He seems to make a living out of preparing for and predicting pandemics.
Someone has dug out a 2006 interview with Oprah Winfrey where he talks about shutting down the global economy, overloaded health systems which can't treat everybody, insufficient ventilaros and other effects we are dealing with now. [Face masks are useless....apparently]
He was also pretty sure that there would be a pandemic in the future. Scene set.
Infectious Disease Expert in 2006 Warns of Inevitable Pandemic - The Oprah Winfrey Show
Since then he's written a book in 2017 which was cannily re-released in April 2020, and has hawked his wares around various media outlets and studios. His trade mark phrase is 'threading the rope through the needle', along with "physical distancing' implying that we will be moving everything online, no physical contacts between people any more, as wave after wave of this phoney virus are "detected" and we have to shut everything down again.
https://edition.cnn.com/2020/04/21/opin ... index.html
Was it a coincidence that he popped up as Joe Rogan's guest on March 10?
Article on March 13 with link to video
https://www.menshealth.com/health/a3147 ... ogan-tips/
ABC Australia April 8 2020
The Drive podcast March 31 2020
Some other earlier scary presentations
Council for Foreign Relations May 3 2011
Is the Bird Flu Threat Still Real and Are We Prepared?
Back home in Minnesota, MArch 2017,
"Deadliest Enemy: Our War Against Killer Germs” Lecture by Mike Osterholm, PhD, MPH
JLB has noted his connection with a big pharma company.
I bet all the participants in the various pre-2020 pandemic drill scenarios had been told to pick up a copy of Michael's book.
And finally, back at the U of Minnesota in DECEMBER 2019 including Osterheim. The word Pandemic doesn't appear in the title.... keep one's powder dry.
Preparing for the Next Epidemic | Healthy Futures Summit
speakers
James Neaton Professor, U of M School of Public Health
Michael Osterholm Regents Professor, U of M School of Public Health
Sonja A. Rasmussen Professor, College of Medicine and the College of Public Health and Health Professions, University of Florida
Moderator
Susan Kline, Professor, U of M Medical School
2005 - Stopping a Pandemic Before It Starts
Aug 3 2005
https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2005/08 ... -it-starts
(I think they mean Neal "half a million UK deaths" Ferguson)It might just work. If a pandemic influenza virus breaks out somewhere in Southeast Asia, massive amounts of an antiviral drug called oseltamivir, combined with draconian measures to limit people's movements and contacts--and some luck--may stop the virus dead in its tracks, according to two computer models. Such an effort could save millions of lives around the world, the authors say.
Both studies, one published online today by Nature, the other by Science, used Thailand as the presumptive ground zero, in part because current pandemic worries focus on H5N1, the bird flu strain haunting Southeast Asia (ScienceNOW, 16 June). Ira Longini, a modeler at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, and his colleagues simulated an imaginary population of 500,000 people in a rural part of the country; Michael Ferguson of Imperial College London built a model based on the 85 million people living in Thailand and a 100-kilometer-wide border zone in neighboring countries.
No mention of vaccines anywhere then...Both then introduced a pandemic virus and looked at whether it could be contained by giving a 10-day prophylactic course of oseltamivir ** to the contacts of every suspected flu patient--either by treating everyone in their household, school, or workplace, or by simply giving it to anyone living within a certain radius. In both models, the drug regimens were supplemented with additional measures such as closing schools, asking people to stay home as much as they could, or restricting travel into and out of the hot zone....
...The more such measures were deployed, the higher the chances that the pandemic petered out, both studies conclude. But success depended critically on several conditions: The pandemic virus could not be too infectious, the first cases had to be found within a couple of weeks, and all contacts of patients needed to be given the drug within a day or two.[/color]
...Michael Osterholm, director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, says he puts very little stock in such models, and he worries that the findings may lead other countries to become complacent about their own pandemic preparedness.
**Oseltamivir, sold under the brand name Tamiflu, is an antiviral medication used to treat and prevent influenza A and influenza B. Many medical organizations recommend it in people who have complications or are at high risk of complications within 48 hours of first symptoms of infection
And the latest scare story being hawked around by Osterholm, May 21 2020 in Foreign Affairs [with the co-writer of his 2017 book....]
https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles ... c-foretold
Chronicle of a Pandemic Foretold
Learning From the COVID-19 Failure—Before the Next Outbreak Arrives
in which he says that the Covid-19 pandemic is NOT the big one. The next one will be bigger.... a bigger hoax?
Here comes the vaccine conclusion....
*** and cruise ships, lol!The problem is that influenza can mutate and reassort its genes with maddening ease as it passes from one living animal or human host to the next, so each year’s seasonal flu vaccine is usually only partly effective—better than nothing, but not a precise and directly targeted bullet like the smallpox or the measles vaccine. The holy grail of influenza immunity would be to develop a vaccine that targets the conserved elements of the virus—that is, the parts that don’t change from one flu strain to the next, no matter how many mutations or iterations the virus goes through.
Microbes do not respect borders, and they manage to figure out workarounds to restrictions on international air travel. ***
A universal influenza vaccine would require a monumental scientific effort, on the scale of the billion-dollar annual investment that has gone into fighting HIV/AIDS. The price tag would be enormous, but since another population-devouring flu pandemic will surely visit itself on the globe at some point, the expense would be justified many times over. Such a vaccine would be the greatest public health triumph since the eradication of smallpox.
Osterholm is a super-spreader of the information that the Covid-19 crisis will last TWO YEARS because of that wonderful property of the virus to be able to be spread from asymptomatic people - we're all potential deadly carriers.... be very scared.
May 1 2020
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles ... eport-says
CIDRAP cidrap.umn.edu is the Centre for Infection Disease Research and Policy
Which is funded by the Bentson Foundation [Larry and Nancy Bentson, philanthropists from the twin cities...]
who give $2m pa to the UoMN foundation and specifically in 2018, $300,000 to the CIDRAP
and CIDRAP is "supported by" Gilead Sciences, who as JLB noted, have developed anti-Covid-19 drug REMDESEVIR. Just fancy that.
https://www.gilead.com/stories/articles ... o-april-29
