I'm surprised outcomes like long covid from covid and mounting evidence that covid causes systemic damage including brain damage on each infection is not included in the why this matters, feels like a strong reason this issue is urgent and important.
I feel like this is probably intentional, this is clearly an offshoot of some research that started for COVID, but the concept has become so politically poisonous (for very silly reasons) that it probably risks causing some push back if it's associated too closely. I remember when I proposed UVC lamps and ventilation for COVID I would get answers as if I was saying we needed to keep doing lockdowns forever.
I'm surprised too, it's like the word Covid has become a third rail. CDC estimates we're losing at least 100K people annually to it, still, and hundreds of thousands of people are getting destroyed every year by Long Covid. This is written like "We're gonna beat Respiratory Viruses...vague vague Respiratory Viruses! No particular reason that's on our minds now."
Also measles and other diseases are a growing issue, but part of why they're growing is because Covid causes immune damage so we're all losing herd immunity to things we used to keep in check.
Yeah, I think it would've been good if long covid and other infection-associated chronic illnesses were mentioned here. Respiratory viruses also play a significant role in causing ME/CFS (which the heavy long covid cases mostly fit the criteria of), dysautonomia, etc.
Having looked into the epidemiology quite a bit though, I'm pretty skeptical of the numbers in the source you cite. A lot relies on studies with heavy selection bias, no control groups, self diagnosis (the US Household Pulse survey), and very broad definitions.
I'm a ME/CFS patient myself btw, possibly caused by covid, so absolutely don't mean to discuss my own community. Just.. figures tend to fly around without a strong basis in every field including ours.
Oh and I analyzed some excess mortality figures from covid and they're still pretty substantial in 2024 and probably ‘25 as well, though I don't think it comes from reinfection
Love this, and glad it's the three of you leading it. I'd like to read your detailed thinking on the harder, less glamorous work of resetting the policy and regulatory environment. That means model legislation, advocacy, and the thousands of unglamorous hours of coalition work needed to move slow public health agencies and the constituencies that block progress into alignment behind your contrarian premise that common respiratory infections should no longer be common.
Here is one example of how hard this is. To run an at-scale school trial of a respiratory intervention, you'd first need many schools to record why each student is absent (illness vs. other) and classify the illness. Aligning schools on that single data point is a monumental feat today, and bringing transparency into everyday disease spread runs counter to how governmental public health scopes its work, measures itself, issues guidance, and permits interventions.
The policy reset has a far longer lead time than new intervention products. So the political work has to start now, and there's a place to begin next week. NASN2026, the National Association of School Nurses' conference, runs June 29–July 2 in Las Vegas. Worth being there to put your vision in front of the people who manage pathogens in schools every day.
This one's personal. My daughter had two and a half beautiful years through the pandemic with zero illness, clear airways, steady energy, and present for learning. Her new normal is roughly 30% of the year sick or congested, in waves that roll through our schools, childcare, and camps. We're told to treat that as ordinary. She's the clearest evidence I have that it doesn't have to be.
Specifically, you'll want to look at footnotes 20 and 21:
----
https://ehjournal.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/1476-069X-1-3 “A study of indoor carbon dioxide levels and sick leave among office workers “, quoting other studies: “In a study conducted by Nichol et al., upper respiratory infections accounted for approximately 65% of sick leave days among working adults [11]. In a study of military aircrews, respiratory infections accounted for 70% of the total number of days the crews were grounded [12]. In a study conducted on government employees in the United Kingdom, respiratory infections and gastroenteritis accounted for over half of all absences [13]”.
https://www.bls.gov/opub/ted/2022/7-8-million-workers-had-an-illness-related-work-absence-in-january-2022.htm “The number of workers who are absent because they have an illness, injury, or medical problem or appointment regularly spikes from December through March, coinciding with the peak in cold and flu seasons…. The increase in absences during January 2022 partly reflects the increase in COVID-19 cases, along with seasonal illnesses.” Article from TED: The Economics Daily, Bureau of Labor Statistics, US federal government, February 9. 2022
21 Ibid. “In a study first published in 1960, Gwaltney and his colleagues conducted an extensive study at a large insurance company. Their results suggested that working adults were responsible for introducing 32% of the colds their families contracted [5–7].”
