Yes, it was a great talk indeed. You really got us convinced that this is something we need to look more into! I am sitting here and reading about plague in Denmark and Eastern Europe right now :)

Yes, the archaeologist was so surprised that her first reaction after having unearthed it was to put it back down again, thinking

"Shit! - How can there suddenly be iron here, right in the middle of Bronze Age finds and in a Bronze Age setting?"

www.dr.dk/nyheder/indl...

For more info:
www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

But you read about past influenza outbreaks. I was reading about the influenza outbreak in Iceland in 1862. It spread through the whole island in 14 days.
Good luck trying to argue that this was due to big droplets!

Why are we still too good-mannered to say this loud? Aren't the stakes too high for niceties and for ignoring the fact that we have a completely wrong understanding of how best to protect ourselves against influenza, caused by an outdated paradigm?

Looking back five years, we faced a similar situation where medical professionals were evidently more concerned about having to revise dogma and their teachings than about effectively addressing a pandemic virus.

However, when a new strain of the virus emerges and immunity is lacking, the virus's airborne nature becomes much more evident.

Relying on measures like coughing into your elbow and washing your hands will then be entirely useless.

When studying the history of influenza, it is clear that it spreads in the air, just like measles. The challenge is that widespread immunity can create the illusion that influenza is not easily transmitted, as it reduces the number of individuals who are susceptible to the virus.

With a superspreading pathogen like Covid combined with zero epistemic flexibility on the part of health authorities to recognize its airborne nature and take the necessary precautions, it's impossible to see how a lockdown was avoidable.

Congratulations on this award! This is wonderful news for the field. I'm currently working on a smallpox paper drawing on previously unstudied medieval sources, so I'll be following this project's developments with great interest.

Wonderful! I'm working on a big smallpox paper using unstudied medieval sources, so this Rhazes retranslation is perfectly timed. Too many dismiss medieval medical texts without reading them (cf. this article).

www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

Ah, England. England England England…