Eva K. Lee describe the spread of COVID-19, including how public health internationally has been hampered by the spread of misinformation about the epidemic and the value of alternative treatments and vaccines. Many conflicting messages have undermined public health recommendations. These problems have been at least partly consistent with well-documented efforts by Russian propagandists to undermine political and economic processes in western democracies, exploiting how for-profit Internet companies make money by exploiting fundamental defects in how humans think and make decisions.
Widespread confusion and lack of collaboration about public health directives was identified as a major potential threat in a sweeping expert review of public health readiness published in 2019, but the general problem was described a quarter century earlier in a 1994 classic work on pandemic spread.
Eva K Lee is a distinguished professor in the Health System Institute at Georgia Tech and Emory University. She has been a special advisor to Homeland Security and a collaborator with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on defenses against pandemic and biological weapons. She holds a PhD in computational and applied mathematics from Rice.
REFERENCES
- EK Lee, YF Liu, F Yuan FH Pietz. “Strategies for Disease Containment: A Biological-Behavioral-Intervention Computational Informatics Framework“, AMIA Annu Symp Proc. 2022 Feb 21;2021:687-696.
- “The Science and Politics of COVID-19” Fireside chat with Dr Eva K. Lee and Director Suzanne Hillinger. The Decentralized O.S. November 2020. (Suzanne Hillinger is one of the co-Directors of the COVID-19 documentary “Totally Under Control” with Alex Gibney and Ophelia Harutyunyan.)
- EK Lee, ZL Li, YK Liu, J LeDuc. Strategies for Vaccine Prioritization and Mass Dispensing. Vaccines 2021; 9 (5), 506-530. https://www.mdpi.com/2076-393X/9/5/506
- Center for Strategic and international Studies (CSIS) and Center for the Study of Democracy (Bulgaria, CSD) “The Kremlin Playbook“, 2016.
- CSIS and CSD, “The Kremlin Playbook 2“, 2019.
- CSIS, “The Kremlin Playbook 3: Keeping the Faith,” 2022
- Scowcroft Institute of International Affairs, Bush School of Government and Pubic Service, Texas A&M University, “Community Resilience, Centralized Leadership and Multi-Sectoral Collaboration in Pandemic Preparation and Response“, May 2019
- Laurie Garrett (1994) The Coming Plague: Newly Emerging Diseases in a World Out of Balance (FSG).
- John M. Berry (2004) The Great Influenza: The Epic Story of the Deadliest Plague in History (Penguin).