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In February, a drug conference was held in Boston, USA, where 99 people were infected with the new coronavirus.
Now researchers can determine that hundreds of thousands of corona cases can be traced back to infection.
Some of them in Sweden, where the conference participants went after the super spreader event.
The word super spreader event had yet to be used many times as of late February. But the Biogen pharmaceutical company conference then held in Boston would turn out to be one.
When the conference was held on February 26 and 27, the United States had only 30 confirmed cases of infection. But of the 175 conference participants, 99 people would be infected. Now researchers have discovered how many in turn have been infected by these people. By the end of October, it turned out that almost 300,000 corona cases could be traced to the conference.
Photo: Steven Senne / TT
The pharmaceutical company Biogen organized the conference.
Carried the virus to Sweden
But not only the Americans were in the hotel in Boston. Swedish representatives were also present during the conference. And when they returned home, they took the virus with them. The researchers, who this week published a study in the scientific journal Science, have tracked the virus in 29 different states, in addition to Australia, Slovakia and Sweden.
“This is a cautionary tale,” epidemiologist Broneyn MacInnis told the NY Times, who was one of the first to report on the study.
– When we hear stories about cluster infections in which 20, 50 or 100 have been infected, what happened afterwards has not been taken into account, he tells the newspaper.
Photo: Johan Nilsson / TT
Stock Photography.
Biogen Poodles
After it became known that the conference contributed to the spread of the virus, Biogen received criticism. Many believe that a pharmaceutical company should have understood that a pandemic was imminent. Biogen has responded to the actions based on what was known at the time.
The NY Times quotes John Carroll of Endpoint News magazine, who looks at the pharmaceutical industry. He thinks the recently released study shows that even then there were reasons for Biogen to cancel the event.
“The irony is that a large pharmaceutical company is responsible for staging the mother of all super-spread events, which played a major role in creating the epidemic that is now killing more than 3,000 Americans a day,” he says.
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