“I
AM THE LUCKIEST MAN…I SAW THE LAST CASE OF SMALL POX
These
were the words of American epidemiologist Dr. Lawrence Brilliant, who I mentioned
in my last entry. He was in the World Health Organisation (WHO) team that ended
the career of deadly small pox in India and also Bangladesh. Rahima Banu was
the name of the last victim. Dr. Brilliant is now 75 but luckily for us he is still
actively giving advice on the current pandemic, bringing to bear on it his vast
experience. Much as we need doctors, we also need the experience of people who
have dealt with such diseases in the past. So many people died in the tsunami
that struck India in 2004 because no living person had a memory of it and therefore
people were unable to gauge the danger.
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Dr. Larry Brilliant and his wife Girija |
Dr.
Brilliant, like many other members of that WHO team including Indians, is quite
an offbeat doctor if one can call him that. After his internship he came to
India, like many of his back-pack contemporary looking for spiritual
upliftment. Dr. Brilliant’s journey, along with his wife Girija, has been
unusual and he did get the spiritual upliftment that he was seeking. In this
quest, he met Neem Karoli Baba and stayed at his Ashram at Kainchi Dham near
Nainital for some time. The Baba, a devotee of Lord Hanuman, changed Brilliant’s
life forever when he asked him to shed his kurta and pyjama and put on a
three-piece suit and work in the WHO. The Doctor, the Baba predicted would end
the scourge of small pox from India. Many credited the Baba with supernatural
powers but this prediction of his came true.
Dr.
Brilliant has settled in the up-market Bay Area of Los Angeles, USA with his
wife and three children. Though he never adopted an ascetic life and lives in
luxury, he continues his love affair with India and other Asian and African
nations helping them out of their difficulties in health care. It seems that
the good doctor has been endowed with powers of future forecasting, probably a
blessing from his Guru who died in 1973. About 14 years back he had spoken of
just such an epidemic as the world is witnessing today. He was speaking at a
TED talk in 2006, Dr. Brilliant said many epidemiologists feared the outbreak
of a virus epidemic that could infect a billion people worldwide and result in
165 million deaths. He had said that it would be like nothing like what people
had seen till then. “There will be no airplanes flying,” was his ominous forecast
and the US economy would lose one to three trillion dollars and the “consequences
will be unthinkable.” A group of top epidemiologists he had spoken to had felt
that it would occur within the next generation or the one after that. Dr.
Brilliant was also the chief technical advisor of the 2011 film ‘Contagion’
that has suddenly become very popular again. It seems he was pretty accurate
and the unthinkable has happened.
What
does Dr. Brilliant have to say now? Well, he revealed that at least the United
States has not just walked into the epidemic with its eyes open but the
administration has even worked to dismantle the team that had been part of the
National Security Council. And this had been happening for the past couple of
years. The Washington Post reported in May, 2018 that the top White House
official responsible for leading the US response in the event of a deadly
pandemic had left the administration and the global health security team he
headed had been disbanded by National Security Advisor John Bolton, a Trump
supporter. The man who headed the team was retired Rear Admiral Timothy Ziemer.
“I mean Trump pushed out the admiral… And then Trump removed the (early
warning) funding for countries all around the world.”
“That there is no human being in the world that has
immunity as a result of having had it before. That means it’s capable of
infecting 7.8 billion of our brothers and sisters … But there's going to be tens of millions of us or hundreds of millions
of us or more who will get this virus before it's all over, and with large
numbers like that, almost anything where you ask “Does this happen?” can happen.” See what you can make of it.
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