Want more health and science stories in your inbox? Subscribe to Salon's weekly newsletter The Vulgar Scientist. It's named in honor of the former Republican presidential candidate and face mask refuser, who died a month after attending Trump's infamous 2020 Tulsa rally. As body counts rise, we seek solutions. In the early days in 2020, coronavirus contagion anxiety and the frantic search for the "ground zero of a new virus," was quickly weaponized into a rash of anti-Asian hate crimes and racist rhetoric like Trump's references to "kung flu." Now, Reddit's sardonic "Herman Cain Award" sub identifies vaccine skeptics and mask mandate defiers who've succumbed to COVID-19 infections. There's no more telling contemporary example of collaboration and polarization than the intense, often accusatory response to our current pandemic. And as the co-author, with historian Nate Pedersen, of "Patient Zero: A Curious History of the World's Worst Diseases," she also recognizes how quickly our curiosity can turn into something far less benevolent. As a practicing physician, Kang understands the value of investigating the origins of illnesses. "It's a natural instinct to want to find the causes and sources of problems," says Dr.
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