Looks like Moderna has phase 2 trials underway to test boosters that include spike proteins for variants. Test results look optimistic.
CAMBRIDGE, Mass.–(BUSINESS WIRE)–May 5, 2021– Moderna, Inc. (Nasdaq: MRNA), a biotechnology company pioneering messenger RNA (mRNA) therapeutics and vaccines, today announced initial data from its Phase 2 study showing that a single 50 µg dose of mRNA-1273 or mRNA-1273.351 given as a booster to previously vaccinated individuals increased neutralizing antibody titer responses against SARS-CoV-2 and two variants of concern, B.1.351 (first identified in South Africa) and P.1 (first identified in Brazil). A booster dose of mRNA-1273.351, the Company’s strain-matched booster, achieved higher neutralizing antibody titers against the B.1.351 variant of concern than a booster dose of mRNA-1273. A manuscript describing these preliminary results has been submitted as a preprint to medRxiv and will be submitted for peer-reviewed publication upon completion of the multivalent mRNA-1273.211 booster arm.
I’m hoping for booster distribution to happen soon. 🙂
Florida has a lot of YOUNG people cases. Did not expect Florida and excess young people to be found in the same headline. “Young patients have Florida among highest COVID hospital rates” I guess that our Governor’s concentration on saving us old people had an effect. Also, Miami claims to have several variants that are more dangerous to younger people.
https://www.sentinelsource.com/news/national_world/young-patients-have-florida-among-highest-covid-hospital-rates/article_dcb65a86-1d40-514f-b15b-9590efc84b42.html
I don’t think a jury is going to convict any of the other officers. I’d have to see some clear negligence = clear knowledge of distress and clearly taking no action. Perhaps some officers reach this level, but I didn’t see it.
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I don’t see Chauvin getting the death penalty, it’s not even 1st degree murder.
Russel,
Yes, that’s just one of many “young people with covid!!!†articles lately that demonstrate the vaccination strategy is working as hoped. Other potential non-negative framings are “seniors being hospitalized at much lower rates!!!†or “hospitalized patients surviving at much higher rates!!!â€.
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Florida 65+ vaccination rate is now at 85.3% with at least one dose, 71% fully vaccinated. Better than I had hoped.
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Florida is one of the unfortunate leaders in the B117 (UK) variant which puts it in the top 10 in the nation of cases. However the fact that cases are declining with widespread transmission of B117 is a good sign that the vaccines are effective. Unvaccinated people engaging with risky behavior are still under threat, and I would recommend even young people get vaccinated even though the risk of severe illness is not high. My kids got vaccinated.
Tom Scharf,
“I don’t see Chauvin getting the death penalty, it’s not even 1st degree murder.”
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Hope you are right (I agree he doesn’t deserve death for unintentional murder), but I fear you are wrong.
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IMO, women in Saudi Arabia who are unfaithful to their husbands don’t deserve death either, but killed they are. You are not thinking like a dedicated leftist. In both cases (Islam and leftist ideology), it is a desire to punish those who do not follow “established values” that drives the punishment, not any specific harm done by the perpetrator.
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I hope the Biden administration does not ask for the death penalty for Chauvin, but I will not be at all surprised if they do. Death penalty or not, they will want him locked away until he dies. And I think they will get that wish.
Tom Scharf
Do you know about this Florida Covid data site from FAU: https://business.fau.edu/covidtracker/data/florida-data/index.php
Note the drop down menus in the upper right of each graph. It lets you see the data.
WSJ: The New Scientific Method: Identity Politics
https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-new-scientific-method-identity-politics-11620581262
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“Lest anyone wonder whether the demographic composition of the new membership was planned, NAS home secretary Susan Wessler made clear that it was. Each of 31 different fields can put forward recommendations for new members. From there, Ms. Wessler told Science Magazine, “we assign slots based on the diversity of the lists of nominees that get forwarded.†Sections presenting more-diverse lists get extra slots. Then the next year, the number of slots allocated to the sections depends on how successful they were at picking diverse candidates.
To be more specific, Ms. Wessler added: “If they used [their slots] to pick a bunch of white guys from Harvard, they get penalized.â€
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This has just gotten crazy. Wearing explicit racial and gender bias as a badge of honor.
“…explicit racial and gender bias as a badge of honor.”
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Which is why it is so crucial that control of at least one house of Congress be taken by Republicans in 2022. The inmates are running the asylum, and it is not a pretty look.
Russell,
If all the people who are not vaccinated are younger, then the cases that are recorded, and most hospitalizations, will obviously be younger people.
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They won’t die (well, almost none of them will die), but most will wish they had gotten the vaccine rather than the illness. This is not complicated. If you are under 25, then your risk of severe illness is very near zero. If you are 50, then your risk of severe illness (even if it does not put you in the hospital or kill you) is significant. I sure wish there were an aggressive advertising campaign to explain this to people.
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There is not, which is almost incomprehensible for me. I say lay it out clearly: the older you are, the greater your risk of severe illness (or death). If you have other health issues (suppressed immune system, cancer, heart disease, diabetes, obesity, etc), then your risks multiply. So get the damned vaccine if you don’t want the illness.
SteveF,
Yes. Not dieing is good. But not even being being sick as a dog for a week or so is great. I had a student defer tutoring today because he thinks he might have been exposed. I’ll hear more tomorrow.
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Get a vaccine man!
We have 26 days of declining cases in the US now, and the last 14 days are -30%. It is a near linear drop and possibly even declining faster lately. This does look like the “big one”. This thing has been really hard to predict though, so let’s hope it continues. We will probably eventually hit a lowish plateau while the variants burn their way through small regions. It is unfortunate that we have as many unvaccinated as we do. That heavy streak of individualism in the US has its features and drawbacks. The effort to convince people to get vaccinated has been rather poor IMO, and almost nonexistent. The results speak for themselves. Decline of trust in institutions (well earned in many cases) is having an effect.
Tom Scharf (Comment #202107): “We have 26 days of declining cases in the US now, and the last 14 days are -30%. It is a near linear drop and possibly even declining faster lately. This does look like the “big oneâ€.”
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Well, we had a 75% drop in 6 weeks in January and February, new cases are still higher than in September, and deaths have been essentially flat for a month. So I think one sees what one wants to see. I hope that we are seeing the vaccine campaign crush the virus; time will tell.
MikeM,
As vaccines were getting distributed.
Part of the drop could be due to some naturally immunity having built up, but that timing is what we were hoping would happen as vaccines started being distributed and it did happen.
We will probably continue to see a plateau because some people, including some vulnerable, are not getting vaccinated. Also because vaccines aren’t perfect.
Vaccines seem to be largely working. Monitoring of infection demographics “in the wild” indicate they are as good as the trials suggested. I having seen evidence they don’t work in the wild.
I think it’s pretty fair to say that (barring mutations that break through vaccines) we are unlikely to see another dramatic rise.
Mike M,
Deaths nationwide are the lowest since a few days in early July of last year. The rate of death continues to fall, and within a couple of weeks should be the lowest since March of 2020 when deaths were skyrocketing in Cuomoland nursing homes. With the number of unvaccinated adults, it is inevitable there will be new cases, but the ratio of deaths to cases will be much lower than earlier in the pandemic. It looks liker over 80% of the 65+ population will ultimately get vaccinated, and maybe 60-70% of those over 45. That indicates at least a four-fold reduction in deaths per case compared to earlier in the pandemic. The fall in cases and deaths will no doubt be very gradual for a month or two, but by August deaths should be down to 100-200 per day, or a couple % of the normal rate of death from all causes.
I also note that at this time least year we were seeing cases decline in a similar manner, but not as quickly. But at that time, testing was still ramping up rapidly and the positive test rate was dropping rapidly.
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We had a steep drop before the vaccines should have had much effect. Then as there should have been more effect from the vaccines, cases leveled off and rose a bit.Now they are dropping again. And the CFR has not been dropping.
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I do not see how one can cite that as evidence of the vaccine working. It is *not* evidence against the effectiveness, since we don’t know what would have happened otherwise. The effect of the vaccine on the epidemic remains inconclusive.
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Remember that half the population being vaccinated should cause the new case rate to drop by far more than half.
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I agree that all published studies indicate that the vaccine ought to be having a big effect. It is very strange that we don’t see a clearer effect on the epidemic.
MikeM,
“I agree that all published studies indicate that the vaccine ought to be having a big effect. It is very strange that we don’t see a clearer effect on the epidemic.”
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Multiple things are happening at the same time: Vaccination rates increasing, immunity from recovery from infections is rising, states are reducing restrictions, people are starting to behave in more normal ways (especially in red states), and strains that are more contagious are spreading. As we have seen multiple times before, it is impossible to consider only a single factor to explain the history of cases and deaths. If you really think the vaccine is not effective (in spite of double blind studies and many “in-the-wild” evaluations), then I doubt there is anything that will convince you the vaccines reduce cases and deaths. I hope you get vaccinated, but I doubt you will.
SteveF (Comment #202114): “Multiple things are happening at the same time … it is impossible to consider only a single factor.”
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I said that.
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SteveF: “If you really think the vaccine is not effective”
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I did NOT say that.
Mike M,
What you said was: “It is very strange that we don’t see a clearer effect on the epidemic.”
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I don’t think it is at all strange…. there are multiple factors at play, as the multi-peak history of cases and deaths in the USA (and elsewhere) makes clear. If you accept that there are in fact multiple factors involved, then there is no reason to think it strange the effect of vaccines is not very clear. Where the effect of vaccines is extremely clear is “in-the-wild” studies like the vaccinated versus unvaccinated health care workers in Israel, where the reduction in symptomatic cases was ~97% and cases overall (including asymptomatic) reduced about 95%.
Mike M
Doesn’t seem that way to me.
It is evidence. Evidence doesn’t mean “proof positive”. It’s just supporting evidence.
This claim is not necessarily true. It wouldn’t be true if HIT was greater than 1/2, the number with natural immunity was low and Reff remained above 1. In that case, all vaccines would do is slow the rise. But you would see a continued rise there would be no drop at all.“, and the number with pre-existing immunity.
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How much you “expect” vaccinating half does to the overall increase or decrease in the measurable “new case rate” depends on “R
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You also seem to forget that cases have dropped by much more than half that since vaccine roll out. So, presumably, this drop of dramatically more than half should support the notion vaccines work if you think they should have made it drop by more than half!
I forgot to add additional things to my list of factors that affect how much you “expect” vaccinating half does. But SteveF got them: changes in Ro due to mutations and/or behavior.
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But my main point is the bald claim that “… half the population being vaccinated should cause the new case rate to drop by far more than half.” is wrong even in the simple case where no mutations or behavior changes occur.
Mike M.,
IMO, the reason we’re not seeing a clear effect in new cases from vaccination, other than the reduction in the average age of those hospitalized, is that most of the reduction is a result of immunity acquired by infection rather than vaccination. On January 15 when the seven day trailing average of new cases/day at worldometers.com peaked, only 10.5 million people in the US had received one dose of the vaccine. And we should really go back two weeks earlier because it takes about two weeks to develop some immunity. That’s 4.2 million on January 2 or 1.3% of the US population according to this site.
There’s no way that few people would have a significant effect on a daily new case rate of over 250,000/day. But the population having crossed the herd immunity threshold would and would result in a steep drop. The bump in the new case rate that peaked on April 14 was, IMO, the result of changes in behavior and the introduction of more infectious new strains that temporarily raised Reff to slightly greater than one.
This tended to be localized. Michigan was a major contributor to the bump with the case rate there going from slightly more than 1,000 cases/day in mid-February to almost 8,000/day in mid-April and is now down to less than 3,000 new cases/day. That’s almost half of the increase in the national new case rate from mid-March to mid-April.
The other thing we don’t know is the fraction of those getting vaccinated who were already immune whether they knew it or not. IMO, that fraction is of the order as the HIT and could be 50% or higher.
DeWitt,
I think that SteveF pointed to the data that shows it’s working: that’s relative number of cases among vaccinated vs. unvaccinated. The drop in cases is consistent with a decrease in Reffective due to vaccination provided we were near Reffective=1. But (absent new variants or behavior changes) whether that drops or rise is affected by Reffective, which, as you suggest, may well have been very near 1.
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The comparison of cases among the vaccinated and unvaccinated “in the wild” is a much better indicator since that isn’t strongly affected by Reffective. To the extent that the vaccinated are getting sick at a lower rate, that suggests a the vaccination is at least partly causing the drop. (Having reached natural HIT is not excluded.)
DeWitt,
On the Diamond Princess, almost exactly 20% of the people on board tested positive for covid, half of those asymptomatic. The Diamond Princess air system did not have HEPA filters, so confining people to their cabins appears to have helped spread the virus, not reduce the spread. There were many, many instances where one spouse in a shared cabin became infected and the other didn’t. I think the Diamond Princess data suggests:
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1) There is likely an upper bound (somewhere near 30% ?) for the fraction of people ever likely to become infected under real-world exposure conditions.
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2) About half of all cases will be asymptomatic.
Considering those numbers, the peak and rapid fall in cases in early 2021 does indicate that the pandemic had passed the HIT in most places, and was approaching the maximum number likely to ever be infected in many places (not all…. where restrictions were most severe, like Michigan, there was a larger surge in cases last month).
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Your point of the vaccines having little effect on those already resistant is well taken. If a large portion of the population is already resistant (either from past infection or some natural resistance), then the effect of vaccinations on number of cases will be lower.
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The CDC claims that virtually everyone is susceptible to infection have zero evidence in support, yet they form the basis of public policy. There is overwhelming evidence that some people are far more resistant to infection than others. One interesting conclusion: if a large fraction of the population is inherently resistant, then the virus actually spreads far more easily than the rates of rise in cases suggests…. if the vulnerable population is much less than 100%, then the virus has to spread far more easily to reach the limited population that is susceptible.
If you asked me 5 months ago, I would have expected deaths to have dropped further by now with the high rate of senior vaccination. Why it hasn’t dropped “as expected” is a bit of a mystery. I suspect there is a floor to the death rate, it might be a “dying with covid” floor or a “vaccines are not that effective against those who are very frail and immunocompromised to begin with”. Some people may just be very susceptible to covid and very near death. Hospitalizations are starting to drop so we should see a slow decline in deaths in the next month.
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The other major factor has been the introduction of B117 to the US. There is enough data now globally to show that this variant is much more transmissive, ~60%. We can’t run alternate realities but the information I see is that we would likely have gotten a rather large 4th wave from B117 that the vaccines have stopped in its tracks. The timing was rather fortunate.
