How to Stop the Next Pandemic

The pandemic is your fault.

Yes, yours.

If you are avoiding people, wearing a mask and generally following what public health officials tell you to do (even if that has been a moving target), the notion that you have anything to do with why this pandemic occurred may seem ridiculous.

After all, it’s easy to look for blame in others.

You may be pointing your finger at Chinese officials for not acting fast enough. A recent Pew study suggested 78 percent of Americans place “a great deal of the blame for the global spread of the coronavirus on the Chinese government’s initial handling” of the outbreak.

Maybe you blame politicians who have prioritized their political well being over the health of the people they govern? Or are other people’s diets the problem? A dinner party? A beach party? The police?

There is enough blame to go around.

Finding blame in yourself can be a more difficult task. But experts say you have played a role whether you know it or not.

Read more here.

China’s Health Care Crisis

The Chinese government claims that it provides medical coverage for nearly all of its citizens. But the reality is that the country’s health care system is broken.

Attacks by frustrated patients against doctors are common. Some patients who lack access to lifesaving drugs have resorted to making them at home. Long lines filled with people desperate for treatment wrap around hospitals and administrators have been accused of corruption.

A stat from the World Health Organization captures just how broken the system is:: There is one general practitioner for every 6,666 people, compared with the international standard of one for every 1,500 to 2,000 people.

The crisis is felt most acutely by those living in rural areas. This includes children with serious diseases who move to cities with their families for therapies unavailable in their regions.

As we learned from interviews with families struggling to keep their children alive, they’re sometimes referred to as “cancer refugees.” It helps explain why illness is the leading cause of poverty in China.

In this two-part video series, filmmaker Jonah M. Kessel gained unique access to China’s broken health care system to show just how dire the situation is for over a billion people while holding one of the world’s most powerful governments accountable to its claim that China has universal health care.

Read more.

Operation InfeKtion

Meet the KGB spies who conceived this virus and the American truth squads who tried — and are still trying — to fight it. Countries from Pakistan to Brazil are now debating reality, and in Vladimir Putin’s greatest triumph, Americans are using Russia’s playbook against one another without the faintest clue. Read more.

Russia’s meddling in the United States’ elections is not a hoax. It’s the culmination of Moscow’s decades-long campaign to tear the West apart. “Operation InfeKtion” reveals the ways in which one of the Soviets’ central tactics — the promulgation of lies about America — continues today, from Pizzagate to George Soros conspiracies.

From North Korea with Dread

While we were preparing for our trip, President Trump was telling the United Nations that the United States may be forced to “totally destroy North Korea.” The country responded by organizing a series of huge anti-American parades.

Welcome to Pyongyang, kind of.

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In the fall of 2017, I went to North Korea on a quest to understand whether war was inevitable, whether there is a real chance millions of people might die. 

Along with Op-Ed columnist Nicholas Kristof and editorial writer Carol Giacomo, and video journalist Adam Ellick, we arrived in the world’s most isolated country as tensions between it and the United States were at their highest in a generation. In a sign of continuing escalation, just today, North Korea launched another ballistic missile.