While 70 million Americans are under lockdown to contain spread of the 2019 form of coronavirus, SARS-CoV-2, in order to limit the spread of the COVID-19 illness that has cost 16,000 lives worldwide, American lawyers are teeing up to sue the one product the FDA and everyone else knows kills germs - Purell.

After Robert Koch first separated Mycobacterium bovis from Mycobacterium tuberculosis, and with the success of vaccination in preventing smallpox well-known, scientists believed that infection with bovine tuberculosis might protect against human tuberculosis. It wasn't a linear path but after a lot of trial and error, and some fitful starts (including deaths) microbiologists Albert Calmette and Camille Guérin  introduced the Bacillus Calmette–Guérin (BCG) vaccine and it has been administered routinely to protect babies against tuberculosis since 1921.  

COVID-19, caused by the 2019 form of coronavirus, SARS-CoV-2, has the world thinking about how prepared governments are for pandemics. Some, such as Italy and Spain, were clearly unprepared, while China and Singapore have been able to take Draconian steps due to totalitarian governments.What about the U.S.? Our concern was warranted and the steps we took, such as travel restrictions, while initially criticized were later adopted by Canada and numerous other countries. We declared an emergency for the first time since H1N1 in 2009 (we dodged the MERS coronavirus bullet in 2012).

FDA is streamlining labs to allow independent coronavirus testing after CDC showed they were just as cumbersome and incompetent as I'd worried for years, they're cutting red tape for hand sanitizer "approval", getting treatments to market without 90-day comment periods where activists can insist science is a vast corporate conspiracy.

If you want to be reminded that a worldwide pandemic won't bring people together, go to Amazon and search for "Purell."In California, where I live, despite no disruption to the supply chain, no disaster, barely more than a dozen dead in a state of 40,000,000 people, wealthy elites are emptying grocery store shelves. Who is being penalized? Kids in WIC programs, the same poor people California listed as the reason to choose Senator Bernie Sanders in the Democratic primary just a few weeks ago. Because he is the most socialist.

It's no surprise that Twitter is a hotbed of misinformation and disnformation about science. They have no barrier to entry whereas a journal article must survive peer review and if you want to promote your clients in The Guardian you at least have to cut them a check.What is interesting is how these deniers for hire are using the public's newfound resolve to mitigate risk for people with preexisting conditions from coronavirus to advance their agenda against normal agriculture. This, they argue, is the "precautionary principle" in action and if it's right for infectious disease, why not use it against food sold by competitors to their clients and spiritual leaders? 

What is the line between increased resolve to mitigate risk to people who have preexisting conditions from coronavirus, and therefore possibly COVID-19, versus the panic culture that seems to be evident in places like California, where the governor has declared it a crime to leave your home if your trip violates what government has deemed essential.

In 2017 a group of colleagues and I began editing a short book called "The Next Plague, And How Science Will Stop It". It was published in early 2018 and became quite popular. Shortly after that, articles began appearing in The Atlantic and other places wondering what the next pandemic would be.

You may have seen a graphic showing how we should "flatten" the curve of transmission risk to prevent the health system from being overloaded by people with COVID-19 or who want to be tested for the presence of the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), which causes it.It involves common sense precautions like washing hands and using sense. Don't panic and subsidize toilet paper companies and retreat to a bunker but don't pretend it can't spread. As the first person-to-person analysis showed, it may not spread to your broad circle, but people with respiratory issues are at risk.

When a mass outbreak of the coronavirus occurred on a Princess Cruise ship, it quickly became international news. There was a rush to panic and Diamond Princess was quarantined for over two weeks, and the infection rate onboard was about four times higher than what can be seen on land in the worst infected areas of China. But, they said, it would have been worse if they had not isolated everyone.