----
And my summary of the conclusions from these:
-- Respiratory illnesses probably account for 50%-70% of all absences from work. [20]
-- Roughly 30% of these illnesses are probably caught at work. [21]
We're still "during" the pandemic. We're still in the "Covid era". Covid never stopped spreading, disabling, killing. We're not post-anything. Your researchers aren't serious. The problem is and remains ongoing, airborne Covid spread, of which there has been severe levels for a good portion of the year as recent as 2024. You-Do-You doesn't work. You can't vax your way out of this. It's not seasonal. It's all year long. Covid is the problem. The results are many. We need action on ending the pandemic conditions that remain to this day.
No matter how one spins it, COVID is at this point endemic, not pandemic, by the definition of those words.
Honestly I think this program if anything highlights something else - that COVID being "just like the flu" is in a sense correct, because it has led us to re-examine the flu and other respiratory illnesses and realise that maybe we were underestimating their ability to do lasting damage. It's been more visible with COVID due to it being a new virus we had no or little defences for, but it's likely not exclusive to it.
Not spin. The pandemic is ongoing, airborne, unmitigated and out of control. Covid not seasonal like colds/flu. Not mild. Much more contagious. With potential for long-term effects as millions suffering the results of infections. Still spreading, disabling, killing. We need action on ending the pandemic conditions that remain right now. What are these 'researchers' & investors doing right NOW to help stop the spread?
I think this is a great initiative! I hope you are able to develop solutions in all the categories you've listed. One thing to keep in mind, using your discussion of waterborne diseases, is how they are still here when looking globally. For instance, cholera is now easily treated and prevented. And yet, in the last 25 years, there have been over 8 million reported cases and more than 90,000 deaths, according to the WHO. Even in 2024, there were more than 560,000 cases and over 6000 deaths. And these are likely serious undercounts. So finding solutions is one very important step, but getting them out there to the whole world is another, especially for respiratory infections, which spread globally much more easily than waterborne diseases. Nevertheless, any advances in these areas can only benefit humanity!
Yes, DEPLOYMENT is the problem. We have the tech to end all airborne diseases right now, and it's extremely cheap.
But people are refusing to use it. Hospitals are just choosing to spread airborne disease rather than taking inexpensive, 100%-effective precautions like respirator masks and air filters.
The problem is getting the tech actually deployed. It's much cheaper than water cleaning.
Great initiative! I would add a third focus area of Improved Testing, alongside Broad-Spectrum Preventatives and Air Cleaning Technologies. Improved Testing means tests that are cheap, accurate, easy to administer, and are as effortless as possible. At an extreme, we might be able to develop a cheap "Virus Detector" device in each room, which sends an alert when it detects a respiratory virus. Such devices can reduce frequency of respiratory viruses to basically zero: they'll be much cheaper than ACTs, and more widely applied than BSPs. Plus, they don't need to be as common: if testing devices were just deployed in 1% of all rooms, they would solve the problem. We can start by making better home testing kits, which are less invasive and easier to use, and go from there.
Air cleaning technologies are *startlingly* cheap.
The leading tech is, of course, respirator masks (P100 or P3), which are 99.97% effective at preventing infection, and should be standard in healthcare.
The second-leading tech is simple standalone fan-filters with high clean air delivery rates (CADR) -- the quietest ones are made with computer fan technology, optimized for decades to be quiet, and standard filters developed for furnaces, ranging from MERV-13 - MERV-17.
The third is far-UV.
The problem has been convincing people to actually bother to even try at all. The real need is for a vast public information / marketing campaign to make people realize that these diseases are preventable. Just like we stopped drinking contaminated water, we can stop breathing contaminated air. But we have to convince people to do it.
