Back Draft: We Don't Need No Water

THE DEVIL IS IN THE (D) TALES
It was the publisher of the Washington Post who first said that the job of the press is to write the first rough draft of history, a phrase often repeated since, but, if you ever did graduate work, you know that a newspaper article is not exactly a primary source. It is like the Cliff Notes for that Shakespeare play you were supposed to actually read in high school. But try reading a legal brief by Mark Herring in any litigation on the lockdown: news article after news article and not one iota of science, representing the nation's only physician serving as a state governor, as if he did not know that not just Geraldo Rivera sometimes, maybe most times, gets the story wrong.

We are over one year into a pandemic pathogen, and even scientists do not know the infectious dose, a priority metric scientists have been determining early since the 1870s, and you need that to determine if a pathogen is "highly contagious" or to develop a vaccine that will prevent you from being infected.