Angry Citizens Pressure the World Health Organization to Fully Recognize COVID’s Airborne Spread

Angry Citizens Pressure the World Health Organization to Fully Recognize COVID’s Airborne Spread

Aerosol scientists say that the evidence points to airborne transmission of COVID-19 "beyond any reasonable doubt."

Wikimedia Commons/CDC Public Health Image Library ID 11162

A new citizen movement is gathering steam to try to convince the influential World Health Organization to change its messaging about how the coronavirus is transmitted.

The new petition "COVID is Airborne" (www.covidisairborne.org) started in early November and has approximately 3,000 signatures. During this particularly dangerous acceleration of the pandemic, the petition's backers allege that the WHO is failing the public with mixed messaging and thus inadvertently fueling the wildfire of transmission.

"Early on in the pandemic, [WHO Director General Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus] said that coronavirus is airborne, but then in March, WHO tweeted that COVID-19 is not airborne, saying that it is primarily transmitted via droplets that are too heavy to hang in the air," says petition co-creator Jessica Bassett Allen.

Keep Reading Keep Reading
Damon Brown
Damon Brown co-founded the popular platonic connection app Cuddlr. Now he helps side hustlers, solopreneurs, and other non-traditional entrepreneurs bloom. He is author of the TED book "Our Virtual Shadow" and, most recently, the best-selling "The Bite-Sized Entrepreneur" series. Join his creative community at www.JoinDamon.me.
Don’t fear AI, fear power-hungry humans

Story by Big Think

We live in strange times, when the technology we depend on the most is also that which we fear the most. We celebrate cutting-edge achievements even as we recoil in fear at how they could be used to hurt us. From genetic engineering and AI to nuclear technology and nanobots, the list of awe-inspiring, fast-developing technologies is long.

However, this fear of the machine is not as new as it may seem. Technology has a longstanding alliance with power and the state. The dark side of human history can be told as a series of wars whose victors are often those with the most advanced technology. (There are exceptions, of course.) Science, and its technological offspring, follows the money.

This fear of the machine seems to be misplaced. The machine has no intent: only its maker does. The fear of the machine is, in essence, the fear we have of each other — of what we are capable of doing to one another.

Keep Reading Keep Reading
Marcelo Gleiser
Marcelo Gleiser is a professor of natural philosophy, physics, and astronomy at Dartmouth College. He is a Fellow of the American Physical Society, a recipient of the Presidential Faculty Fellows Award from the White House and NSF, and was awarded the 2019 Templeton Prize. Gleiser has authored five books and is the co-founder of 13.8, where he writes about science and culture with physicist Adam Frank.
Interview with Jamie Metzl: We need a global OS upgrade

Jamie Metzl, author of Hacking Darwin, shares his views with Leaps.org on the future of genetics, tech, healthcare and more.

Jamie Metzl

In this Q&A, leading technology and healthcare futurist Jamie Metzl discusses a range of topics and trend lines that will unfold over the next several decades: whether a version of Moore's Law applies to genetic technologies, the ethics of genetic engineering, the dangers of gene hacking, the end of sex, and much more.

Metzl is a member of the WHO expert advisory committee on human genome editing and the bestselling author of Hacking Darwin.

The conversation was lightly edited by Leaps.org for style and length.

Keep Reading Keep Reading
Matt Fuchs
Matt Fuchs is the host of the Making Sense of Science podcast and served previously as the editor-in-chief of Leaps.org. He writes as a contributor to the Washington Post, and his articles have also appeared in the New York Times, WIRED, Nautilus Magazine, Fortune Magazine and TIME Magazine. Follow him @fuchswriter.