MAURICE HILLEMAN: A Truly Remarkable Medical Researcher

Here is a video sent to me hailing the incredibly quick development of the vaccine for COVID-19:

How wonderful that while it took more than 3000 years for medical science to develop the vaccine for Small Pox and Polio, it took only four months to accomplish this task for COVID-19. Watch that video.

Well, I then thought something was missing. On 7March2021 I had a posting entitled, HOW EASILY WE FORGET. To summarize:

In the 1957-8 period, there was a pandemic from the H2N2 Asian Avian Flu.

The origin was Guizhou, China, about 600 miles from Wuhan.
Up to 4 million died (note that COVID-19 has not quite reached 4 million yet).
The world population then was 2.9 billion, so on a per capita basis, that 4 million of today would be nearly 10.6 million.
It is reasonably safe to say that the total world deaths from COVID-19 will not reach that number when the pandemic is deemed over.
The threat was to those UNDER 50 years of age.
There was no economic upheaval and no one in the U.S. wore masks.
Very few of us oldsters even remember that there was a pandemic.
HERE IS THE SURPRISE.

Do you know how long it took to develop an H2/N2 vaccine? Four months, the same as for COVID-19 with all the advancements today available to medical science.
Who developed this vaccine? Maurice Hilleman of the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research and his team.

There was then an antigenic shift of the H2N2 virus into H3N2 so that a decade later there was the 1968 Hong Kong Flu Pandemic.

Again, globally, 4 million perished.
The world population was 3.5 million, so compared with our population today of 7.7 billion, the per capita comparison should be 8.8 million, which won't be eclipsed by COVID-19.

Guess how long it took to develop a vaccine...and who did it? Four months! By the same Maurice Hilleman (photo in 2005). Who even remembers him today? There should be a large statue of him at Walter Reed.
Actually it's more than that...MUCH, MUCH MORE!

He and his teams have MORE THAN 40 vaccines to their credit, and they have saved 8 million lives!!!
Hilleman is the inventor of vaccines for measles, mumps, rubella, hepatitis and chickenpox.
He was mostly known as the grumpy guy who came to those AIDS meeting when he was in his 80s, a story from Tony Fauci.
The Golden Age of vaccines was in the decade of the 50's and 60's.

Got to end with something funny:

Hilleman described his dating experiences: “I had a couple of dates. Christ. Finding women is sort of like by Brownian action. You don't know whether they're drunkards, or they'll spend all your money, or whether they have venereal diseases.”
To continue: Giving up on the dating scene, he instead decided to hunt for a wife among the job applicant pool at Merck and Company in West Point, Pennsylvania, where he worked. He enlisted the aid of his administrative assistant. “I said, 'Look, Ken, I want you to go through all these [job] applications and pick out what looks good to you, then send them up to me, and we'll do that once a week until we find one,'” Hilleman recalls. On hearing this, a young woman in the audience at the symposium remarked to her companion, “You couldn't get away with that today.”
He worked every day, even for Merck, a company he joined after his government job.
His cure for mumps came when his oldest daughter Jeryl Lynn (on left this photo) caught this disease. He took a culture from her, and used it to develop the mumps vaccine.

Here is another way to look at how relatively insignificant COVID-19 has been, in terms of deaths compared to other pandemics:

I belong to a photography club, and every so often we are asked to take black and white photos because there is something about capturing the right mood or significance by using this particular medium. Every time I try to do this, I end up with the color version still looking better. Here is a video about Jecinci Colorizations that sort of says the same thing. Jecinci is a 40-year old architect and artist from Romania, who must be now be in the range of colorizing 1500 photos. Recognize her?

Amelia Earhart. Only last month there was an announcement that her crashed plane was possibly found in a lagoon on Nikumaroro Island at Seven Site:

The first hurricane of the season formed in the East Pacific. Nothing yet this year in the Atlantic. Hurricane Enrique, now at 85 MPH, will skirt the Mexican coastline and approach Baha:

A NEXT COVID SUBVARIANT?

By now most know that the Omicron BA.5 subvariant has become the dominant infectious agent, now accounting for more than 80% of all COVID-19 cases. Very few are aware that a new one, BA.4.6, is sneaking in and steadily rising, now accounting for 13% of sequenced samples . However, as BA.4.6 has emerged from BA.4, while there is uncertainty, the scientific sense is that the latest bivalent booster targeting BA.4 and BA.5 should also be effective for this next threat. One concern is that Evusheld--the only monoclonal antibody authorized for COVID prevention in immunocompromised individuals--is not effective against BA.4.6. Here is a reference as to what this means. A series of two injections is involved. Evusheld was developed by British-Swedish company AstraZeneca, and is a t ixagevimab co-packaged with cilgavimab . More recently, Los Angeles County reported on subvariant BA.2.75.2 . which Tony Fauci termed suspicious and troublesome. This strain has also been spreading in

Part 3: OUR NEXT AROUND THE WORLD ODYSSEY

Before I get into my third, and final, part of this cruise series, let me start with some more newsworthy topics. Thursday was my pandemic day for years. Thus, every so often I return to bring you up to date on the latest developments. All these subvariants derived from that Omicron variant, and each quickly became dominant, with slightly different symptoms. One of these will shock you. There has been a significant decline in the lost of taste and smell. From two-thirds of early patients to now only 10-20% show these symptoms. JN.1, now the dominant subvariant, results in mostly mild symptoms. However, once JN.1 infects some, there seem to be longer-lasting symptoms. Clearly, the latest booster helps prevent contracting Covid. A competing subvariant, BA.2.86, also known as Pirola , a month ago made a run, but JN.1 prevailed. No variant in particular, but research has shown that some of you will begin to lose hair for several months. This is caused by stress more than anythi

HONOLULU TO SEATTLE

The story of the day is Hurricane Milton, now a Category 4 at 145 MPH, with a track that has moved further south and the eye projected to make landfall just south of Sarasota. Good news for Tampa, which is 73 miles north. Milton will crash into Florida as a Category 4, and is huge, so a lot of problems can still be expected in Tampa Bay with storm surge. If the eye had crossed into the state just north of Tampa, the damage would have been catastrophic. Milton is a fast-moving storm, currently at 17 MPH, so as bad as the rainfall will be over Florida, again, a blessing. The eye will make landfall around 10PM EDT today, and will move into the Atlantic Ocean north of Palm Bay Thursday morning. My first trip to Seattle was in June of 1962 just after I graduated from Stanford University. Caught a bus. Was called the Century 21 Exposition . Also the Seattle World's Fair. 10 million joined me on a six-month run. My first. These are held every five years, and there have only been

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