Despite this, Addenbrooke Hospital currently does not use air filters or FFP3 respirator masks, because the management doesn't wanna and doesn't care that they're endangering patients and staff. This is the problem.
In short, we don't need funding to develop new tech. We need funding to promote, market (public service announcements), and deploy the tech we already have.
"When Addenbrooke’s Hospital in Cambridge upgraded its face masks for staff working on COVID-19 wards to filtering face piece 3 (FFP3) respirators, it saw a dramatic fall – up to 100% – in hospital-acquired SARS-CoV-2 infections among these staff."
A 100% drop means they eliminated infections completely.
Worth noting that the Addenbrooke Air Disinfection Study, conducted at Addenbrooke Hospital in Cambridge, UK, in a ward full of Covid patients, (a) sampled numerous pathogens out of the air, (b) proved that using respirator masks (FFP3) stopped infection, (d) proved that using HEPA filters for the whole ward removed all the pathogens from the air.
The proof has been done -- that was a really thorough study. The air filters can just *be implemented now*. We know what's needed and there are even ASHRAE and Canadian Standards Association standards for the air filtration, ALREADY. The problem is convincing people to actually DO IT. The need is for a marketing campaign.
Are you also planning to work on the public health communication and driving regulatory change side of this? As various people pointed out, deployment and driving adoption is the biggest barrier. The technologies, particularly on the "cleaning the air" side already exist but they're not being adopted widely enough.
This is a very interesting venture. Regarding air-cleaning techs, there was a clever experiment done by the scientists William Wells and Richard Riley in the mid 1900s. They constructed a closed ventilation system where a group of guinea pigs were made to live on top of a tuberculosis ward in the Baltimore VA hospital. The animals were exposed to just the infected air from the ward beneath them. For a second group of guinea pigs in an identical setup, Wells and Riley put UV lights in the air ducts. The results were striking: the second group of guinea pigs did not contract TB while the first group did. William Wells's wife, Mildred, attempted a somewhat similar experiment with children in Philadelphia schools; she set up UV lights in schools and observed students' rate of illness. While the experiment was successful in reducing the spread of measles in experimented Philadelphia schools, Mildred could not reliably reproduce her results, for the reasons you mention -- students visit far more spaces than just school, and the scientist cannot control this. Still though, I find Williams's experiment with the guinea pigs at the VA hospital very promising for this domain.
How practical is it to integrate detection alongside ACT? It would be very useful to be able to detect a pathogen in a large environment. I suspect it's hard (maybe it's not currently possible?), but the bar here can be loosened quite a bit and still be very valuable.
At the lowest bar, if the limit was ability to only with large quantities, for example just multiple individuals or super-spreader type virus shedding. This would allow you to know when it's truly necessary to shut down because ACT itself was being overloaded.
Another lowering, if reagents are the limit, just having the general capacity, but not generally operating would be useful. For example, if you needed to get a quantity of air, and sample it effectively, but only added reagents when you had expectations of a severe risk.
Obviously there's better outcomes than those if it's practical and possible, but just wanted to think about the lowest bar that would be useful, in case that's all that is practical or possible.
I'm surprised outcomes like long covid from covid and mounting evidence that covid causes systemic damage including brain damage on each infection is not included in the why this matters, feels like a strong reason this issue is urgent and important.
I feel like this is probably intentional, this is clearly an offshoot of some research that started for COVID, but the concept has become so politically poisonous (for very silly reasons) that it probably risks causing some push back if it's associated too closely. I remember when I proposed UVC lamps and ventilation for COVID I would get answers as if I was saying we needed to keep doing lockdowns forever.
I see your point, but the flu and the commons cold can also cause postviral conditions like ME/CFS, which I think is also noteworthy.
I'm surprised too, it's like the word Covid has become a third rail. CDC estimates we're losing at least 100K people annually to it, still, and hundreds of thousands of people are getting destroyed every year by Long Covid. This is written like "We're gonna beat Respiratory Viruses...vague vague Respiratory Viruses! No particular reason that's on our minds now."