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The best evidence for vaccine efficacy among all the other changing factors is the severe illness ratio between the vaccinated and unvaccinated.
The expected alternate reality scenarios are impossible to prove. If the B117 variant R0 was = 2.2 and you cut the transmission rate in half then you would be at 1.1 and cases would still be increasing, but at a much slower rate. If R0 = 1.2 and you dropped it to 0.6 then the changes would be more dramatic by the way we measure things with a heavy mental bias on increasing/decreasing.
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Other factors such as lower case counts and fully vaccinated people now engaging in formally risky behavior make it an ink blot test.
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Israel, the UK, the US, and Europe in a few months should be definitive evidence of vaccine efficacy.
Nobody has ever explained why the covid breakout “forest fires” go out on their own all over the world to my satisfaction. This has happened over and over and over. Brazil and India will likely peak on their own without vaccines. Health officials do some hand waving about changed behavior but I’m just not buying it. We are missing something major here. Just like forest fires are much more likely to start in dry and windy conditions and stop when it’s calm and rainy, there just seems to be something going on here that is very significant and unknown.
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My speculation is that aerosolized transmission is much more likely in a narrow band of environmental conditions.
Just to be clear, I’m not saying that vaccines aren’t effective. It’s blindingly obvious that they are. However, when just looking at the new infection rate, there are a number of confounding factors, most especially, IMO, infection acquired immunity. Then there are changes in behavior over time that can raise or lower Reff, see, for example, the daily new case plot for the Czech Republic.
There’s also large heterogeneity in transmission. A few people infect a lot of others while the majority are unlikely to infect anyone, leading to the 20/80 rule, 20% (or maybe only 10%) of the infected are responsible for 80% of new infections, and the examples SteveF quoted in the Diamond Princess. It’s not clear, however, whether that’s due to some inherent immunity of those who don’t get infected or that most infected people don’t shed a lot of virus or some yet unknown possibility.
What it does mean, though, is that simple SEIR models with a single Ro are unlikely to be helpful in calculating an HIT or projecting the future course of infections.
Yes, Viral immunology is a primitive science. The secondary attack rate for flu is also low and no one knows why.
Most of the simple models are hopelessly wrong too. I have argued that its impossible to define a single R0 as well. It’s simply highly variable across regions and populations. Heck, we can’t even measure accurately infection numbers or deaths.
David,
I don’t think you are the only one who thinks there it’s not possible to define a single R0. I don’t think that’s generally accepted. The entire premise of mask wearing and social distancing is based on the notion that R0 is affected by the amount of interaction between the population being infected and other behaviors. So those advocating lockdowns, social distancing, masks and any behavior changes agree with you.
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Not being aable to accrately measure infections and deaths means we couldn’t determine R0 with any precision even if the SEIR model was perfect. But that wouldn’t mean a single value didn’t exist.
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That said, I think almost no one who undestands what R0 means thinks there is one unique value for any particular pathogen.
Tom
My mother in law died of a urinary tract infection. At some point frail people die from anything they catch.
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I suspect some very frail people have immune systems so weak their immune response to the vaccine is negligible too. We are going to see some deaths.
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Tom
Precisely. That’s why saying that 50% vaccination rate “would be expected” to do “X” to the observed number of new cases is fraught. You “expect” it to do something relative to the number that would have occurred without the vaccinations. But you can’t observe that number. You would need a model to predict it. Given uncertainty, we can come up with any model we like.
Precisely. And we are seeing this ratio is low.
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lucia,
And that’s just what IHME, Imperial College, etc. do. They come up with models that give them the numbers they want. Plus, it’s almost certainly one size fits all. I seriously doubt that a model existed that predicted the 700% increase in new cases in April in Michigan and the only 10% increase in California.
Preliminary data shows the India variant to be about as increasingly transmissive as B117.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/coronavirus-strain-found-in-india-is-a-variant-of-concern-who-says-11620662311
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“The variant appears to be at least as transmissible as B.1.1.7, U.K.-based scientists said in a conference call with reporters Monday.
Sharon Peacock, director of the U.K.’s Covid-19 Genomics Consortium, an alliance of labs and universities that sequences viral samples, said that initial assessment is based on the variant’s genetic mutations and epidemiological modeling. More data are needed to reach firmer conclusions, and there is no evidence yet that the variant causes more severe disease than established strains, she said.
“There’s a huge amount of uncertainty around this at the moment,†Prof. Peacock said.”
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The vaccines appear effective against all variants so far. Ironically once enough of the world gets vaccinated there will be more evolutionary pressure to escape the vaccines. For now in most of the world there is no competitive advantage for vaccine escape.
Tom Scharf,
“Ironically once enough of the world gets vaccinated there will be more evolutionary pressure to escape the vaccines.”
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The evolutionary pressure to resist an immune response may increase as more people are vaccinated, but it is always present. I mean, every time someone contracts and then recovers from the virus, spread becomes more difficult because an ever growing fraction of the population is resistant.
Twelve year olds can now be innoculated with Pfizer in the US.
Tom,
On the evolutionary pressure aspect: Moderna working on boosters to address variants is a positive step. New variants spring from mutations of old variants. Having immunity that is targeted to a broad range of variants is bound the reduce the opportunity for any mutation to get through the vaccine.
Getting vaccine out to the world will help too. Mutations happen at a specific rate per viral replication. The less virus out there, the fewer variations occur.
NBC cancels the Golden Globes. Apparently Hollywood Awards shows are not politically correct enough. Somehow. Someway. Well, actually I really don’t know. I suppose the dramatic collapse of ratings for other award shows was interpreted as them not being quite in line with the viewing audience who desire ultra left wing lectures and to be shamed more forcefully by their betters. Quite humorous.
Tom Scharf,
I would bet that it’s that the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, whose members determine who’s nominated and who wins, isn’t diverse enough, too many white males.
SteveF,
The hypothesis that only a relatively small fraction of people are susceptible to COVID-19 is belied by the Skagit Valley Chorale incident in Washington State on March 10, 2020. 52 of 59 people (88%) at the choir practice, not counting the symptomatic person thought to be the superspreader, were infected. All the infected were symptomatic although only 32 were tested and confirmed to have been infected.
https://www.livescience.com/covid-19-superspreader-singing.html
My guess is that it’s a dose/response thing. Asymptomatic infections are likely, IMO, the result of a low exposure to the virus. I don’t think it’s proven that there is much, if any, asymptomatic, as opposed to presymptomatic spreading of infection. I would also expect significant variation in susceptibility to infection from low exposure and, of course, large variation in infected individuals virus shedding rate.
Tom Scharf,
I sure am looking forward to enjoying missing the Golden Globes this year. I alway enjoy missing the awards shows because I have previously enjoyed missing the movies they celebrate.
You people talking Covid math may be interested in this article “The Statistical Secrets of Covid-19 Vaccines”. https://www.wired.com/story/the-statistical-secrets-of-covid-19-vaccines/#intcid=_wired-category-right-rail_7cf4f2ed-4a70-4dc4-bf70-0b999f1aa8a3_popular4-1
I found it counter-intuitive, but I’m not a statistics geek.
DeWitt,
Thanks for that link.. One nitpick: it was 52 of 60 who later became sicken not 52 of 59. I would also suggest that it is certainly possible some of the untested people didn’t have covid, but some other virus.
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That said, it is interesting that so many were symptomatic in three days…. and that does suggest a high initial dose of virus particles. So the observed lack of infection in many people (Diamond Princess and elsewhere) in spite of known exposure, and the common incidence of asymptomatic infection, may well be due to a combination of somewhat lower personal susceptibility and the dose of virus particles received. Singing (which generates clouds of aerosols!) is obviously an efficient way to spread the virus.
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I guess even people who have been vaccinated or who have recovered from an infection could still become ill if given a high enough dose of virus particles.
Russell,
I’m not impressed with the Wired article. It purports to be an analytical evaluation, but fails to provide meaningful numbers. I found it a waste of time.
SteveF (Comment #202142): “One nitpick: it was 52 of 60 who later became sicken not 52 of 59. I would also suggest that it is certainly possible some of the untested people didn’t have covid, but some other virus.”
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Or no virus at all. Especially if the symptoms were mild and only reported after they knew that the others were sick.
Mike M,
Sure, there is potential for a placebo effect in reverse. If none of those people were tested, their cases either resolved very quickly, and/or they had very mild cases. The ages of the people (almost all elderly) also raises questions about their resistance to the virus.
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The point of the article, which was printed early in the pandemic, was to scare the bejesus out of people (talk about transmission by touching objects, etc is pure rubbish) and gain support for draconian policies. That said, it clearly was a “super-spreader” event where lots of people contracted the virus at the same time: crowded space, likely minimal ventilation, singing, extended (multiple hours) contact time…. all increase the chance of transmission.
SteveF,
So the virus appeared by magic? Nope. One of the 60 was already infected, as I pointed out in the post, so there were only 59 susceptibles.
Mike M.,
Oh, puhleeze. 32 people tested positive. The idea that the other symptomatic people had allergies, some other virus or weren’t sick at all is, as William F. Buckley would say, nugatory. It’s more likely that the seven who didn’t have symptoms had asymptomatic infections, but that is, admittedly, speculation on my part.
DeWitt,
The article was poorly written; here it says:
“So, 61 members of the Skagit Valley Chorale, half of the choir’s singers, came to the evening practice at the Mount Vernon Presbyterian Church, according to the Los Angeles Times, which broke the story.” (my bold)
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They later say: “The median age of those infected was 69 years old. Excluding the superspreader, 52 of the 60 singers (or 86.7%) became ill.”
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One of those 61 was infected, leaving 60.
Unfortunately I think we may be in need of a White Guys Movie Award Show. Voted on only by white guys, and targeted at a White Guys audience. We can get advertisements for Hair Club for Men, various testosterone enhancement pills, pickup trucks, beer, and Hooters.
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We can finally get a best movie award for things like Rambo, The Terminator, Transformers, Alien, and Star Wars.
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The judgment of “art” in all its various forms has become completely corrupted by social justice activists. Editors Choice and selections of books is now totally unreliable and is based more on the authors subject choice and politics than content. The large gulf between actual best sellers and movie top grossers has only gotten wider. Awards have become irrelevant.
Tom Scharf,
“The judgment of “art†in all its various forms has become completely corrupted by social justice activists.”
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I think it is far more general than that. The left contaminates every aspect of human endeavor, always diminishing, always corrupting. Leftist thought is all-consuming, dishonest, and destructive; a politic where the ends justify the means. Sadly, the left now dominates “higher education”, and indoctrination rather than education is the result. And that is damaging the social fabric of the country.
SteveF,
I stand corrected. I completely missed the 61 attendees number. Must be getting old.
The Wired article does what almost every media article on covid statistics does, falls all over themselves to avoid talking about the numeric specifics of age related risk. Healthy people under 20 (almost all of them are healthy) have very little risk of severe illness. It’s OK to say this out loud if you want to retain credibility, or you can spend a 1000 words avoiding the most glaring and relevant statistic of the virus. It’s also OK to tell them to get vaccinated anyway to reduce the chances of transmission to the vulnerable population and to help reach herd immunity.
I think you can probably get a vaccine booster if you want to … unofficially. I’m sure it’s not too hard to just walk in and sign up. You might need to fib a bit, use a variation of your name or whatever. I have seen zero info to show that there is any extra risk here, and most companies are already testing boosters. I would probably get a mRNA shot if I had gotten a single J&J. It’s not clear if they will offer a different formulation or just the same shot at this point.
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People aged over 50 in Britain to be offered 3rd COVID vaccine shot in autumn -The Times
https://www.reuters.com/world/uk/people-aged-over-50-britain-be-offered-3rd-covid-vaccine-shot-autumn-times-2021-05-04/
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CDC director says U.S. is planning for Covid vaccine booster shots ‘just in case’
https://www.cnbc.com/2021/05/11/covid-booster-shots-cdc-director-says-us-planning-just-in-case.html
It does sound like they are working on a new formulation that mimics more than one spike protein. I’ll want that as soon as it’s approved.
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I agree it might be possible to get a booster on the sly. It’s tempting, but I’m hoping for the extra spike proteins.
A discussion idea… I live in a zip code with an Amish village. They were strikingly opposed to masks. I have an Amish craftsman who does work at my house. He would not wear a mask [I restricted him to outside work] and now he and a lot of other Amish are refusing the vaccine. Two articles: My zip code covid story and NPR vaccine story. https://www.heraldtribune.com/story/news/coronavirus/2021/02/05/sarasotas-most-coronavirus-cases-pinecraft-zip-code/4396977001/
https://www.npr.org/2021/04/16/988200823/convincing-the-amish-to-get-vaccinated-as-covid-19-cases-surge-in-their-communit
According to VAERS, through the end of April 3099 people have died after getting a covid vaccine. Is that a lot? 1760 of those died in 0-7 days and 1189 in 0-2 days.
https://wonder.cdc.gov/controller/datarequest/D8;jsessionid=DCFD6C6362530FFAE3F9FBFF0B96
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Is that a lot? I have heard the claim that the numbers are dramatically higher than for other vaccines. But I don’t know how to interpret the numbers.
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I realize that if you randomly select 100M people, then maybe 3000 will die within a day. But these are not randomly selected. I doubt they are giving the vaccine to people in hospice or the ICU. So I don’t know how to interpret the numbers.
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If you don’t already know, Tucker Carlson has called attention to these numbers while admitting that he does not know how to interpret them. I have found a number of totally useless “fact checks” on it.
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Here is the breakdown by age:
https://wonder.cdc.gov/controller/datarequest/D8;jsessionid=DCFD6C6362530FFAE3F9FBFF0B96
Biased old, but off hand it seems less so than for the illness. And it looks like at least a few obvious errors (0-6 months?).
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I hope the above links work.
——–
Dang. Maybe this link will work?
https://wonder.cdc.gov/controller/datarequest/D8;jsessionid=DCFD6C6362530FFAE3F9FBFF0B96
Mike M.,
All your links are identical and don’t ‘work’ in the sense of going to data. It looks like you need to specify what you requested or make a copy and post that.
MikeM
We know they gave them to the elderly first. Apparently healthy elderly die at greater rates than apparently healthy young.
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Do you have a source for the number who would die each date?
The link doesn’t really work.
