago, his advice is perhaps more relevant today than ever.Lewis identifies three enemies facing students during crises such as ours and mental exercises to defend against each. His thought are also helpful to those who are not students.The first enemy is...

As those who follow the gyrations of the stock market are well aware, human beings have a propensity for short-term thinking. They react on impulse to that which is recent; they magnify its significance; and they forget what previous generations learned through bitter experience.To this propensity, the study of history can be an antidote. But all too often historians ransack the past in support of current prejudice.For one who wishes to escape the prison of presentmindedness and gain perspective, there is no substitute for works written regarding circumstances similar to our own at a time our prejudices and predilections...

It has long been a cultural phenomenon that when people are confined to their homes due to dramatic weather events, babies start springing forth nine months later. Nearly half the worldÂ’s population is confined to their homes with two primary tasks: 1. Do not catch nor spread COVID-19. 2. DonÂ’t go nuts from boredom or cabin fever.In trying to accomplish No. 2, people are playing more board and card games. Others are catching up on sleep and preparing more homecooked meals. These are very good things.Husbands and wives are also finding themselves with plenty of time for other activities, and...

SHOULD WE BE READY FOR THE REEMERGENCE OF SARS? Coronaviruses are well known to undergo genetic recombination (375), which may lead to new genotypes and outbreaks. The presence of a large reservoir of SARS-CoV-like viruses in horseshoe bats, together with the culture of eating exotic mammals in southern China, is a time bomb. The possibility of the reemergence of SARS and other novel viruses from animals or laboratories and therefore the need for preparedness should not be ignored. SARS-CoV is highly capable of jumping interspecies barriers and is an excellent candidate as an emerging or reemerging pathogen.

World Health Organization The Wuhan virus has shown that even during pandemics, the WHO will put politics ahead of public health. During a recent interview with Hong Kong news outlet RTHK, Bruce Aylward, a physician and senior adviser to the World Health OrganizationÂ’s director general, refused to answer a question about TaiwanÂ’s handling of the COVID-19 pandemic. A clip of the exchange has been viewed thousands of times on Twitter, and there are growing calls for Aylward to explain himself.DonÂ’t expect him to. AylwardÂ’s behavior is just the latest in a long line of instances of the WHO putting politics...

As humans have spread across the world, so have infectious diseases. Even in this modern era, outbreaks are nearly constant, though not every outbreak reaches pandemic level as the Novel Coronavirus (COVID-19) has. Today’s visualization outlines some of history’s most deadly pandemics, from the Antonine Plague to the current COVID-19 event. -- A Timeline of Historical Pandemics -- Disease and illnesses have plagued humanity since the earliest days, our mortal flaw. However, it was not until the marked shift to agrarian communities that the scale and spread of these diseases increased dramatically. Widespread trade created new opportunities for human and...

A 101-year-old Italian man born during the Spanish flu pandemic has reportedly survived a coronavirus infection as the outbreak continues to ravage his country and spread globally. Gloria Lisi, the vice mayor of Rimini, a city on the coast of the Adriatic Sea in the Italian north, said the man had been released from a hospital earlier this week and returned to his family. She identified him only as Mr. P. "He made it. Mr. P. made it," said Lisi, according to the ANSA news agency. Lisi said the man was admitted to a hospital in Rimini last week and...

This was the worst outbreak of plague in England since the black death of 1348. London lost roughly 15% of its population. While 68,596 deaths were recorded in the city, the true number was probably over 100,000. Other parts of the country also suffered. The earliest cases of disease occurred in the spring of 1665 in a parish outside the city walls called St Giles-in-the-Fields. The death rate began to rise during the hot summer months and peaked in September when 7,165 Londoners died in one week. Rats carried the fleas that caused the plague. They were attracted by city...

The world’s oldest man, who turns 112 on Sunday, has been forced to cancel his birthday celebrations because of coronavirus. Bob Weighton, from Hampshire in the UK, was due to celebrate with family and friends, but with the UK locked down he will spend his birthday alone. “Everything is cancelled, no visitors, no celebration,” he told Sky News. “It’s a dead loss as far as celebration is concerned.” Weighton lived through the last truly global pandemic, the 1918 Spanish Flu outbreak, but says he does not remember it.

From a disease standpoint, Shakespeare was living in arguably the worst place and time in history. Shakespeare's overcrowded, rat-infested, sexually promiscuous London, with raw sewage flowing in the Thames, was the hub for the nastiest diseases known to mankind. Here are the worst of the worst. 1. Plague It is little surprise that the plague was the most dreaded disease of Shakespeare's time. Carried by fleas living on the fur of rats, the plague swept through London in 1563, 1578-9, 1582, 1592-3, and 1603 (Singman, 52). The outbreaks in 1563 and 1603 were the most ferocious, each wiping out over...

The arrogant attitude that we or they own the answer and that anyone suggesting alternative responses to the coronavirus must be acting from stupidity, malice, or greed must stop. Two weeks into the coronavirus pandemic, much remains unknown. There are two certainties, though: Americans need more humility and we need more awe.Americans need humility to recognize the limits in our predictive capabilities; the uncertainty of scientific models; and that the countervailing interests of safeguarding lives and livelihoods render it impossible for any political leader to achieve a perfect outcome.The reflexive rejection of contrary views as either an ignorant exaggeration...