Also measles and other diseases are a growing issue, but part of why they're growing is because Covid causes immune damage so we're all losing herd immunity to things we used to keep in check.
Can I ask why this doesn't say more about the ongoing impact of Covid, both economically and on health systems (eg. https://www.cidrap.umn.edu/covid-19/long-covid-takes-1-trillion-global-economic-toll-each-year-analysis-suggests ) and in terms of Long Covid and secondary effects on health (up to 200 potential symptoms)?
Yeah, I think it would've been good if long covid and other infection-associated chronic illnesses were mentioned here. Respiratory viruses also play a significant role in causing ME/CFS (which the heavy long covid cases mostly fit the criteria of), dysautonomia, etc.
Having looked into the epidemiology quite a bit though, I'm pretty skeptical of the numbers in the source you cite. A lot relies on studies with heavy selection bias, no control groups, self diagnosis (the US Household Pulse survey), and very broad definitions.
I'm a ME/CFS patient myself btw, possibly caused by covid, so absolutely don't mean to discuss my own community. Just.. figures tend to fly around without a strong basis in every field including ours.
Oh and I analyzed some excess mortality figures from covid and they're still pretty substantial in 2024 and probably ‘25 as well, though I don't think it comes from reinfection
https://substack.com/@siebepersists/note/c-265337653?r=6rc6a
IT IS TIME TO CLEAN THE AIR
one of the coolest announcements in a long while!
Great philanthropy; it's viscerally relatable with dual goals of health and prosperity across large populations. Godspeed!
@nanransohoff @petty @drsok
Love this, and glad it's the three of you leading it. I'd like to read your detailed thinking on the harder, less glamorous work of resetting the policy and regulatory environment. That means model legislation, advocacy, and the thousands of unglamorous hours of coalition work needed to move slow public health agencies and the constituencies that block progress into alignment behind your contrarian premise that common respiratory infections should no longer be common.
Here is one example of how hard this is. To run an at-scale school trial of a respiratory intervention, you'd first need many schools to record why each student is absent (illness vs. other) and classify the illness. Aligning schools on that single data point is a monumental feat today, and bringing transparency into everyday disease spread runs counter to how governmental public health scopes its work, measures itself, issues guidance, and permits interventions.
The policy reset has a far longer lead time than new intervention products. So the political work has to start now, and there's a place to begin next week. NASN2026, the National Association of School Nurses' conference, runs June 29–July 2 in Las Vegas. Worth being there to put your vision in front of the people who manage pathogens in schools every day.
This one's personal. My daughter had two and a half beautiful years through the pandemic with zero illness, clear airways, steady energy, and present for learning. Her new normal is roughly 30% of the year sick or congested, in waves that roll through our schools, childcare, and camps. We're told to treat that as ordinary. She's the clearest evidence I have that it doesn't have to be.
I have some actual information on the impact of airborne-acquired illnesses -- check the citations in this paper.
https://whn.global/doctors-should-not-infect-patients/
Specifically, you'll want to look at footnotes 20 and 21:
----
https://ehjournal.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/1476-069X-1-3 “A study of indoor carbon dioxide levels and sick leave among office workers “, quoting other studies: “In a study conducted by Nichol et al., upper respiratory infections accounted for approximately 65% of sick leave days among working adults [11]. In a study of military aircrews, respiratory infections accounted for 70% of the total number of days the crews were grounded [12]. In a study conducted on government employees in the United Kingdom, respiratory infections and gastroenteritis accounted for over half of all absences [13]”.
https://www.bls.gov/opub/ted/2022/7-8-million-workers-had-an-illness-related-work-absence-in-january-2022.htm “The number of workers who are absent because they have an illness, injury, or medical problem or appointment regularly spikes from December through March, coinciding with the peak in cold and flu seasons…. The increase in absences during January 2022 partly reflects the increase in COVID-19 cases, along with seasonal illnesses.” Article from TED: The Economics Daily, Bureau of Labor Statistics, US federal government, February 9. 2022
21 Ibid. “In a study first published in 1960, Gwaltney and his colleagues conducted an extensive study at a large insurance company. Their results suggested that working adults were responsible for introducing 32% of the colds their families contracted [5–7].”