Oh also, I remember this from a discussion with someone on twitter: VAERS is, sadly, highly spammable and IS spammed. The person on twitter had their knickers in a twist about a 4 year old dying after a vaccination given in Virginia before trials on teens were even being tested!
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So you need confirmed deaths, not VAERS. Some of those entries are, like it or not, fake. There may be people entering fake stuff for “reasons” of their own. It’s designed to be over inclusive and allow everything to get in. Normally, there is no political motivation for anyone to enter fake stuff. But in the current environment, I’m afraid there is.
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As we know, people put fake stuff into climate surveys (e.g. Lewandowsky ones). There’s no reason why that can’t happen with VAERS data.
Click “report” on VAERS
https://wonder.cdc.gov/vaers.html
In other words: So data may be totally, utterly fake. Note that the entries do include what vaccine type and lot number were given and who got it. So faking could be detected. But that data remains in VAERS. I know at least one entry is fake — the one about a 4 year old in VA. I’d say you can’t “interpret” this unless someone goes through and checks each entry to at least connect it to an actual death.
We do a pretty good job of creating death certificates. If someone actually died, it should be possible to connect that to a VAERS death, but the post processing would require some tracking. My guess is: there are fake entries in VAERS.
I think the media probably has a bias to not report adverse vaccine events. Lots of people have died who have gotten the vaccine because lots of people die anyway, and the media isn’t really reporting these with their usual click bait fear. The hive mind has decided to protect the vaccine rollout. I would say it is very unlikely there is any major problem with the vaccines in spite of this. They did find the blood clot problem which is a 1 in a million type of event.
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It’s simple enough to examine the all cause deaths between vaccinated and unvaccinated and see if there are overcounts or undercounts. I’m not sure which way I’d expect these numbers to go, but they should be roughly even. Vaccinated people are probably more likely to be healthier overall is my guess (?) and would die at an older age. They tend to be more educated and that correlates to other things that determine lifetimes. I haven’t seen any data with this that searches for hidden vaccine problems.
I specified “death” as the adverse event, for covid vaccines sorted by date of event onset and then also by age.
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lucia,
Pooh-poohing and claiming that VAERS is junk is not helpful. Especially since previously you claimed how thorough VAERS is in that there is no way it missed deaths due to blood clots.
————–
It seems that there is a real problem here. Maybe the problem is that the vaccine is killing a large number of people, by the standards of vaccines. Maybe the problem is that VAERS is not very useful. Maybe it is something else. It should not just be ignored.
———–
I guess I need to add that even if the vaccine is killing large numbers of people by the standards of vaccines, it is killing a tiny number compared to the virus. But is that true in all age groups?
Prices seem to be going up on everything. I wish we had a word for that phenomenon.
I don’t have a lot of trust in the media, but I do have a fair amount of trust that the CDC and FDA take the safety of vaccines very seriously. They have a bias toward safety that causes problems as we have talked about before. It’s not just the US system, it is also the European system and to a lesser extent all the others.
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The best safety data is the formal trials and they are still ongoing. These people are formally tracked. Since they involve ~30K people then the only problems that should escape are the very rare ones. It’s possible that other problems can occur, production safety issues and such. Thus the requirement to have batch numbers that you see on your CDC card.
All vaccines
Symptom: death
Sorted by Year Reported
Percent (of 4,934)
DEATH 2000 1 0.02%
DEATH 2001 1 0.02%
DEATH 2003 1 0.02%
DEATH 2006 4 0.08%
DEATH 2007 95 1.93%
DEATH 2008 112 2.27%
DEATH 2009 149 3.02%
DEATH 2010 126 2.55%
DEATH 2011 138 2.80%
DEATH 2012 123 2.49%
DEATH 2013 103 2.09%
DEATH 2014 114 2.31%
DEATH 2015 118 2.39%
DEATH 2016 143 2.90%
DEATH 2017 98 1.99%
DEATH 2018 138 2.80%
DEATH 2019 164 3.32%
DEATH 2020 155 3.14%
DEATH 2021 3,098 62.79%
DEATH Unknown Date 53 1.07%
DEATH Total 4,934 100.00%
Total 4,934 100.00%
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It seems that since 2007, deaths have been stable at about 100-150 per year. Until this year.
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Maybe people have been bombarding the system with bogus reports. I do not see a way to sort by who did the reporting, such as a doctor vs a relative.
Covid vaccines
Symptom: Death
Sorted by Age
< 6 months 1 0.03%
1-2 years 3 0.10%
6-17 years 3 0.10%
18-29 years 24 0.77%
30-39 years 50 1.61%
40-49 years 93 3.00%
50-59 years 210 6.78%
60-64 years 223 7.20%
65+ years 2,325 75.02%
Unknown 167 5.39%
Total 3,099 100.00%
Total 3,099 100.00%
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Obviously at least a little bad data in there. Like car crash victims who died of covid. But that does not mean that it is mostly bad data.
Covid vaccines, sorted by onset interval. Symptom: death.
0 days 419 13.52%
1 day 529 17.07%
2 days 241 7.78%
3 days 152 4.90%
4 days 129 4.16%
5 days 115 3.71%
6 days 67 2.16%
7 days 108 3.48%
8 days 65 2.10%
9 days 66 2.13%
10-14 days 262 8.45%
15-30 days 472 15.23%
31-60 days 230 7.42%
61-120 days 31 1.00%
Over 120 days 7 0.23%
Unknown 206 6.65%
Total 3,099 100.00%
MikeM:
“Not helpful”. I don’t even know what that means. I do understand it isn’t helpful to those who want to say everything in there is accurate.
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I think VAERS won’t miss things that happened. That’s not to say some entries aren’t fake. Someone entering a bogus entry doesn’t make the real ones vanish. It is specifically designed to make it easy for anyone enter so as not to miss things. But it is also easily spammed meaning it can also include absolutely fake data.
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I think if you reflect a moment, you’ll see the difference between “not missing” deaths due to clots but possibly “overstating deaths” (due to anything at all.)
B117 share of covid cases:
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2/13/21 = 4.5%
4/24/21 = 66.0%
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Next closest competitor is 8%. P.1 (Brazil) at 5% is accelerating but looks to be getting crowded out by B117 still. B117 is seriously bad news for large unprotected populations. All these variants seem to be similar in they are variations in the spike, perhaps B117 is near “optimal”.
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https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#variant-proportions
MikeM
No one said it should be ignored. What I said is that you should recognize the site can be spammed and filled with fake entries. So you should find another source to verify deaths or events. That’s not easy to do. But you should do it if you want to understand what those numbers “mean”. The might mean people are dying. They might mean lots of people are spamming VAERS.
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I know there are fake entries in there because some of the entries are obviously fake.
This article describes some:
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/factcheck/2021/05/09/fact-check-no-evidence-2-year-old-died-covid-vaccine/4971367001/
Or, perhaps we shouldn’t ignore this report that James Laidler turned into the Incredible Hulk.
In fact, I think we shouldn’t ignore it: It is evidence that people do enter fake data into VAERS for reasons of their own.
You may prefer to totally ignore the known fact that people can and do enter fake stuff into VAERS. I’m not going to do so. Until we have a estimate of that number, I’m going to recognize the number of entries could is greater than the real number and it could be much, much, much greater.) Undercounts or “missing” deaths are much less likely. That’s by design of the system.
Mike M
You don’t see a way using VAERS. You would need to look at each death entry and find a corresponding death entered at that locality matching the statitics and trace it. This would require work and it would require searching databases other than VAERS.
For what it’ worth: I suspect Fox News would have the budget to try to locate real death certificates matching the deaths of everyone who supposedly died within 14 days of being vaccinated. If they did trace them, then maybe Tucker Carlson could discover how to interpret those numbers.
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Perhaps you could sugget the task to Tucker and he can get Fox news to fund your effort to track down the real death certificates.
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I’m guessing Tucker Carlson has no interest in trying to check whether those entered deaths correspond to any actual deaths in the locations where they supposedly occurred. He probably prefers to not know how to interpret those. 🙁
I am trying to wrap my head around the VAERS numbers and can not find a way to make sense of them.
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I imagine that in the past, most reporting was done by doctors but now maybe most reporting is from the public. That could certainly inflate the numbers.
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Family members might well mis-attribute death. Grandpa got the vaccine a week ago and just had a stroke; it must have been the vaccine! But I would think that would be weakly dependent on time; that is, the number of such reports should drop only gradually with days since vaccination. But the reported deaths drops by a factor of 5 after one week and a factor of ten after two weeks. So I think that can only explain a modest fraction of the 1760 deaths that occured during the first week.
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Another possibility is that in the past, deaths were hugely under reported compared to now.
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But in any event, the CDC has surely investigated every one of those 3099 reported deaths. So they ought to be able to provide a detailed breakdown. Why are they not doing that? I could see why they might not have done so proactively due to not wanting to call attention to the number. But now that it is in the news, there is no excuse.
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At best, it would seem like they are treating the public like children. No, make that sheep.
lucia (Comment #202172): “I suspect Fox News would have the budget to try to locate real death certificates matching the deaths of everyone who supposedly died within 14 days of being vaccinated.”
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I doubt they have the names of those people. But that is not the job of Fox News. That is the job of the CDC. Carlson has asked the question. Why has the CDC not answered?
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And if it is fraud, then why is the CDC not warning people that fraudsters will be prosecuted?
Biden ran on being not Trump. Once in office, he started to frantically undo everything that Trump did. He is sure succeeding.
When Trump left office, peace was breaking out in the Mideast. Not any more.
When Trump left office, control of the border was the best in memory. Now it is the worst ever.
When Trump left office, the economy was roaring back. Now it has stalled. And it looks like we are to experience the misery of stagflation.
When Trump left office, we were essentially energy independent. Now there are gas shortages in much of the country.
Biden has been a great “success”.
MikeM
Have you considered the “someone is spamming them” theory.
I would suggest that when vaccination are not a hot political topic, few entries are made in bad faith. When it becomes a political topic, the site is spammed.
The site is not limited to family member.
Fake entries aren’t limited to “mis-attribution”. There is nothing preventing someone from going in and putting in an utterly fake entry. As in: No one died.
You continue assumign that these deaths even occurred.
Here’s a suggestion: Death records are public information. Fox news has a big budget. Tucker Carlson is reporting on this. Suggest he track down the corresponding death records. But maybe he doesn’t want to. Maybe he just wants to look puzzled, “wonder” and say he doesn’t know what to make of it. Whoa is he!
The CDC has written this:
It’s true we don’t have a link to a detailed report instantaneously nor have they put a listing online indicating whether the entered death has been confirmed as having happened at all much less having happened after a vaccination.
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Believe it or not, if an entry is bogus it might could actually take time to track down and prove it’s bogus. (Not all of them are people claiming to have turned into the incredible hulk.)
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I note: Fox news has also not done this. Nor has Tucker Carlson. Nor have they indicated they are even going to try.
Meanwhile: We do know that fake entries can and have been entered into VAERS and we know that is something people do especially when there is a political hot potato. Vaccination is a political hot potato.
https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/vaccines/safety/adverse-events.html
I very much doubt the CDC has tracked down many of these deaths. They probably use this as a first line warning system that something might be going on and then spot check a few if something seems amiss. The CDC couldn’t really do contact tracing either. What the US has is about 3000 independent public health agencies with little real federal oversight. There is very little coordination of these places.
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Deaths are reported by states and so they would need to investigate each one through the labyrinth of county / state agencies. They likely take anecdotal reports from doctors, ER’s, hospitals much more seriously.
MikeM
Actually, it is the job of news reporters at major outlets to vet their news. And it’s our job to decide how much credence to put in a source if they report breathlessly, fail to mention the source they are looking at is spammable and don’t try to do anything to vett their story details.
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Tom,
There’s also V-Safe. It’s voluntary and self – selecting. But they are likely to detect deaths if someone who registered stops reporting without having opted out first.
The full check list of what’s reported in VAERS is here:
https://vaers.hhs.gov/docs/VAERS%202.0_Checklist.pdf
I don’t know what is revealed in online VAERS report.
We do know the report age at vaccination and location of the person in the VAERS and also death date. So it should be possible to search state data bases to find if someone matching that entry died and read the cause of death.
Fox news could make a phone call to the relatives of the deceased.
I’m guessing they haven’t tried to do anything to vett their story. Tucker doesn’t want to try.
Are you guys seriously suggesting that CDC gets reports of deaths following vaccination and does not check them out? If so, that is a bigger scandal than 3000 deaths from the vaccines.
I haven’t suggested the CDC doesn’t check them out.
I think you or Fox news should send the CDC a FOIA asking for records indicating whether those deaths occurred and whether they were associated with the indicated
vacationvaccination. It’s then up to you and Fox news to figure out how to word the request and go through all the data to find out how many of those deaths can be verified to have happened at all, and how many can be linked to the purported vaccination..
That’s the sort of thing Fox news should do. Suggest it to Tucker!
I am absolutely suggesting that the CDC doesn’t investigate every person who has had a vaccine that died and it got reported on a public facing self reporting system. If someone reports that a vaccinated person died from ongoing breast cancer then I doubt they do anything at all. Maybe they get counted in some way in a spreadsheet, if you want to call that an investigation. That doesn’t make this report worthless, perhaps they find out there is problem with a side effect of an anti-cancer drug. If this shows up repeatedly then they might act on it.
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How are the VAERS data used?
VAERS scientists look for unusually high numbers of reports of an
adverse event after a particular vaccine or a new pattern of adverse events. If scientists see either of these situations, focused studies in other systems are done to determine if the adverse event is or is not a side effect of the vaccine. Information from VAERS and vaccine safety studies is shared with the public. Throughout the process of monitoring VAERS, conducting studies, and sharing findings, appropriate actions are taken to protect the public’s health.
For example, if VAERS identifies a mild adverse event that is verified as a side effect in a focused study, this information is reviewed by CDC, FDA, and vaccine policy makers. In this situation, the vaccine may continue to be recommended if the disease-prevention benefits from vaccination outweigh the risks of a newly found side effect.
Information about newly found side effects is added to the vaccine’s package insert that lists safety information. Newly found side effects also are added to the Vaccine Information Statement (VIS) for that vaccine. If serious side effects are found, and if the risks of the vaccine side effect outweigh the benefits, the recommendation to use the vaccine is withdrawn.
https://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/hcp/patient-ed/conversations/downloads/vacsafe-vaers-color-office.pdf
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UPDATE: I’m not sufficiently interested, but for those that are, the long version:
Safety monitoring in the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS)
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4632204/
Thanks Tom,
So the have developed a system that is robust to spamming. (And it appears they likely developed it before Covid.)
