Tuberculosis (TB) is the second leading infectious disease killer. According to the World Health Organization, every year, more than 10 million people fall ill with TB, and 1.5 million people die from the disease. The thing is, though, that it could be worse. Not nearly everyone who is infected has TB disease.
A recent feature by Joel Achenbach of the Washington Post on the dangers of increased public distrust toward the scientific establishment, both to the public and to the scientists themselves, is itself a pitch-perfect example of why such skepticism exists in the first place. Written from the highest perch of one rotten establishment in order to give cover to another, the piece demonstrates a lack of self-awareness and tone-deafness that only the legacy media could achieve. Indeed, the article bolsters the perception of a scientific establishment that dissembles, misleads, and is incapable of self-reflection.
An explosion of right-wing venom has greeted the release in preprint form of an important work by Boston University researchers who investigated the Omicron variant’s change in virulence compared to the ancestral type of SARS-CoV-2.