he couldn t talk well or swallow, very painful. this seems to really help. a quick note, though, when you look at these types of medications, it was originally approved for smallpox, to really know how effective something is, you have to test it in the middle of an outbreak. there obviously hasn t been a smallpox outbreak in 50 years or longer than that. most of the data really comes from primates. you re now starting to get human data because of how large this monkeypox outbreak is. and so far encouraging in terms of how effective it is. yeah. encouraging how effective it is, but how readily available is this antiviral at this point? this is sort of the interesting thing. with covid we were dealing with a novel virus, so everything had to be created. with this particular antiviral, it already exists. in fact, the united states government had the wherewithal to stockpile nearly two million doses of this in case of a bioterror attack involving smallpox. so it s there. it s just a qu
this before or certainly in the last decade. we are doing everything we can. and i think you re missing the fruits of all of that in the days an weeks ahead. i want to get your reaction to a new gao report that the cdc is still not prepared to respond to disease threats posed by international travel. they can unable to quickly and identify the number of passengers exposed to a specific infected passenger on a flight. does that worry you, especially now that we have relaxed or eliminated the requirement for testing before return flights from overseas? we really are in a different moment in the pandemic where we have relaxed a lot of the international masking and testing. we need cdc and other agencies to be able to jump. what we really need to do if we re going to think about future threats, let s say a novel virus, we need really strong surveillance systems.
be higher. covid is a novel virus. how much is known about long covid? we are two years into this virus. i had some patients still dealing with brain fog, fatigue, weird rashes, persistent cough, we are learning day by day, what we are doing with patients, take care of their symptoms, get you into sia pulmonologist, maybe steroids, pulmonary toiletry. we are learning day by day how to combat long covid and prevent long covid. some literature suggests getting a booster, getting vaccinated, making sure you don t catch severe symptoms or acquire severe symptoms. these things can protect you. how do you prevent severe symptoms? make sure you are not deficient
omicron has just been with us for a few weeks but there was data will be forthcoming. greg: after dodging that yesterday the cdc director suddenly had all the info. the overwhelming number of deaths, over 75%, occurred in people who had at least four comorbidities who, these are people who were unwell to begin with. greg: dana, i understand, it s a novel virus. so people make mistakes. the information is always changing. i guess what always bugged us is that it was often the experts in the media who scandalized a lot of the sensible assumptions that people were making about the origin of the virus. about the comorbidities. so it s like, who do we trust at this point? basically we can only trust ourselves. dana: the cdc director is saying things that you used to get band on twitter for saying. i admire the fact that she s decided to get somebody to help
her on media relations and communications. she s great scientist and probably a great doctor. communicating to the public is not necessarily everyone s strong suit so i m for that. so one of the things they should tell her in one of those sessions is a little humility can go a long way. imagine if they started every press conference by saying this is a novel virus. we are continuing to learn things every day. we are going to share with you what we have. it might not be all the information we are continuing to learn as we go along. we will keep you informed. all information welcome, something like that to give people a sense they are doing that. it s one thing for the cdc director. sure you have a supreme court justice. sonia sotomayor who is basically getting her covid information from the bottom of the facebook comments page and she is going to rule on something that really matters? at a point when the vaccine mandate was for the