I still think Fox news should send a FOIA and then do their own analysis. Or just do their own. They can pull up the information.
1) Find out if a death certificate exists corresponding to the death entered in the VAERS. (They have death date, location, age of diseased and other information that should be traceable to a death certificate.)
2) Call the family to find out if that person had a vaccine, and when. Ask for the vaccine certificate and compare to the batch number etc. (Whoever entered it must have had it.)
3) Find any obituary in the news paper corresponding to the death.
Tucker is clearly concerned about this. He is obviously puzzled about the whole thing. He’s a deep guy! He should want to get to the bottom of it. It’s a news agencies job to investigate. They should investigate!
If 100 million people have been vaccinated with a vaccine that is 95% effective, then you would expect that up to 5 million of those people could eventually become infected. That is, of course, the upper limit. If the IFR is 0.5% even after vaccination, probably also close to an upper limit, then you would expect 25,000 deaths. But we don’t know the infection rate for the vaccinated so we don’t know how many of the vaccinated have developed COVID-19.
However, there have been a little over 235,000 COVID-19 deaths reported in 2021. So that puts some perspective on the ~3,000 VAERS reported deaths. Also, if truly vaccine related deaths were happening in the US, then one would expect they would be happening everywhere that the Pfizer, Moderna and J&J vaccines were being used.
What we really need, besides an analysis of death certificates, is mortality data to see if there are excess deaths compared to the expected mortality in the vaccinated cohort.
DeWitt,
That’s if they even occurred. But you are correct about comparing to Covid deaths. Some of the deaths soon after vaccination could be due to Covid itself. That’s not likely in the 0-2 day, but someone could symtomless but infected on the injection day. They might subsequently die. Also, someone might catch it within a few days of being vaccinated and then die.
Everyone suggests continuuing distancing until at least 14 days after the first vaccination. Many urge it until the 2nd vaccination for the 2 dose vaccines.
lucia,
Yes, like the one death in the less than 6 months age and the three in the 1-2 year range. Any deaths in the first day, if they are actually vaccination related, would probably be from an allergic reaction leading to anaphylaxis that wasn’t treated in time, something that could also happen with the flu vaccine and a lot of other drugs if you listen to the caveats in the TV ads. But without a stated cause of death, who knows.
Seven Yankee players have tested positive for COVID. It is stated that all had been fully vaccinated.
Six were totally asymptomatic. I didn’t read anything about the other one’s symptoms.
Apparently “science” has changed dramatically in the last couple weeks.
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Fully Vaccinated People Can Stop Wearing Face Masks, Physical Distancing in Most Settings, CDC Says
https://www.wsj.com/articles/fully-vaccinated-people-can-stop-wearing-face-masks-physical-distancing-in-most-settings-cdc-says-11620928800
“Fully vaccinated people don’t need to wear a mask or physically distance during outdoor or indoor activities, large or small, federal health officials said, the fullest easing of pandemic recommendations so far.”
“The agency said it was making the revisions based on the latest science indicating that being fully vaccinated cuts the risk of getting infected and spreading the virus to others, in addition to preventing severe disease and death.”
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I’m not complaining about the ruling, only noting that nothing has really changed since the latest recent confusing mess of rulings which included kid’s camps having to stay masked all the time. This is just politics. The internal discussions at the CDC must have been pretty brutal lately.
Tom,
I think it may be dawning on them that all this “abundance of caution” tends to feed anti-vax feelings.
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The owner of the dance studio heard about the CDC just as Jim and I were arriving for our weekly practice. She’s trying to figure out what to do. (She’s sick of masks. But there’s also the “How do you check?” “How do people react to being asked?” etc.)
Lucia,
Private enterprises just need to say: “As of Xx of July, we will not require masks of anyone at our studio. If you are worried about covid infection at our studio, please get vaccinated to reduce your rusk.”
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It will only end when people choose to end it.
Science publishes open letter for a better investigation into the covid outbreak.
https://science.sciencemag.org/content/372/6543/694.1
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“We must take hypotheses about both natural and laboratory spillovers seriously until we have sufficient data.”
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Basically they are saying what everyone is thinking. If there is barely any information to make a real determination how is one theory very likely and the other very unlikely? These dots are never connected. I don’t think we will ever know this answer, but at least this is a push to get the media to stop ignoring it.
Tom Scharf,
Yes, we may never get an answer about where covid-19 came from….. mostly because the CCP will continue to block all access to data about research to enhance infectivity at the Wuhan lab. But to even have to wonder is already half an answer: If there were nothing to hide, all the gene sequences they were concocting would already have been disclosed.
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The weight of the evidence is that lab workers were exposed and they spread it outside the lab. But proof or not, doing this kind of research is quite mad. I do hope it is stopped.
SteveF (Comment #202193): “Private enterprises just need to say: ‘As of Xx of July, we will not require masks of anyone at our studio. If you are worried about covid infection at our studio, please get vaccinated to reduce your rusk’.”
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In New Mexico, that will get the business fined $5000/day. So it is hardly a matter of “just need to say”.
Tom Scharf (Comment #202194): “If there is barely any information to make a real determination how is one theory very likely and the other very unlikely?”
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There is no proof, but there is certainly evidence as to which is more likely. No plausible zoonotic source has been identified, in contrast to SARS and MERS where the zoonotic sources were quickly found. But there is strong evidence in favor of a lab source. The fact that the virus seems to have appeared already very well adapted to humans. The presence of a furin cleavage site (suspicious in itself) using a codon associated with lab manipulation. The fact that the virus appeared just where the Chinese were doing gain-of-function research on coronaviruses.
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And as SteveF points out, the Chinese are clearly hiding something. We can be certain that they are not hiding evidence of a zoonotic origin.
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I agree with SteveF that even if somehow this virus did not come from a lab, gain-of-function research is mad and must be stopped. That will happen if, and probably only if, people conclude that the Wuhan virus came from a lab.
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The supporters of such research are attempting to get people to fall for the following: The virus *might* have come from an animal, therefore we can’t say that it cane from a lab, therefore we don’t need to stop gain-of-function research. Madness. Sadly, they might get away with it.
————–
This might be a duplicate post. Something odd happened.
Concerning the origin of Covid-19, from this article:
In other words, an expression that the virus might have come from the [Wuhan] lab might be construed as support for Trump, and lead to a loss of funding or collegial relationships. Partly Trump’s fault, to be sure, being such a loose cannon, but it speaks poorly of the integrity of the scientific community and the peer pressure exerted therein.
SteveF,
It’s slightly more complicated in dance studios.
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The studio is trying to decide their policy on “rotation” during group lessons. Some people will want to stick to their partner only. Some might be willing to rotate provided the other partner is vaccinated (which they will know… how?)
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Normally, rotation is highly encouraged during group lessons because it helps people learn lead and follow. It’s been forbidden during mask-wearing era. Social mixing is also highly encouraged at dance parties because it (a) makes it more social! and (b) helps people learn to dance with different leads and follows. This has also been forbidden.
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I was there when Britney got an excited call from another studio owner and they were discussing options and what to do.
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I heard one studio is giving people wristbands for “showed proof of vaccine” vs. “did not show proof of vaccine”. That will affect people decision of who to dance with. What they are allowed to do will affect whether they come to a group lesson or social.
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Jim has liked not rotating because he likes to dance with me anyway. He may miss having his excuse to not dance with other ladies (especially some who don’t move on their own and who plop their weight on him!)
HaroldW,
The virology community has apparently circled the wagons around gain-of-function research much like the climate scientists did over the Hockey Stick. Where is Wikileaks when we need it.
Fauci hasn’t exactly come clean about his possible role in authorizing funding for research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology either.
DeWitt Payne (Comment #202200): “The virology community has apparently circled the wagons around gain-of-function research”.
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A portion of that community, led by Daszak, did that in early 2020, using specious arguments. But a lot of people are intimidated; it does not take many enemies to put grant funding out of reach.
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DeWitt Payne: “Fauci hasn’t exactly come clean about his possible role in authorizing funding for research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology either.”
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Indeed. The money went through a middleman (essentially Daszak) and was only a portion of a grant that itself was just a fraction of a percent of NAIAD’s budget. And the purpose of that funding may well have been obfuscated. So it is possible that Fauci may actually have been unaware. But instead he dodges and quibbles and looks guilty. I think that Fauci is a strong supporter of gain-of-function, but I could be mistaken.
Yes, I also see the circle the wagons or bunker mentality among “science” when GOF research is even talked about now. This subject seems to go to “us against them” rather quickly.
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The statement “there is no proof covid came from a lab” is rather useless unless the rest of the sentence is “and there is no proof it came from an animal”. Saying one without the other is just propaganda. It is very likely it “came from an animal” but the real question is whether an existing animal coronavirus was edited through GOF and accidentally released. Not to go fully conspiracy here though, it is also easy enough for another country to do the same thing and intentionally release the virus in Wuhan to point fingers at China. I doubt this happened but one can imagine the Norks doing something like this to bring the whole developed world down a notch to their advantage. End of crazy talk.
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I haven’t really seen a reasonable defense of why this research should be done. The best I have heard is a theory that it allows them to develop vaccines faster, which at this point seem to be complete BS. As of now they just don’t talk about it, and the media isn’t asking any hard questions. Can they point to something where this tech has been useful?
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I don’t claim to know this subject very well, but to me this is an area where it has to be completely obvious why this has good outcomes before it is allowed because bad outcomes are quite easily imaginable.
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China has a pretty bad record in biotech and their behavior with SARS was shall we say not exemplary. It’s like nobody remembers this. China’s behavior now is like a guilty 5 year old, can nobody see this? They aren’t releasing the earliest genetic sequences, this just look bad, very bad.
THE SARS EPIDEMIC AND ITS AFTERMATH IN CHINA: A POLITICAL PERSPECTIVE
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK92479/
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Pre-pandemic discussion of gain of function research:
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2014: Risks and Benefits of Gain-of-Function Experiments with Pathogens of Pandemic Potential, Such as Influenza Virus: a Call for a Science-Based Discussion
https://mbio.asm.org/content/5/4/e01730-14?ijkey=666ad29d189d880b48b7aa14f05d71acd5a9ad45&keytype2=tf_ipsecsha
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“Recent history has shown that GOF experiments in influenza virus research can provide unique insights into the potential threat posed by influenza virus strains and mechanisms of viral pathogenesis. Much of the debate involving the H5N1 experiments which demonstrated the “gain†of ferret transmissibility focused on the publication of the specific mutations that conferred this property. However, the major scientific finding was the observation that this virus had the biological capacity to be transmitted between mammals after alterations in a few amino acids. In fact, this finding is of great value to humanity, because it suggested that a human H5N1 pandemic might be able to occur if and when similar mutations occurred spontaneously, as is characteristic of influenza viruses, along with conditions favorable for bird-to-mammal transmission.”
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“Proponents of continued GOF experiments emphasize the benefit and downplay or even deny the risk, while opponents do the converse. Since both risk and benefit involve quantitative assessments, in this case with limited information, the debate is fueled by the reality that weighing risks and benefits involves judgment calls. The risks fall into two general categories that are separate but related: namely, biosecurity and biosafety. Biosecurity risk is the likelihood that someone would use products or information gained from GOF experiments that led to a more pathogenic virus to carry out intentional damage in the form of bioterrorism. Biosafety risk is the likelihood of accidental escape that could trigger an outbreak and epidemic.”
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I find it remarkable that the medical community thinks it’s OK to do GOF research on influenza and coronaviruses specifically targeted to increased human transmission while being adamant that challenge trials on humans is unethical. I can see why this area of science does not want a spotlight on it.
Since the Enlightened are offering lottery tickets and fast food in exchange for getting vaccinated, I’m really in a hurry to get shot up now. /sarc
Andrew
Nature 2014: US suspends risky disease research
Government to cease funding gain-of-function studies that make viruses more dangerous, pending a safety assessment.
https://www.nature.com/news/us-suspends-risky-disease-research-1.16192
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“Critics of such work argue that it is unnecessarily dangerous and risks accidentally releasing viruses with pandemic potential — such as an engineered H5N1 influenza virus that easily spreads between ferrets breathing the same air1, 2. In 2012, such concerns prompted a global group of flu researchers to halt gain-of-function experiments for a year (see Nature http://doi.org/wgx; 2012). The debate reignited in July, after a series of lab accidents involving mishandled pathogens at the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta, Georgia.”
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“One of the most prominent laboratories conducting gain-of-function studies is run by Yoshihiro Kawaoka, a flu researcher at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. In 2012, Kawaoka published a controversial paper1 reporting airborne transmission of engineered H5N1 flu between ferrets. He has since created an H1N1 flu virus using genes similar to those from the 1918 pandemic strain3, to show how such a dangerous flu could emerge. The engineered H1N1 was transmissible in mammals and much more harmful than the natural strain.”
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Yikes.
Andrew_KY
Funny. Yeah, I don’t know how well that is going to work. But you never know.
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I think the free Uber rides might be more helpful.
Mike M,
With the CDC now saying vaccinated people don’t need to wear masks, I expect draconian rulz will soon be dropped…. after all, those Democrat governors have been falling all over themselves to declare they will ‘follow the science’… no more masks is were the science actually points. There will be a lot of kicking and screaming by the usual suspects, of course, but kicking and screaming is not following the science.
Lucia,
What might work is money. Say $200 cash per dose administered. I know it won’t happen, but it is a better incentive than lottery tickets or Uber rides. Heck, Congress has already spent $3 trillion; $40 billion to pay 100 million people to get vaccinated is chicken feed by comparison.
The mask-shamers are going to be rather annoyed. So hard to identify the malcontents and deplorables now. I saw 6 of them today in my grocery store!!!! I had a good mind to walk up and scream at them for following the science and CDC. The shamer’s new complaint is now knowing who is vaccinated, but it is the unvaccinated who should be worried about that.
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Yes, I think literal cash would be the best incentive. A pile of money sitting at the vaccination table, no strings attached, no rebate forms to fill out. Sticking the vaccination table right next to the beer aisle might be best, but they can play with that placement as desired. I really believe they need to get a little more low brow here. Innovate.
Tom Scharf,
Two words: Equine excrement.
There is precisely nothing we can do to prevent this, or any other type of mutation in the wild. We likely already suspected that something like this was true. But actually creating such a virus in a lab, even with level 4 security, which probably wasn’t the case, just for confirmation is beyond stupid.