----
And my summary of the conclusions from these:
-- Respiratory illnesses probably account for 50%-70% of all absences from work. [20]
-- Roughly 30% of these illnesses are probably caught at work. [21]
We're still "during" the pandemic. We're still in the "Covid era". Covid never stopped spreading, disabling, killing. We're not post-anything. Your researchers aren't serious. The problem is and remains ongoing, airborne Covid spread, of which there has been severe levels for a good portion of the year as recent as 2024. You-Do-You doesn't work. You can't vax your way out of this. It's not seasonal. It's all year long. Covid is the problem. The results are many. We need action on ending the pandemic conditions that remain to this day.
Today is March 2307, 2020.
No matter how one spins it, COVID is at this point endemic, not pandemic, by the definition of those words.
Honestly I think this program if anything highlights something else - that COVID being "just like the flu" is in a sense correct, because it has led us to re-examine the flu and other respiratory illnesses and realise that maybe we were underestimating their ability to do lasting damage. It's been more visible with COVID due to it being a new virus we had no or little defences for, but it's likely not exclusive to it.
Not spin. The pandemic is ongoing, airborne, unmitigated and out of control. Covid not seasonal like colds/flu. Not mild. Much more contagious. With potential for long-term effects as millions suffering the results of infections. Still spreading, disabling, killing. We need action on ending the pandemic conditions that remain right now. What are these 'researchers' & investors doing right NOW to help stop the spread?
I think this is a great initiative! I hope you are able to develop solutions in all the categories you've listed. One thing to keep in mind, using your discussion of waterborne diseases, is how they are still here when looking globally. For instance, cholera is now easily treated and prevented. And yet, in the last 25 years, there have been over 8 million reported cases and more than 90,000 deaths, according to the WHO. Even in 2024, there were more than 560,000 cases and over 6000 deaths. And these are likely serious undercounts. So finding solutions is one very important step, but getting them out there to the whole world is another, especially for respiratory infections, which spread globally much more easily than waterborne diseases. Nevertheless, any advances in these areas can only benefit humanity!
Yes, DEPLOYMENT is the problem. We have the tech to end all airborne diseases right now, and it's extremely cheap.
But people are refusing to use it. Hospitals are just choosing to spread airborne disease rather than taking inexpensive, 100%-effective precautions like respirator masks and air filters.
The problem is getting the tech actually deployed. It's much cheaper than water cleaning.
Great initiative! I would add a third focus area of Improved Testing, alongside Broad-Spectrum Preventatives and Air Cleaning Technologies. Improved Testing means tests that are cheap, accurate, easy to administer, and are as effortless as possible. At an extreme, we might be able to develop a cheap "Virus Detector" device in each room, which sends an alert when it detects a respiratory virus. Such devices can reduce frequency of respiratory viruses to basically zero: they'll be much cheaper than ACTs, and more widely applied than BSPs. Plus, they don't need to be as common: if testing devices were just deployed in 1% of all rooms, they would solve the problem. We can start by making better home testing kits, which are less invasive and easier to use, and go from there.
Air cleaning technologies are *startlingly* cheap.
The leading tech is, of course, respirator masks (P100 or P3), which are 99.97% effective at preventing infection, and should be standard in healthcare.
The second-leading tech is simple standalone fan-filters with high clean air delivery rates (CADR) -- the quietest ones are made with computer fan technology, optimized for decades to be quiet, and standard filters developed for furnaces, ranging from MERV-13 - MERV-17.
The third is far-UV.
