Business Talk Magazine

NEWS RELEASE

CONTACT:
John Norris
617-680-3127
John.Norris@Safely2Prosperity.com
https://www.safely2prosperity.com

November 12, 2023 – (BOSTON)

I am a former FDA COO and Harvard faculty member who is a decades-long infectious disease spread risk management expert.

Given my background, I have recently felt a calling to write open letters (this is the first in a series) to my academic, business, and government agency colleagues and selected US government and business leaders regarding the breakdown of world order that is exposing us all to significant danger and steps we must take to deal with it effectively and efficiently.

Here is my open letter:

“Dear Colleagues —

The US and world’s recent years grappling with the first wave of COVID-19 and this fall and winter’s new experience with its recurrence as part of the “CDC-Tripledemic,” where the CDC couples it with significant outbreaks of the Flu and RSV, have taught us lessons we can no longer ignore. And we expect additional vital lessons are hidden just around the corner.

We now know that significant COVID-19 spread will likely reoccur annually. In other words, many more harmful COVID-19 waves are to come, just like our over 100 annual experiences—wave after wave—with the 2018 Flu that first struck massively so many years ago and remains a significant danger to this very day.   

This annual or more frequent reoccurrence of COVID-19  (at least periodic if it is nature-made and possibly more frequent if human-manufactured through terrorist or hostile-nation attacks) presents a critical human health services crisis for all humankind.

Accordingly, I am proposing today to the health policy, management, risk management, financial, and scientific communities, where I have served for almost 50 years, that we create a new category of health-related solutions used in service to humankind.

I am calling this new category: “Pandemic Safety Solutions.” With its related human and financial costs, this annual engagement threatens to be larger than the other two categories (including conventional wars) combined. The relatively recent deaths of 1.1 million Americans might just be the starting point.

This new category of health-related solutions is readily distinguishable, and I now distinguish it, from the two traditional categories of human-health solutions:

1.     Lower-level “health-related solutions,” such as overseeing and delivering nutrition and PT services. And

2.     Advanced  “health-related solutions,“ such as overseeing and delivering health care, including diagnosing and treating lifestyle, genetic, chemically induced, non-infectious, and infectious diseases.

Of course, here again, as there has been with the traditional two categories, there is considerable overlap between the categories. But this most significant threat to humankind, the intellectual and practices third leg, has earned itself this new category. And, of course, creating a new category of thinking about and delivering a unique solution to a historically intractable problem is not a panacea—just one step, but a giant one, in the right direction.

It is not so much the nature of the infectious disease that counts. The extent to which we are prepared to block its “arithmetic spread” across the US and worldwide matters by far the most. As we have seen in the case of one of history’s most deadly diseases, smallpox, we can corral a significant infectious disease if we are adequately prepared with the proper methods and means for corralling it.

These tools range from vaccines to tests to therapies to isolations to quarantines to authentications to tracings and the like—and the advanced combined management and risk management of them all. This latter component is the most important. But it has been missing historically and up to the present.

I make this announcement now because there is strong evidence that average citizens, along with their leaders from many disciplines but mostly from government agencies and businesses (including for-profit companies and not-for-profit corporations), are blind to (or want to ignore) the many danger-related lessons learned from the COVID-19 pandemic experience. Once again, it is business as usual. There is a “hole in the dike,” but few see it—or want to see it.

Accordingly, they must be alerted to—and helped to comprehend—the dangers of the quick, broad, and deep spread of infectious diseases, to them, their loved ones, and their coworkers and loved ones.

Creating a new “solutions category” will clarify and develop a better, essential understanding of the deep meaning of this critical topic and build forward acceleration and momentum behind it—from deans to their students, agency heads to their employees, CEOs to their workers, union leaders to their members, and workers to their spouses (the best source of communication to workers of significant workplace dangers are their spouses).

Unprepared people, their spouses, and the leaders of their organizations, within whose workspaces they spend half their awake hours, will be caught off-guard again if unprepared soon with the tools to respond quickly and effectively.

I am seeking feedback on my announcement (both pro and con). You may reach me at john.norris@safely2prosperity.com. I will treasure your insights and keep them confidential.

Best wishes,

• John
• Dr. John Norris
• Executive Chairman
• Safely2Prosperity, LLC
• Web: Safely2Prosperity.com

© Safely2Prosperity, LLC, and Dr. John Norris, JD, MBA. All rights reserved.