Tom Scharf (Comment #202209)
“I Think literal cash would be the best incentive.â€
Hummm…I could use some cash. Unless there is a master data base, I could make the rounds and get multiple vaccination. That would have the added benefit of increasing the vaccination percentages. Lets see…3 county locations, 3 pharmacies, and let’s not forget the free clinic. Could probably get cash from 6-10 locations with in 30-45 min drive.
TOm “I haven’t really seen a reasonable defense of why this research should be done. The best I have heard is a theory that it allows them to develop vaccines faster, which at this point seem to be complete BS. As of now they just don’t talk about it, and the media isn’t asking any hard questions. Can they point to something where this tech has been useful?â€
–
I thought he was going to hit me so I hit him first is a reasonable post facto excuse.
Why should it be done?
Because it it is there.
Better and different vaccines have been developed.
Viruses (modified) are probably the best way currently for genetic engineering and replacement/ removal of deleterious genes.
Etc.
The future beckons.
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Dewitt/Tom
Like we didn’t already know a human H5N1 pandemic might be able to occur if mutations to the virus happen? Duh. The virus mutating and jumping entire species is known to occur.
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The current vaccines don’t seem to have been developed based on GOF research. They were developed based on the virus that was circulating.
angech (Comment #202212): “Because it it is there.”
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That is not a rational reason for doing something that might have a negative consequence on society.
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angech: “Better and different vaccines have been developed.”
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Not as a result of gain-of-function research.
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angech: “Viruses (modified) are probably the best way currently for genetic engineering and replacement/ removal of deleterious genes.”
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Irrelevant to gain-of-function research.
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The issue is not virology or genetics research. It is the specific madness of gain-of-function research. I agree with Tom and many (most?) virologists: There is no reasonable defense of why that research should be done.
angech
The future always beckons (whether we like it or not!). That’s not a good argument for gain of function research!
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GOF research has only one real function, biological warfare. Anything else put forward as a reason for doing it is merely hand waving or barely disguised greed. It should be strictly banned by any rational biological warfare treaty. It’s little different than a civilian lab doing research on newer and better nerve gases.
I just read of a case where someone who had been infected and recovered, was vaccinated and now tests positive for the virus. I realize this is just one case, but it has me rethinking my plan to get vaccinated. My thought is that those who get reinfected by the virus after recovering from another infection may have a defect in their immune systems. That would mean that vaccination won’t help.
It’s still really annoying that the authorities still don’t recognize that infection and recovery is almost certainly more effective at preventing another infection than any vaccine. Thus we keep getting these idiotic stories that we will never reach herd immunity because not enough people are getting vaccinated.
*sigh*
“Testing positive” is not the same thing as sick. It has long been unclear as to just what it means.
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Re the discussion about getting more people to get vaccinated: Speaking for myself, all they have to do is to remove unnecessary barriers. Trying to get vaccinated here is hideous.
The difference between GOF on dangerous viruses and bioweapons research is subtle at best. Perhaps this is the intent.
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The thing about bioweapons research is even if you do successfully ban the practice nobody forgets how to make them once they have been discovered/invented. It’s like promising to not build more atomic bombs after you have demonstrated the ability.
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When the Soviet Union collapsed there were a bunch of bioweapons engineers who hadn’t been paid for months looking for jobs and countries like Iran and North Korea more than willing to pay. I don’t know that any of that technology was transferred but the fact that these guys knew how to do it is undisputed. Weaponized, aerosolized, and genetically modified smallpox was produced by the ton. I don’t even like thinking about that. In theory it was all destroyed. Terrorist groups have made fumbling attempts at bioweapons but have not been successful for the most part.
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As biotechnology becomes cheaper and more accessible it may become inevitable that a nasty event awaits (aka The Future). I am not convinced that biosecurity is taken seriously enough, of course that is predictable and easy to say coming out of a pandemic. It’s not clear North Korea or other bad actors can be stopped from doing this no matter what.
In the good news column, the 7 day rolling average of cases just dropped to 34.5K, this is lower than the minimum after the second wave. We are now at the lowest rate in 11 months and still declining at ~30% every two weeks. Only 3 states have increasing rates and they are at low baseline levels. It would seem when vaccination first doses hit around 40% the virus started collapsing. This is consistent with the UK and Israel. Deaths, although stubbornly high for whatever reason, seem to be following the recent downward trajectory of hospitalizations. All good.
Tom Scharf,
“Deaths, although stubbornly high for whatever reason, seem to be following the recent downward trajectory of hospitalizations.”
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That trend in deaths exactly parallels the trend in stubborn elderly people who refuse vaccination. If they were 30, then nobody would care, for they would suffer but not die. But they are not 30, and sadly, many will indeed die for no reason except being stubborn.
I know more than a little about aerosol particles. About a year ago, I looked at some papers on droplet and aerosol transmission of the Wuhan virus and found them very confusing, until I realized that the authors don’t know anything about physics.
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Seems I was right. Here is a pretty good, if somewhat meandering, article on the subject:
https://www.wired.com/story/the-teeny-tiny-scientific-screwup-that-helped-covid-kill/#intcid=_wired-category-right-rail_a22e72b1-b4f0-4e59-9bd8-9fd8cfaba611_popular4-1
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Ventilation and/or air filtration is key. The 6 foot rule is ridiculous and obsessive disinfecting does not much help; plastic barriers do nothing. It does not say much about masks, but it seems that it is really only N95 masks that should have much effect.
BTW,
I am now in the PRM (Peoples Republic of Massachusetts), and even here there is growing reluctance to conform with mask mandates. I saw an elderly woman walking in the supermarket today without a mask! Lord help us and save us, for the devil himself has surely arrived on Earth!
I’m sure it’s an exaggeration to say plastic barriers and mask do nothing. It’s a bit much to characterize it as “ridiculous”.
Even if tranamission is by aerosols, dilution is useful. People breathing directly into faces has the potential of delivering a nearly undiluted dose. So masks resulting in lowered momentum of the plume and increased entrainment would be beneficial.
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That said: the idea that they provided extremely good protection based on the whole “drops fall within 6 feet” was not well founded. But we knew that at the time. There we had discussion of that here and elsewhere.
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Protection with masks is not perfect. That doesn’t mean suggesting them or even advising them is “ridiculous”.
I would add: Lat march- early summer the only quick fix for buildings was ventilation. (In some cases, that wasn’t even possible.)
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Building operators can’t just re-configure for different filters. Even last February the studio owner at one of the studios I haunt asked Jim and me our opinion. The building owner couldn’t just put in Hepa filters and there was a maxium air flow. (Her studio has windows though! Yay!)
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The standard filters available to homeowners were not highly filtering. By summer, the supply of home furnace filters at Lowes and Home Depot. At this point, people who have control of their own furnance or AC in high rise apartments can put in better filters. But that was difficult last fall.
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I advised my sister to crack a window if she felt her high rise didn’t have enough venitillation. Yeah, you pay money to heat the air that infiltrates, but that’s how you get more changes of air.
lucia (Comment #202224): “I’m sure it’s an exaggeration to say plastic barriers and mask do nothing. It’s a bit much to characterize it as “ridiculousâ€.
Even if tranamission is by aerosols, dilution is useful. People breathing directly into faces has the potential of delivering a nearly undiluted dose.”
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I suppose I could have been more careful in my wording. If you are in the same room as other people for any length of time, plastic barriers do next to nothing. If the person on the other side of the barrier coughs or sneezes in your direction without covering the cough or sneeze, the barrier should help. How often does that happen? So I should have said “next to nothing”.
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How often does somebody breathe directly into your face, so that you can feel their breath on your skin? People you live with don’t count. So you want to avoid cocktail parties or crowded bars where you might want to talk to someone in the presence of a lot of ambient noise.
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Cloth masks do almost nothing to stop small particles.
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Putting all that effort and money into ventilation/filtration or stand alone air purifiers would have been far more effective.
MikeM.
I mostly see these in front of cashiers running cash registers. I don’t know if this qualifies as the situation where you think they do nothing, but I suspect they do “something”. They are likely a benefit for the cashier and the customer.
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Sneezing isn’t the only problem. Diluting jets for breathing and talking is likely useful. I don’t see this as “next to nothing”. YMMV.
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Well… honestly… every night. But I guess you think people I live with don’t count.
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But, I haven’t said it has to be that close. A respired plume not being diluted to close to ambient is enough to be a problem relative to breathing in ambient air..
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Perhaps not. But they can do a lot to reduce momentum of a plume or jet and can result in dilution over shorter distances. Also: No says there is no transmission by large particles. The idea at this point is that it’s not only from lage particles.
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That’s not what the MIT article on concentrations in rooms and likely exposure suggested. It assumed masks do act as filters– but aerosols do remain. So it’s suggesting filters and ventillation in addition to masks.
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Beyond that: “all that money?” What trove of money are you suggesting could have been spent on filters instead of “something”. Also, how could filters and hardware have been rolled out fast? And where? These are to some extent real questions, but mostly, you just seem to be flinging stuff out there. Many business places could not install better filters quickly. Many could not increase ventilation quickly. Maybe in some universe somewhere, these “money” could have been spent on all this HVAC hardware, or buildings to be modified to take out all the large display windows that don’t open and put in windows that open. But it’s unlikely any of this could have been done quickly.
Mike M,
“Cloth masks do almost nothing to stop small particles.”
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Of course, this has been true since January 2020. (N95 masks would make a difference, of course, but that is not the issue.) Faced with a scary pathogen, our betters at CDC determined that masks were helpful to frighten the unwashed masses. The utility of masks is (until now) utterly unproven. The point of masks is, I guess, to give some people a feeling that they are protecting themselves from all the unmasked/unwashed evil citizens who voted for Trump. Which is garbage, of course, but which made people of the left feel better. Idiot politicians (Wittmer, Cuomo, et al) took advantage of garbage claims about masks to make sure people could not return to normal behavior, even when they should have.
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Fortunately, the mask hysteria will end soon. Wittmer is toast.
The drive toward energy efficiency in HVAC (lower bills, global warming, etc.) over the past few decades has setup the opposite of what is needed here. Energy efficiency is recirculated air and running the fans as little as possible. Better filters are less efficient.
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None of this is news, but simple things like running the fan always, using higher quality air filters, not recirculating air, and opening windows anyway have never made it to the serious recommended list of actions, at least as far as the media goes. The CDC page is here:
Ventilation in Buildings
https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/community/ventilation.html
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I’m not aware that sufficient research was even ever performed. Did anyone ever actually test this (CDC: The risk of spreading SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, through ventilation systems is not clear at this time.) This is kind of crazy. Just go into buildings and scrape the filters and test them. Do something. I also wondered if roadways aren’t chock full of dispersed covid.
Tom
Yes. There are other ways to achieve energy efficiency, but at a cost. The cost wasn’t seen as worth it.
Lucia,
“Yeah, you pay money to heat the air that infiltrates, but that’s how you get more changes of air.”
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Except that is not strictly true. Yes, if you just open a window, you pay to heat the cold incoming air. But any normal system of air replacement has counter-current heat exchange (exiting air against incoming air), making the cost of air interchange very much lower.
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I imagine that future domestic AC designs will increase air exchange rates, at minimal energy costs.
Masks might make a difference, but what is missing is definitive evidence that this is the case. I have only looked a couple times at alleged evidence and it was thin gruel. States with mask mandates had 2% lower cases than states without mandates and such. To the extent that they do work, the efficacy is likely overstated (mostly because the efficacy is actually never stated at all, but just asserted). However they are simple and not very much of an imposition, so beyond politics it isn’t a very big deal.
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How about asking people who test positive whether they wear masks and tabulate the results? Obvious. I’m guessing this has already been done and the results weren’t satisfactory for the narrative so they buried it.
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The best evidence for masks + social distancing being effective is that the flu was virtually eliminated the past year. Maybe they work great for the flu and not so great for covid. I also guess that better fitting masks, better designed (these things are really crap, can’t we get Elon Musk on this?) would improve results. The masks have huge holes in them if they aren’t well fitted N95’s. Air entry and exit will go to the area of least resistance.
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Also it is counter intuitive that if most spread is at home the experts just totally ignore wearing masks at home. So even the experts draw somewhat arbitrary lines for convenience, different people have different lines.
SteveF
Yes. The cost is putting in the heat exchangers to do it. It can be done. In the past, they didn’t spend on that. I agree with you they will likely do it in the future.
Tom,
I agree there is no definitive evidence masks helped. Even the flu vanishing could just be the greater social distancing. Lots of people everywhere holed up. (Though perhaps not in Australia. Is the flu gone there too? I’ll need to look that up.)
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But there is also no evidence they don’t help nor that the idea they could help is “ridiculous”. I anticipate more fresh air and better filtering in future HVAC.
Lucia,
Lucia, Home air quality improvement… My two AC systems were not designed for high efficiency [HEPA MERV 13] filters and using them caused an unacceptable reduction in airflow across the evaporator. Now I use two DIY HEPA filters that cost about $40 to make. It really helps. They are noisy so I have Alexa run them when we are not nearby [Upstairs daytime and downstairs nighttime]. Materials: 20×20 MERV 13 filter, 20×20 boxfan and a smart plug. Here’s a video from Wirecutter: https://youtu.be/YnIvLBe6xUE and Test results from University of Michigan: https://youtu.be/kH5APw_SLUU
I told a dance studio owner about those. I told her they work but they look hideous and she wouldn’t want them on the dance floor.
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Fortunately, her studio is in a much older building (pre-energy efficiency). She could opt for opening windows that run around waist height on both sides of the studio. So that room has great cross ventillation. From March-now the windows have been open during every party I’ve gone to. (I don’t know what they’ll do in late June/July. It will get hot. But by then maybe we’ll have 70% vaccinated in Illinois.)
Lucia,
Flu rates are near zero in Australia and New Zealand, but not common colds, which remain, well, common. Two things may explain this:
1) Flu is highly seasonal, so stopping virtually all international travel prevented the arrival of flu carriers (as well as covid carriers, of course); common colds are not so seasonal, and are always being being passed around in the general population.
2) Rhinoviruses are known to be efficiently spread by hand contact.
Tom Scharf (Comment #202232): “The best evidence for masks + social distancing being effective is that the flu was virtually eliminated the past year. Maybe they work great for the flu and not so great for covid.”
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Multiple studies have been done on masks to reduce the spread of flu. None have ever given a statistically significant result. Taken together, they indicate a probably small effect, something like a 20% reduction.