The problem has been convincing people to actually bother to even try at all. The real need is for a vast public information / marketing campaign to make people realize that these diseases are preventable. Just like we stopped drinking contaminated water, we can stop breathing contaminated air. But we have to convince people to do it.
And here's a popular article (with links to the scientific paper) on the air filter part of the Addenbrooke Air Disinfection Study: https://www.cuh.nhs.uk/news/air-filters-on-wards-remove-almost-all-airborne-covid-virus/
Despite this, Addenbrooke Hospital currently does not use air filters or FFP3 respirator masks, because the management doesn't wanna and doesn't care that they're endangering patients and staff. This is the problem.
In short, we don't need funding to develop new tech. We need funding to promote, market (public service announcements), and deploy the tech we already have.
Popular article on the respirator mask part of the Addenbrooke Air Disinfection Study:
https://www.cam.ac.uk/research/news/upgrading-ppe-for-staff-working-on-covid-19-wards-cut-hospital-acquired-infections-dramatically
"When Addenbrooke’s Hospital in Cambridge upgraded its face masks for staff working on COVID-19 wards to filtering face piece 3 (FFP3) respirators, it saw a dramatic fall – up to 100% – in hospital-acquired SARS-CoV-2 infections among these staff."
A 100% drop means they eliminated infections completely.
Worth noting that the Addenbrooke Air Disinfection Study, conducted at Addenbrooke Hospital in Cambridge, UK, in a ward full of Covid patients, (a) sampled numerous pathogens out of the air, (b) proved that using respirator masks (FFP3) stopped infection, (d) proved that using HEPA filters for the whole ward removed all the pathogens from the air.
The proof has been done -- that was a really thorough study. The air filters can just *be implemented now*. We know what's needed and there are even ASHRAE and Canadian Standards Association standards for the air filtration, ALREADY. The problem is convincing people to actually DO IT. The need is for a marketing campaign.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8883285/
Wrote about exactly this years ago. https://jenka.substack.com/p/the-viral-frontier-edaa16850b56
Are you also planning to work on the public health communication and driving regulatory change side of this? As various people pointed out, deployment and driving adoption is the biggest barrier. The technologies, particularly on the "cleaning the air" side already exist but they're not being adopted widely enough.
Great to see more funding from tech founders in the Biotech space.
This is a very interesting venture. Regarding air-cleaning techs, there was a clever experiment done by the scientists William Wells and Richard Riley in the mid 1900s. They constructed a closed ventilation system where a group of guinea pigs were made to live on top of a tuberculosis ward in the Baltimore VA hospital. The animals were exposed to just the infected air from the ward beneath them. For a second group of guinea pigs in an identical setup, Wells and Riley put UV lights in the air ducts. The results were striking: the second group of guinea pigs did not contract TB while the first group did. William Wells's wife, Mildred, attempted a somewhat similar experiment with children in Philadelphia schools; she set up UV lights in schools and observed students' rate of illness. While the experiment was successful in reducing the spread of measles in experimented Philadelphia schools, Mildred could not reliably reproduce her results, for the reasons you mention -- students visit far more spaces than just school, and the scientist cannot control this. Still though, I find Williams's experiment with the guinea pigs at the VA hospital very promising for this domain.
How practical is it to integrate detection alongside ACT? It would be very useful to be able to detect a pathogen in a large environment. I suspect it's hard (maybe it's not currently possible?), but the bar here can be loosened quite a bit and still be very valuable.
At the lowest bar, if the limit was ability to only with large quantities, for example just multiple individuals or super-spreader type virus shedding. This would allow you to know when it's truly necessary to shut down because ACT itself was being overloaded.
Another lowering, if reagents are the limit, just having the general capacity, but not generally operating would be useful. For example, if you needed to get a quantity of air, and sample it effectively, but only added reagents when you had expectations of a severe risk.
Obviously there's better outcomes than those if it's practical and possible, but just wanted to think about the lowest bar that would be useful, in case that's all that is practical or possible.