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Hank CampbellRSS Feed of this column.

I founded Science 2.0® in 2006 and since then it has become the world's largest independent science communications site, with over 300,000,000 direct readers and reach approaching one billion. Read More »

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COVID-19 has brought high levels of attention to coronavirus, which few outside the microbiology community had heard of even after two pandemics in 17 years, SARS and MERS.

Terms like ventilators, respirators, and N95 masks were also less commonly thrown about. While it's difficult to trust corporate journalism doomsday narratives one thing is sure; coronavirus has already killed more many people in three months as flu does in its average six-month season. COVID-19 hasn't reached 2018 flu season levels yet but it likely will.(1)
Many people have recently discovered that the U.S. CDC is actually not that useful. For some, it came when CDC refused to send hospitals coronavirus tests until they proved to CDC their patients had coronavirus. Then, when the Trump administration forced them to send tests nationwide the career employees at CDC showed they were so clueless they hadn't even checked to see if the tests only they were allowed to send had the correct reagents (they didn't.) Then the public started to wonder if CDC could do anything more than reformat and reprint statistics they got from states using money they got from states.
Disney and Warner Bros. are losing a small fortune pushing back the dates of "Black Widow" and "Wonder Woman 1984" respectively. Yet they did it.

Despite paying interest on $500 million in debt, they believe it will be better to change the date for theater release than sell their films directly. Movies, concerts, theater shows, etc. command a premium because they are communal. Anyone who has watched a filmed version of a Broadway show can tell you it's not the same.
Cristina Cuomo, the wife of journalist Chris Cuomo, who had been setting progressive hearts aflutter with his jovial sort-of interviews with his brother, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo, before contracting COVID-19, has also tested positive for coronavirus.

Nothing surprising there. What is shocking is that she is founder of The Purist, a "wellness" (read: rich white people) brand which promotes woo like homeopathy, "energy medicine" and "oxygenated herbs" as how you prevent disease. And yet she got the disease anyway.
The International Journal of Antimicrobial Agents has already retracted a March 20th paper analyzing hydroxychloroquine as a treatment for COVID-19, the disease that can result from the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus that originated in Wuhan, China late last year.
When is it right to turn over 5 million acres of public land for exploitation by energy corporations? 

The Obama administration did just that, with corn ethanol, and environmental groups wrapped him in the flag of renewable biofuels despite science showing it was worse for the environment than gasoline. A generation earlier they had also wrapped natural gas in the flag of environmentalism and continued to do so until it began to replace coal.(1) During the Bush administration, a Republican.

Then it was time for lawsuits.