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But there are all sorts of things that can reduce the effectiveness. The masks might not be worn properly. They are probably not replaced with sufficient frequency. That would be at least once per hour since material collected on the mask builds up and can be resuspended. They might not be handled properly, resulting in transfer of pathogen from mask to hands to face. And of course cloth masks don’t work nearly as well.
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A study was done where surgical masks were loaded on the inside with easily detectable particles. Then before the wounds was closed, they looked for those particles in the wound and found lots of them.
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Another study did mock operations in an operating room after the air was fully filtered, then ventilation was turned off. Aerosol loading increased toward ambient values in tens of minutes (going on memory here).
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And then there is the compensation effect. Safety precautions cause changes in behavior. If perceived reduction in risk is much greater than actual reduction (as is clearly the case with masks), then overall risk can actually increase.
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Masks are not without health consequences. The net effect of people masking up has almost surely been detrimental.
A n old and revealing story on the media coverage of Israeli / Palestinians The Atlantic reran today. This has been rather obvious to me for decades but it also directly relates to the media crisis to come after 2014.
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2014: What the Media Gets Wrong About Israel
https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2014/11/how-the-media-makes-the-israel-story/383262/
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“I mention these instances to demonstrate the kind of decisions made regularly in the bureaus of the foreign press covering Israel and the Palestinian territories, and to show the way in which the pipeline of information from this place is not just rusty and leaking, which is the usual state of affairs in the media, but intentionally plugged.”
“This helps explain why a reader looking at articles written by the half-dozen biggest news providers in the region on a particular day will find that though the pieces are composed and edited by completely different people and organizations, they tend to tell the same story.”
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I cannot remember seeing any pictures of Palestinians with guns or in the act of firing rockets for probably 10 years now in normal coverage. It’s really slanted. A lot of this is the rules of press engagement under Hamas or Hezbollah, but they should openly acknowledge that in their writing.
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I can’t find it now, but they caught someone in Lebanon I think walking around placing children’s toys on top of the very recently bombed out rubble of buildings. A lot of those pictures were showing up in the media a long time ago but they generally don’t fall for that anymore.
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All the coverage is suspect here, and it’s pretty uninteresting.
A lot of people do not realize that the Palestinian terrorists deliberately use civilians as a human shield. Or that the Israelis always warn civilians in a targeted area to clear out before taking out the target.
Mike M,
“A lot of people do not realize that the Palestinian terrorists deliberately use civilians as a human shield. Or that the Israelis always warn civilians in a targeted area to clear out before taking out the target.”
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A news organization explaining those things would be counter to the left’s narrative (Israel is evil) and counter to the left’s desired outcome: Israel ceases to exist, or just becomes an Arab country when tens of millions of Palestinian descendants are given “the right of return”. The “right of return” is a bit like slavery reparations I think.
MIkeM
My mask reminded me of risk.
Has anyone else seen Saudi Arabia’s plan for green hydrogen? The plan is to use solar panels to generate electricity, use the electricity to separate water into hydrogen and oxygen, take the hydrogen and use the Haber process to convert it to ammonia, liquefy and ship the ammonia to, say, Germany where it would be converted back to hydrogen at the site. I’d really like to see an analysis by an independent chemical engineer. It looks like pie in the sky to me. The capital investment is going to be enormous and shipping isn’t going to be cheap. The overall energy efficiency seems likely to be low as well.
https://gcaptain.com/saudi-hydrogen-export-market/
The roof of the AP building in Gaza had at least five antennae on it. There were at least two dozen communication cans on these towers including analog, microwave and satellite equipment. The Israelis dropped two bombs and put an aircraft and pilot at risk. From the videos, each bomb had two charges, an initial explosion and a second one about three seconds later. These were sophisticated, accurate guided munitions…. very expensive and very hard to manufacture.
The AP staff were given an hour to leave. The AP is professing that they expended these weapons to intimidate some journalists. Idiots! The AP is deluding itself or lying.
Russell
I wouldn’t care if they did intimidate journalists. They are in a war zone.
I read this
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2021/05/15/israel-airstrike-destroys-associated-press-office-gaza/5115746001/
Repeated calls to stop the attack? Do journalists think they get to tell one side to stop attacks? The calls for time were evidendently to save valuable equipment. Equipment can be replaced. That’s no reason to let people who aren’t journalists get away. (Many probably did anyway.)
It’s a war zone. Loss of equipment is the cost of doing business for journalists.
Dozens of residents. Who were they? Israel says Hamas was in the building. The AP says they, uhmm, don’t know. Well, maybe they don’t know. But too bad.
On this
Well, good for the Israelis. Counter intelligence is acceptable. My dad worked in counter intelligence in the Korean war.
If the press doesn’t know counter intellgence exists, they are idiots. If they pass on info to Hamas for whatever reason, well too bad for Hamas and the press.
DeWitt,
The round-trip efficiency will be poor. Electrolysis might reach 80% with the most efficient hardware (not cheap!), the Harber process is (in theory) exothermic, but in fact uses a lot of electricity to run compressors, so maybe the ammonia gets made at about 50-55% net efficiency. Subtract a couple of % for transportation. Conversion of ammonia to hydrogen is endothermic…. so more energy in, and of course, there will be much less than 100% efficiency in turning the hydrogen into motive power or electricity. I would be shocked if the overall efficiency reached 30% (power out less total power in divided by total power out). The only way the process makes economic sense is if the per KW value of solar and wind generated electricity is very close to zero…. which it is not, of course. Then there is the issue of intermittent production of electricity…. large chemical processes always run continuously….. hard to see a good match to solar and wind.
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BTW, I was underwhelmed by the reporting in your linked article….. the reporter obviously knows nothing about the economics of chemical plants.
Lucia,
I assume Hamas commandeered (perhaps surreptitiously) some of that communication equipment on the roof. The Israelites probably have records of the transmissions. That evidence should convince even President Biden that the building had to go. He has been quiet since he spoke with Netanyahu.
Russell,
I tend to believe the Israels knew Hamas was in the building. I tend to believe the AP wants plausible deniability. The degree to which they check is desultory. So “to their knowledge” there is no Hamas in the building.
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I tend to believe Al Jazeerah absolute, positively knew Hamas was in the building.
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Look: if you are in a war zone and have a building that might give cover to a somewhat underground group, you should at least be aware they might be in there. If that underground group is conducting a war, you might have to leave at little notice. OR, you might get bombed with no notice.
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As far as I’m concerned the journalists are lucky they got any notice at all. You get notified: Get the f*** out. Grab what you can, but get the f*** out.
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I mean: earthquakes don’t give notice. You can’t tell a hurricane to stop. You can’t tell an earthquake to give you 15 more minutes. Get the f*** out.
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Don’t pretend you have a right to just stick around when you know you might be being used for cover. “Oh. I’m a news agency but ‘to the best of my knowledge…'” that’s just lame-o.
The reason Hamas was in the building is just as likely to be because foreign press was in the building, to allow cover. I don’t fault them for that really, they are trying to survive in the conditions they are dealt and they have a distinct disadvantage. Why the foreign press continuously gives these people a free pass on their activity is beyond me. Running to the fainting couches over civilian deaths in Gaza while you watch thousands of barely guided missiles being fired right under your nose without any moral comment is cognitive dissonance of the highest order. It is noteworthy that hundreds of these missiles fall short and land in Gaza.
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Stop firing missiles and you will stop being bombed. Everyone knows this, with the possible exception of the media. Perhaps it is even justifiable to hold Israel to a higher standard, but they are not holding Hamas to any standard whatsoever, which ends up being counterproductive to achieving some sort of stalemate. As it sits now, Israel has to mow the jihadi grass every few years and I don’t see this changing any time soon.
This is what I am talking about, see the lead picture here:
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/16/world/middleeast/israel-gaza-hamas-civilian-casualties.html
“Graphic video footage showed Palestinian medics stepping over rubble that included children’s toys and a Monopoly board game as they evacuated the bloodied victims from the pulverized building.”
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In an incredible feat of physics, a baby bed stands undamaged in front of a destroyed house. It’s not even dirty! After a bombing. Strangely everything around it is destroyed or covered in debris. The sorrowful boy walking in front is a nice touch. Kudos to the “photographer” for being there at just the right moment. Pulitzer Prize material. This is just run of the mill propaganda but news organizations need to get a clue.
That’s one pristine pink baby bed!!!
Tom,
I don’t entirely fault Hamas for being in the building. I fault “the press” for feigning utter ignorance of either their presence or their likely presence. Even if borg AP mind doesn’t entirely know, they have to be aware that Hamas might be in the building.
Expecting the Israli’s to stop and not bomb because “The AP” claims to “not be aware” is ridiculous. After all, the AP can’t both claim to be sophisticated, informed news reporters and also be yokels who just fell off the turnip truck yesterday.
(I do blame Hamas somewhat. Using civilians as cover is hardly noble. But the AP? These can hardly claim to be some sort of helpless, hapless uninformed people who just didn’t know they were being taken advantage of!)
Tom Sharf. https://photographylife.com/what-is-composition-in-photography
Does anyone else remember the CNN hoopla about a picture of a bombed out building in Iraq ….. there was a perfect sign on top of the rubble that said. “Baby Milk Plant†in English! https://www.newsbusters.org/blogs/nb/geoffrey-dickens/2017/06/14/cnn-decades-fake-news
Well, I haven’t seen this before.
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Washington Post 2011: A flu virus risk worth taking
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/a-flu-virus-risk-worth-taking/2011/12/30/gIQAM9sNRP_story.html
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This is an op-ed that supports gain of function research. You will recognize the main author, some guy named Fauci.
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“The question is whether benefits of such research outweigh risks. The answer is not simple. A highly pathogenic bird flu virus transmissible in humans could arise in ways not predicted by laboratory studies. And it is not clear whether this laboratory virus would behave in humans as it does in ferrets. Nonetheless, new data provide valuable insights that can inform influenza preparedness and help delineate the principles of virus transmission between species.”
“Along with support for this research comes a responsibility to ensure that the information is used for good. Safeguarding against the potential accidental release or deliberate misuse of laboratory pathogens is imperative. The engineered viruses developed in the ferret experiments are maintained in high-security laboratories. The scientists, journal editors and funding agencies involved are working together to ensure that access to specific information that could be used to create dangerous pathogens is limited to those with an established and legitimate need to know.”
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One can see why he is rather defensive on the lab release questions given this prior public stance.
Tom Scharf,
“One can see why he is rather defensive on the lab release questions given this prior public stance.”
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I am tempted to just say Fauci is an idiot, but it is more complicated than that. His biggest problem is that he has consistently displayed very poor judgement when it comes to technical issues. That may be related to his second problem: he is basically a politician, for whom technical accuracy (and simple honesty about facts!) are far less important than political expediency. When history finally (probably not for decades) shows the pandemic was caused by a laboratory escape, the long dead Fauci will look bad. Unfortunately, that doesn’t keep us from suffering his poor judgement today.
lucia,
An unanswered question about GOF experiments is still: What are you going to do with the data? AFAICT, it’s only use is to create more Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt. I have never seen mentioned a practical use, other than biological warfare, for the data. Btw, I use ‘experiment’ and ‘data’ rather than research and information because I don’t think it qualifies as research. There is no way they can absolutely guarantee that one of these engineered bugs won’t escape from the lab. The more labs doing this, the more likely there will be an escape.
Until an intermediate animal vector is found, and I’m not holding my breath, the working hypothesis should be that SARS-CoV-2 was created at the WIV by GOF experiments.
Tom Scharf (Comment #202255) quoting Fauci: “new data provide valuable insights that can inform influenza preparedness”.
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That barely rises to the level of vague. The defenders of gain of function always claim that it will help against future pandemics but never explain how.
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Fauci: “and help delineate the principles of virus transmission between species.”
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Superficially more specific, but it still does not explain how that is of benefit.
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Fauci fought against the GoF research moratorium. It is not at all difficult to imagine that he knowingly supported the EcoHealth subterfuge to fund such research in China.
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Fauci is a very talented bureaucrat, but his bad judgement is nothing new. Back in the 1980’s, he skillfully brought almost all federal support for AIDS research under his control at NAIAD. He directed almost all of that toward finding the unicorn of an AIDS vaccine rather than finding therapeutics. Eventually, the private sector developed therapeutics, but government support for such research would have helped to speed up the process.
Dewitt,
I also haven’t heard any obvious practical uses. If we look at the Fauci quote above, this isn’t a “practical use”
“inform” and “delinate principles” are just “we can learn things!” Well, yes. But mostly, it looks like we can learn things that help us do biological warfare. Heck, we can actually use that knowledge for that purpose.
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“delinating the principles of virus transmissions between species” doesn’t stop or slow the process of natural jumps between species. It also doesn’t help us create the vaccine for the mutation that actually occurs. It also doesn’t seem to help us create a vaccine that target the proteins that happen to not mutate which might make it possible to have a vaccine that works for all variants.
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“provide valuable insightshat can inform …. preparedness ” is proposal speak for “we haven’t figured out how to use the insights”.
The article is behind a pay wall. But “preparadeness” means what exactly? If it meant “we can develop vaccines for variants that might get out of the labs after we make them” may be true. But it’s unlikely we’d need them otherwise. And we all know we still need a year between first making the vaccine and finally rolling it out to the public.
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You aren’t don’t to have even phase 0 trials before the virus is “out there”. You can test vaccine platforms without creating a new variant.
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I’m not seeing much use for GOF (other than biological warfare.) Granted, some benefit might arise. Sometimes they do. But this looks mostly dangerous.
Given this prior stance, Fauci has a conflict of interest in judging the merit of a GOF lab escape in Wuhan. If that hypothesis turned out to be true then Fauci’s credibility and professional judgment will be rightfully called into question, and it could be ruinous to his career. I’m not particularly interested in his opinion on this subject given his likely prejudice. There isn’t anything at the moment for him to recuse himself from, but he is not an independent actor on this subject.
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Here is a further fleshing out on the recent letter in Science, it’s pretty interesting.
https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/05/13/1024866/investigation-covid-origin-wuhan-china-lab-biologists-letter/
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“Lipsitch has previously estimated the risk of a pandemic caused by accidental release from a high-security biolab at between 1 in 1,000 and 1 in 10,000 per year, and he has warned that the proliferation of such labs around the globe is a major concern.
Even though Chinese scientists have said no such leak occurred in this case, the letter writers say that can only be established through a more independent investigation.”
