By MIKE MAGEE
This is the collision of past, present and future this week after Trump’s victory on November 6, 2024. The country, both for and against, has been very quiet. It is not clear whether this is a recognition of political fatigue, or the desire of the winners to be “good winners” and no longer “losers.”
Who the “enemy within” really is remains to be seen. But Trump is working quickly to appoint his cabinet and top agency officials. In his first term as President, Trump famously placed himself at the front of the line of scientific experts spreading confusion and chaos in the initial response to Covid.
The 2024 campaign alliance with Robert F. Kennedy Jr. shows health policy remains a strong interest. As the spokesman suggested, his leadership at the front led to an overwhelming victory “because he believed in his decisions and supported his policies, including his promise to Make America Healthy Again alongside respected leaders like RFK Jr.”
For those who have memories of Trump’s disruptive and disruptive management of the Covid crisis, it’s useful to remind ourselves of the days not long ago, and consider whether the dumping of Bobby Kennedy Jr.
I have reviewed the Covid pandemic that I have prepared for a 3-session course on “AI and Medicine” at the Presidential University of the University of Hartford. The course includes several case studies, especially the multi-prong role of AI in dealing with the Covid pandemic as it spirals out of control in 2020.
The initial Covid timeline reads like this:
December 1, 2019: A 70-year-old man was hospitalized in Wuhan, China for shortness of breath.
Mid-December, 2019: Many residents in Wuhan, China are now seriously ill.
December 24, 2019: A post-mortem lung sample from a Wuhan patient yielded a partial genetic sequence of an infectious viral agent. It is similar to the SARS virus that caused the epidemic in 2003.
December 30, 2019: Word leaked and reached US epidemiologist Marjorie Pollack, head of Promed, who alerted 80,000 customers, including officials at the WHO, about the pending epidemic.
December 31, 2019: China’s National Health Commission orders Wuhan health officials to officially declare the outbreak.
January 1, 2020: Wuhan police threaten several local doctors for speaking out, labeling it a “rumor”.
January 3, 2020: The Chinese government tells the WHO that it is managing 44 confirmed cases.
January 5, 2020: The complete genetic sequence of the virus is released. Chinese officials initially tried to suppress the information.
January 13, 2020: German scientists release tests for the virus.
mid-January, 2020: Hundreds are now sick in Wuhan, and people are starting to die from respiratory failure.
January 23, 2020: There is now an outbreak in other parts of China. 571 cases were reported.
A Wuhan Central Hospital worker reported at the time: “It exploded very quickly, and then too many people were infected. Without ventilators, without special medicine, even without enough manpower, how can we save people? If you don’t have weapons in the field war, how can you kill the enemy?
February 15, 2020: Moderna launches “clinical grade production, human safe manufacturing, batches (mRNA) sent to health clinics for testing” just 45 days after the genetic sequence was revealed.
What would normally take a year, take a few weeks. As the chief data and AI officer of Moderna, Dave Johnson PhD said later, “We built the initial preclinical engine of the company, that is, how we can target many different ideas at the same time, do some experiments, learn quickly and do it again .. .if you want to do a lot of experiments, you have to have a lot of mRNA processing (AI-assisted) massively … when you take the data into the system, you know, instead of just taking, you know, this is happening on experiment, now you say let’s use the data to make predictions.
What AI does is direct re-engineering, through mRNA-mediated mutations of the virus’s genetic code, to help produce the first Covid mRNA vaccine.
December 18, 2020: Moderna receives “emergency use authorization” from the FDA’s Vaccine Advisory Committee. It’s not too late, at least they’ll say. The death toll in the US has reached more than 800,000, and the forecast of monthly deaths ahead has reached 62,000.
It is now believed that AI-assisted development of an mRNA vaccine for Covid could save 15 to 20 million lives worldwide. That speed is the result of AI-driven hyperacceleration of mRNA generation. Before AI integration, Moderna produced 30 samples per month. By optimizing the AI, the results explode to more than 1000 per month. The AI is then used again to predict the best way to structure the vaccine to maximize the body’s protein production response…
Dave Johnson is quick to point out that Moderna was quickly working with AI applications years before Chat-GPT became a household term. His background is in software engineering and data science, and a PhD in information physics. So it’s not surprising that they enjoy making non-human connections. As he said, “We always think about this human-machine collaboration, because they are good at different things. Humans are good at creativity and flexibility and insight, while machines are good at precision and delivering the same results every time and doing it with scale and speed.
For a civilian like RFK Jr., who played the doctor, it probably wouldn’t have ended. Tommy Thompson tried to manage the Anthrax crisis in 2001 and had to be helped by Tony Fauci, MD. Fauci was back in April 2020 to whitewash Trump for his Covid comments. Add to this a series of disastrous results in the red state where the zealot bureaucrats have considered themselves qualified to manage emergency obstetrics.
Will history repeat itself? We’ll find out soon enough.
Mike Magee MD is a Medical Historian and regular contributor to THCB. He is the author of CODE BLUE: Inside America’s Medical Industrial Complex. (Grove/2020)