“We felt motivated to say something because science is not living up to what it can be, which is a very fair and rigorous and open effort to gain greater clarity on something,†he says. “For me, part of the purpose was to create a safe space for other scientists to say something of their own.â€
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This is particularly interesting:
“If China doesn’t assent to a new probe, it’s unclear what form a further investigation would take, or which countries would participate, Relman acknowledges. Still, he believes the new letter could give useful cover for Democrats and the White House to join the questioning about the origin of covid-19.”
Maybe 10% of seaworld, orlando, visitors wearing masks.
I’m not interested in Fauci’s opinion on anything given how he has lied so often.
He can be prosecuted for perjury with his answers to Congress about this research.
DaveJR,
If you have been vaccinated, then you really don’t need to wear a mask (ever). If you have not been vaccinated, then I think you have made a grave mistake, but I wish you luck…. an N95 mask will provide some protection. Either way, masking is soon going to end….. except in a few lefty states.
I’m fully Pfizer vaccinated and a fair number of years below the more vulnerable age range! Just thought it would be of interest to know that the rules have already collapsed there. Weird that on International Drive I see a fair number of people wearing masks on the street though.
DaveJR,
“Weird that on International Drive I see a fair number of people wearing masks on the street though.”
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Fear is a very strong but strange motivator. Fear seems to short circuit rational thinking, leading to behaviors which can most generously be described as very odd. There is zero reason to walk International Drive in Orlando wearing a mask. There are no mask regulations remaining in Florida. Some private enterprises continue to insist on masks within their premises, but as of last week (when I left Florida) that was rapidly falling. In Massachusetts (where I am now) there is almost hysterical uniform insistence on mask wearing most everywhere. Which is very odd when you consider the total deaths per million population is much higher in Massachusetts than in Florida…. the rational view is that mask hysteria doesn’t make much difference. But insisting on masks is, sadly, not rational.
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The mask madness will only end when enough people just refuse to wear masks.
I was sitting in my living room this morning looking out the window and here came a person who looked fairly young walking by himself…wearing a mask. What a maroon!
I’m not seeing people walking outdoors with masks on. I still wear it in the grocery store.
People were mostly not wearing them at one of the studios where I take lessons. They are wearing them at the studio where Jim takes his lessons. (I go to Jim’s lesson once a week. So I take lessons there too.)
The owner at the “Jim lessons” studio is asking people to bring in cards to see what fraction are vaccinated so she can decide what to do about people changing partners in group lessons. (Private lessons really don’t matter all that much. It’s sort of up to the private teacher to decide. Jim, our teacher and I were the only ones in the room during Jim’s private lesson.)
The change in mask policy at the CDC came just as the owner of the studio was coming back from having her baby who was born a month ago. She suspects most people who come have gotten vaccinated, but I told her I know one in particular is not. (She is very anti-vax on her facebook and claims to have allergies that prevent her from getting vaccinated. But given her facebook posts, I think she wouldn’t get one allergies or not.)
Those of you who were following this… My wife’s brother died. He had gradually been getting better. He was moved out of ICU, developed pneumonia after three days and died two days later. Thanks for all your concern. Just a reminder, he had been vaccinated but developed Covid anyway.
I’m so sorry to hear that.
Sorry for your loss and that of your wife.
Sorry to hear that. A long protracted death is a really hard death for everyone involved.
4 months later, the Capital Police try to explain their propaganda on Officer Sicknick after demands from Congress:
https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/capitol-police-defend-press-release-sicknick-died-injuries-riot
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“We can assure you, however, that when we released our press statement on January 7th, we believed that Officer Sicknick had died from injuries sustained while on-duty after physically engaging with protestors.â€
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“The Capitol Police’s general counsel added that it took the medical examiner “several months of extensive forensic testing and investigation to reach its medical conclusion, supported by an autopsy report, while our press release was issued in the immediate aftermath of the January 6th assault on the U.S. Capitol by violent insurrectionists†and contended that “indeed†the medical examiner’s conclusion “does not mean that officer Sicknick was not assaulted nor that the events at the Capitol did not contribute to his death.†DiBiase also said that Capitol Police “never put out a press release nor made a statement that Officer Sicknick had been assaulted by a fire extinguisher.â€
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They also never denied that fairy tale. He was cremated within a week of his death, so unclear what forensics they were taking months looking at.
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They are still refusing to answer basic questions about why they never updated status and let the “Trump mob killed officer†narrative stay alive for over 3 months when they knew better. As usual the anonymous sources for the fire extinguisher BS were never revealed nor has their been any forthcoming explanation from the NYT how that mistake was made. The autopsy report has never been made public to my knowledge.
One should never attribute to mendacity that which can be adequately explained by incompetence. Given the incompetence that the Capitol Police displayed on Jan. 6, it is just possible to believe that on Jan. 7 they were confused as to what happened to their officer.
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But their failure to correct the statement of Jan. 7 and the rest of the statement by their council proves that they are liars.
Quoting myself, ha ha: “Still, he believes the new letter could give useful cover for Democrats and the White House to join the questioning about the origin of covid-19.â€
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The Atlantic today:
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Don’t Politicize the Lab-Leak Theory
While the Biden administration should defend U.S. scientists against partisan defamation, it has no reason to protect China against the truth, whatever that may be.
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/05/chinese-lab-coronavirus-leak-origin-theory/618911/
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“If you read the responsible American press, you likely first heard of those suspicions only from the reports denouncing and rebutting them. On January 29, 2020, The Washington Post ran a story headlined: “Experts Debunk Fringe Theory Linking China’s Coronavirus to Weapons Research.†When Senator Tom Cotton voiced suspicions in February, The New York Times headlined its report: “Senator Tom Cotton Repeats Fringe Theory of Coronavirus Origins.—
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The hive mind is adjusting, as usual in unison. The NYT also ran an article on the letter in Science a few days ago. You can see from Frum’s take the reluctance to consider this theory is mainly TDS.
Tom Scharf,
Frum is a mindless political hack. I had to hold my nose to read his garbage…. but read it I did. He slants and distorts everything (including facts) to make Trump look bad. Trump doesn’t need any help with that, he looks plenty bad all by himself; Frum’s diatribes just make Frum look bad.
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WRT Fauci: the guy should be in charge of nothing; another political hack.
I stopped reading Frum a while back, he really has a bad case of TDS and the fact that is what still pollutes his writing today speaks for itself. The days of being a successful political writer by shoveling TDS 24/7 are coming to an end. His argument at the end was basically “we need to do political CYA because the lab leak theory might actually come to pass”. He is less interested in the ramifications of GOF than he is of potential damage to the hive mind’s reputation.
And now from the Left Coast:
https://www.wsj.com/articles/california-leftists-try-to-cancel-math-class-11621355858?mod=opinion_lead_pos6
A few of the commenters assert that the framework document doesn’t actually say this, but they don’t back it up with citations. Perhaps their reading comprehension was impaired by going to school in CA.
One commenter said that when he moved from CA in 1958, he had to take remedial courses to catch up. I will second that. I was way behind after going to seventh and eighth grade in CA schools when I went to a private high school in another state. So primary education in CA has been a problem for a long time.
I suspect the commentors who assert the document doesn’t say that are either incredulous that such ridiculousness could be true, which is understandable, but how it escapes notice under the “rightwing conspiracy theory” thought inhibitor meme, or gaslighting what they know to be true. Afterall, teachers are being encouraged to hide this agenda ie by faking the curriculum presented to parents, because they are well aware how distasteful most regular parents will find it.
CA state schools also no longer accept SAT and ACT tests now. It’s not that they are optional, it is that they will not be reviewed under any circumstance.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/15/us/SAT-scores-uc-university-of-california.html
““Today’s settlement ensures that the university will not revert to its planned use of the SAT and ACT — which its own regents have admitted are racist metrics,†said Amanda Mangaser Savage, a lawyer representing the students.â€
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No word on what they will use to judge a students academic ability, although apparently the entire concept of merit and competence are now racist. It’s madness in that state. I await the evidence that SAT math tests are racist. These are mere assertions based on disparate outcomes in test scores. Psychotic.
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Clearly the way to make things equitable is by having no coherent and falsifiable measures of competence but instead allowing opaque judgments by unaccountable people. As some one else said, you don’t get equity by adding fertilizer and water, you only get equity with a lawnmower.
Tom Scharf,
So now, parents who hired SAT/ACT prep will hire subject matter tutors. Kids with subject matter tutors will find their class ranks rise. AND they can do extra curriculars.
Ex-NYT science writer takes a deep dive into the virus origin. Long story short, no easy answer, but lab leak is more viable than initially thought.
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How I Learned to Stop Worrying And Love the Lab-Leak Theory*
https://donaldgmcneiljr1954.medium.com/how-i-learned-to-stop-worrying-and-love-the-lab-leak-theory-f4f88446b04d
It doesn’t matter what selective colleges do, motivated students and parents will check the boxes they are looking for and unmotivated people will lose the race. It’s gotten so ludicrous now that colleges are trying to have no standards at all or make them unknowable to try to even out the process for some kind “better” result.
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Eventually the electorate will put a hard stop to the insanity through forced reforms, as they did with racial preferences in many states. China has fairer college admissions than the US.
DeWitt, VMPI has cited a similar source on their site:
https://www.doe.virginia.gov/instruction/mathematics/vmpi/index.shtml
The paper says that in the fight for equity, people need to give up accelerated math.
“Issues like systemic racism and stereotype threat, challenges with teacher recruitment, training, and retention, and other factors interact with the opportunity and achievement gaps as well. Detracking continues to be “tied to larger social inequities and racial injustice.â€13 Therefore, the goal of detracking will not be realized without working to dismantle the various social, political, and cultural reasons tracking persists. Those that have been privileged by the current system must be willing to
give up that privilege for more equitable schooling.”
The left will accept nothing but equality of outcome. As Marx said: “From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.” And that is the unwavering principle of the left since Marx and Engels. There is no compromise on the left, only insistence, even while the desired outcome is plainly contrary to human nature, and even while that desired outcome has been used to justify millions killed or imprisoned, along with endless poverty and human suffering. Which is why only political power can block the left from instituting their madness. The public must reject crazy ideas like math is inherently racist and math problems don’t need correct answers, and vote out of office politicians who support that kind of rubbish.
The most comprehensive mask effectiveness study I have seen. From Swiss Policy Research. https://swprs.org/face-masks-evidence/?amp&__twitter_impression=true
It votes NO.
How can people who reject objectivity talk about anything being unequivocally false, is what I’d like to know. They don’t appear to understand what the words they are using mean.
Rephrasing, I don’t think one can use words like ‘unequivocal’ without an implicit appeal to an objective standard of reality. It’s just intellectual dishonesty.
“How can people who reject objectivity talk about anything being unequivocally false”
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Exactly, Mark! White supremacy for me, but not for thee. The same goes for stereotypes or anything else they can use as weapons while attacking anyone else for doing the same. The philosophy has no principles because power is the only thing that matters. The only surprise is that the more principled people on the left, people like Fuller, seem to be onboard with such schizophrenic reasoning. I guess they’re kept compliant with the specter of the “far right” and a media complex which feeds these delusions, and dismisses the stated aims and outcomes of these people, even as they vote them into law.
Thanks Dave.
I think math is a particularly good example to take to illustrate. Do bridges unequivocally stand or fall? Do airplanes objectively fly or fall? Obviously they do. Direct consequence of the objective validity of the underlying math.
Power exists. It plainly isn’t the end all be all answer to life the universe and everything.
The Left seems to think that the world of “Harrison Bergeron” is a utopia.
It seems so absurd and preposterous to me we even have to discuss these trivially and obviously false ideas in the first place. It’s like having to have a serious conversation about wether or not Marvel comic superheroes are real.
mark boffil
At least they don’t say it’s objectively false.
Lucia,
But I think they do implicitly.
Unequivocal – leaving no doubt, CLEAR, UNAMBIGUOUS
Objective – of, relating to, or being an object, phenomenon, or condition in the realm of sensible experience independent of individual thought and perceptible by all observers : having reality independent of the mind
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For something to be unequivocal to everybody, I think a necessary precondition / underlying assumption has to be that there is a ‘realm of sensible experience independent of individual thought and perceptible by all observers’. If everything is subjective, nothing can be unequivocal. Or so it seems to me. Do you disagree?
Now, it’s true that I added the ‘to everybody’ part. But I think that’s what the author DeWitt quoted was saying. If not, if that person was saying “The concept of mathematics being purely objective is unequivocally false TO ME, in my own subjective opinion“, then nobody would pay attention to the clown in the first place. I think it’s implied that ‘unequivocal’ meant ‘to everybody’.
Welcome to the club! It’s easy to see why many ordinary people, when confronted with such utter nonsense, would think you’re having a laugh. You sound like a crazy loon even suggesting such things are the claimed serious results of academic research and explicitly stated public policy goals. Of course, they also take steps to obfuscate and camoflage the insanity behind unquestionable words and phrases to avoid scrutiny, while “enhacing” the definitions of each: antiracism (creating racism to counter “racism”), white supremacist (someone who isn’t one of us), white supremacy (things we tell you are forbidden), diverse (not white) etc. I suspect many believe they are fighting against racists, even as they aid them in tieing a noose around their own necks. Others are well aware of the consequences of sticking out of the crowd.
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This stuff is pure social poison. It is custom made to target a liberally diverse country like the US and tear its social bonds apart from within by setting every social group against each other, creating chaos, while destroying any unifying bonds. The democrats are cynically promoting it for their own ends, but it’s a monster that will devour them.
Lucia,
The more I think about it, the more I think the problem goes much deeper than what I tried to lay out. I think for people to be educators in the first place – and underlying that, for people to believe that intentional communication of any sort is possible in the first place, one must implicitly assume ‘realm of sensible experience independent of individual thought and perceptible by all observers’. When I use words to communicate, it is an act based on a belief that the words will be understood, at least to some extent, to mean what I intended them to mean. That they will refer to or identify the same or similar concepts to the listener that they do to me.
I think that the subjective reality idea is just such a dead end that there’s no sense in wasting time on it. One can’t get anywhere without assuming an objective reality common for all of us, assuming otherwise undermines our ability to get anywhere conceptually to such a profound extent that it becomes impossible to plan, communicate, think, — essentially it becomes impossible to use intelligence to live, or do anything at all, if one accepts the subjective reality idea. [Edit: It goes back to Decartes I believe. Fine; one can’t prove there’s not a demon deceiving oneself. It’s not helpful to let that stop you, you just can’t get anyplace assuming that.]
Gah, one last thing. It’s tedious to get the details just so. The reason I think communication depends on objective reality is – when I make word sounds to communicate, I am acting on the belief that the word sound you hear is the word sound I made and also heard; the word sound I believe I made. If reality is subjective, I don’t even have that.
There. I’ll shush now.
mark,
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Many Christians would agree with the statement “Abortion is unequivocally wrong”. Many of them would also claim that is objectively true, but many others would admit that it is a matter of faith.
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I think that is a good analogy for the things that the wokesters say. The orthodox (literally “right thinking”) must agree with them and all who do not are heretics. They won’t come out and say that their positions are a matter of faith since to do so would give away the game.
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Addition: The woke are logical, but it is the logic of power, not the logic of truth.
Mike,
Fair enough. But everybody who makes a statement in the first place implicitly assumes that the people listening hear the same statement that the speaker made. Implicit belief in an objective reality is a hard thing to get around, unless one just wants to sit in the corner and die.
[Edit: I think my original argument has some merit, it just doesn’t go deep enough. I believe people who reject the concept of objective reality have no claim to any certainty about anything beyond ‘Cogito, ergo sum’, and have no business using the word ‘unequivocal’ in general. But the ‘unequivocal’ use problem pales in comparison to the rest of the problems…]
Mike,
I think the difference is that the Christians in question – while having faith in God and admitting that God is a matter of faith, still believe that there is a ‘realm of sensible experience independent of individual thought and perceptible by all observers’ – an objective reality. It’s just that they believe as a matter of faith that God is at the center of that objective reality.
This is much different in my view from not accepting an objective reality at all.
To those who think I am knocking down a strawman and that nobody questions an objective reality, I remind you – we are discussing people who propound the view that there are no right or wrong answers to math problems.
I don’t think I’m knocking down a strawman. I’d like to think that, wish it were so, but I don’t think so.
My take is almost everyone thinks the “math is racist” meme is completely embarrassing, but they don’t challenge their own side as it’s not a fight worth having. The belief is that craziness will die on its own eventually, which it will. Probably, ha ha. They ironically depend on the opposing side to do the dirty work of killing the initiative instead of having a destructive civil war on their side. People will pull their kids out of public school if this ideology really took over. Sane people will take over school boards in areas that care about education.
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If failing school systems want to formally legislate their failure in perpetuity, then so be it, but not my neighborhood. That’s how it will play out, and the education gap will expectedly widen even further. If some communities don’t want police protection, so be it, but I’m not going to live there, and the property values and crime rates will reflect that choice.
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These are whimsical fantasies at fixing deeply embedded social problems. I say let communities experiment with this stuff if they want, but not my community. Every generation needs to learn some hard lessons, namely that some social problems are … very hard. Defund the police isn’t quite working out as expected, but the results were quite predictable to many. Less police, more crime. Duh.
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It is mostly the activist young who so fervently believe that these problems have easy fixes.
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This type of stuff is political gold for the opposing side though, so it gets amplified. “Stop the steal” is also completely embarrassing, and the reaction is similar. Ignore my crazy uncle.
Yeah maybe. But maybe that belief is why the craziness got so widespread in the first place.
They are terraforming. Ironing out all those problematic things which prevent the survival of their doctrine. They want you to replace your reality with their fantasy and faith is not enough. Their first step is to deny your reality has any moral or objective basis to exist. Deconstruction. Then they will fill the vacuum.
Mark,
I agree about unequivocably and objectively. I was trying to be droll. 🙂
I think claiming they are not the same might almost fall in the category of “equivocation”. (Though perhaps not because that’s using the same word as having two meanings. Not denying two words are synonyms.)
Clearly, the are going to avoid saying “objectively false” when they are denying the existence of “objective” reality. It makes the ri-donk-ulousness too obvious.
Lucia,
Would you believe me if I said it finally occurred to me about five minutes ago that you were joking?
Took awhile. Sorry!
Mark,
I think some aspects of “reality” are in some sense subjective. For example: what was someone “intention” when making a joke? I think sometimes even the person making the joke has multiple “intentions” some of which they are more aware of, some of which they are less aware of. Also, was a joke “mean spirited” toward someone? Was a person treated “fairly”. And so on. These can have some aspect of “subjective”.
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People can have different opinions about what is “fair”. They can also have different opinions about when unfairness is unavoidable and what the best choices are in those circumstances.
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Some things are even “arbitrary” and just “the custome”
4 stands for IIII is customary. The word in English is “four”.
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But
II + II = IIII is correct.
II + II = III and II + II = IIIII are both incorrect.
We can prove the correctness of addition using toothpicks.
Lucia;
Ok. I’d say ‘complicated’ and ‘subjective’ get mistaken for each other some, maybe a lot. But it might be that some things are subjective. I’d just add that these subjective are ultimately nested in a very complicated objective reality.
Mark/ Mike
On the issue of the Christians saying “X is unequivocably wrong” (or right):
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Christians can say this without irony or contradiction because they do claim there is objective reality. They also often believe at least some moral rules are themselves objective and not subjective. If they think X falls inside that set of objective moral rules, there is no logical inconsistency in saying something is “objectively right” (or wrong) and also maintaining objective reality exists.
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The irony Mark spotted is that people who claim objective reality does not even exist then decree that their interpretation of reality defines objective reality. This is a logical contradiction.
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Mind you: Christians can be (and I think often are) incorrect in their conclusions about what is, or is not morally wrong, much less “unequivocably wrong” in the moral sense. Some also just ignore counter arguments of even discussion and so persist in their incorrect conclusions. They are then sometimes puzzled why an argument that amounts to stamping your foot and decreeing yourself right doesn’t work. But their claim that something is “unequivocably wrong” is often mistaken in a very obvious way. Among other things, there are often plenty of people who disagree with the claim and can make good arguments for why it is wrong.
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But in math:
II + II = IIII.
There is no good argument for other answers.
DaveJR (Comment #202304): ” Their first step is to deny your reality has any moral or objective basis to exist. Deconstruction. Then they will fill the vacuum.”
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That is the key issue.
Mark is correct that denying objective reality is inane. But whether the reality den!er$ really believe their nattering is not so important. The important thing is *why* they take the positions they do. They seek power. Their chosen path to power is to tear down society so that they can fill the vacuum. They are not clowns. They are evil. And very dangerous.
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Objectively and unequivocally evil. 🙂
This distinction reminds me of psuedorandom numbers on computers. The order is complicated and hard to deduce from the sequence, but of course the numbers aren’t *really* random. Quantum phenomena might *really* be random as opposed to just complicated. But true random is rare I think.
Tom Scharf,
It’s also going to be “Even if in my neighborhood, not for my kids.”
Demand for private schools, home schools, online private schools, online support for home schools will explode. Ironically, the destructive anti-advanced math proposals are coming just as many parents explored things like “learning pods” (which are sort of like in home private schools), online learning and so on.
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This proposal if implemented is not going to turn out well for public school teachers, their unions nor for kids from lower income families. (Though, after kids whose parents have money leave the public schools people may start seeing the wisdom of giving vouchers to the remaining poor kids parents. So, we’ll see.)
Back to other news, hats off to Netanyahu, who refuses to do the ‘significant de-escalation’ or cease fire thing politicians in far away lands are calling for.
From AP :
Hamas is still firing missiles. The military reality as far as I am concerned is that one does not cower behind defenses (Iron Dome) and wait unless there is no choice. Neutralize the threat; destroy the ability of the enemy to make war.
Good for him.
So now we have Critical Math Theory. (I originally ended the sentence with a question mark, but decided a period was actually more appropriate even ignoring the ‘no rhetorical questions’ policy)
Back to COVID: My local news had a feature related to vaccination. the ‘expert’ medical person stated as a fact that infection acquired immunity only lasts three months while vaccination immunity lasts six months. Needless to say, that was an unsupported assertion, a classic argument from authority.
I’m convinced that the reason the (not) experts insist that infection acquired immunity doesn’t last as long as vaccination acquired immunity is that serum antibodies in most cases for infected individuals decline to undetectable in about three months. But the evidence from the rarity of reinfection for periods of over a year is that a high serum antibody titer is not required for immunity. The experts aren’t. And it’s very annoying.
mark bofill,
Given the civilian death toll from our firebombing raids on Germany and Japan, not to mention the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, in WWII, the US and the UK don’t stand on the moral high ground when demanding that Israel cease offensive military operations that have caused limited civilian casualties before Hamas asks for a cease fire and stops their attacks on Israeli citizens.
The bombing pause tactic didn’t work when we tried it in Viet Nam so we shouldn’t expect it to work on Hamas either.
DeWitt,
Yup.
I was musing to myself earlier that Iron Dome may have saved more Palestinian lives than Jews. If not for Iron Dome, Israel could never have tolerated the threat of having thousands of missiles fired against it. I’ve read that of thousands of missiles fired hundreds have gotten through, and those that have gotten through have been plenty destructive enough.
Israel would have been forced to wipe out Hamas long ago, cost in civilian blood notwithstanding, and take whatever steps necessary to prevent their resurgence.
In fact, looked at from that perspective, one might wonder if Iron Dome is actually a good thing. I don’t know.
Btw, enjoying Black Company. Thanks for that.
Trying the Godkiller chronicles. Good read so far!
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Suggest Steven Erikson, Gardens of the Moon series if you don’t mind not being held by the hand, and Will Wright House of Blades series for an easy going, good heros journey, read!
Always on the lookout for books, thanks Dave.
Sorry, but my objective reality says:
II + II = IV
The Israeli vs Hamas rerun is get pretty tiresome. Everyone says the same things and the same things happen. Bulldozing Gaza into the ocean would be an incredibly bad idea, but I imagine Netanyahu ponders that this would only need to be done once. Hamas has 10,000 rockets, but Hezbollah has 100,000. If nuclear arms are going to be used again in the next 20 years the exchange is 98% likely to be Iran vs Israel in my view. At some point Israel will attack Iran because it is their proxy armies doing the fighting here. Because both sides are highly religious it won’t be rational.
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But I agree that if these foes started using effective weapons then the sh** will hit the fan. As of now, these are primarily exercises in getting international attention.
Tom Scharf,
If nuclear arms are going to be used again in the next 20 years the exchange is 98% likely to be Iran vs Israel in my view.”
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Probably right. The Iranian regime is 100% committed to the elimination of Israel. The strange thing (to me strange), is that the Iranians could chios to simply ignore Israel, and not have it be an impediment to progress. I find it strange.
mark bofill,
I’ll second the Steven Erikson recommendation. That’ll keep you busy for a while. There are ten books in the series with a lot more action than in the 13 books in the Wheel of Time series. Richard K. Morgan is also good. His Altered Carbon (Takeshi Kovacs) books were turned into a series on Netflix but only two seasons were produced. I thought they made some bad decisions altering the plot from the three books and there were only two seasons produced. Read the books instead. Morgan also wrote the Cold Commands series which I liked a lot. It’s science fiction, I think, but reads more like dark fantasy. A couple of major characters in that series are homosexual and there are some fairly graphic sex scenes, if that bothers you.
Glen Cook also wrote a lot of other books besides The Black Company series that I liked.
Nursing home vaccination study:
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/19/health/nursing-home-vaccine-nejm.html
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“The study published Wednesday drew from more than 20,000 residents of 280 nursing homes in 21 states. Of those, almost 4,000 were unvaccinated and the rest received either the Pfizer or Moderna vaccines. About 70 percent had received two doses.
The study looked at residents of nursing home that had received at least one dose as of Feb. 15 and anyone at the facilities present on the first day of their vaccination clinic who had not yet been vaccinated as of March 31.
After receiving a first dose, 4.5 percent of residents still contracted the virus, although most cases were asymptomatic, researchers wrote. Of those receiving the second dose, only 0.3 percent got the virus after 14 days.
The benefit carried over to those in the same nursing homes who did not get vaccinated. Their rate of infection dropped to 0.3 percent from 4.3 percent. For all groups, most infections were asymptomatic; and the rate of both symptomatic and asymptomatic infections decreased over time.”
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Some strange results. The unvaccinated were just as protected as the vaccinated in this scenario. I speculate that this means at 70% vaccination these homes were at effective herd immunity.
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Most infections were asymptomatic meaning those who got it were not effective spreaders. What is missing is a comparison of before vaccination and after vaccination case rates.
Thanks DeWitt.
The governor of Massachusetts has ended mask mandates as of May 29. I expect some businesses will continue to insist on masks, but they will probably meet some resistance.
SteveF,
I think resistance to not wearing masks will be futile. Someone posted a comment about her health club not checking for cards while also announcing the vaccinated didn’t have to wear masks anymore. Her complaint was that the unvaccinated would just pretend to wear masks. She really got no support. (Also, she is vaccinated.)
People told her she had choices: wear hers anyway, don’t go, quit the club.
Second Richard Morgan and raise you Neal Asher for some good cyberpunk scifi. Also Iain M Banks Culture books. He sadly passed away fairly recently. Charless Stross does a good lovecraftian crossover with the Laundry Files, although his later books are suffering from politics.
Tom Scharf (Comment #202324): “After receiving a first dose, 4.5 percent of residents still contracted the virus, although most cases were asymptomatic”.
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I don’t believe they can know that. How do you determine that someone has been infected? I think there are just two ways: (1) symptoms and (2) by culturing live virus. No way did they do the latter for tens of thousands of samples.
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Imagine the sort of situation that leads to a superspread event: A bunch of people in a room for an extended time, perhaps laughing or singing, and one of them is presymptomatic and spewing a large amount of virus. Everyone inhales a bunch of virus particles.
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Now test the attendees as they leave the room. They probably all test positive, regardless of immune status. But only one person is infected, the rest have merely been exposed. Some may become infected, others won’t. Those who are immune should all be in the latter group.
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I suspect that if the study Tom cites were to be reinterpreted properly, the results might be rather different. And would probably be very good news indeed, as with other reports of so-called “breakthrough infections”.
Mike M.,
The NEJM letter to the editor is available online. They used PCR and antibody testing, more detail in the SA, which is also available. You might be correct about an immediate test after a mass exposure, but probably not several days after. Nursing homes have internally locked down, if the one where I and my wife have been is representative, so there shouldn’t have been a large group of people in a small room for at least a year.
DaveJR,
The Iain M Banks Culture novels are great. I’ve read the first few Stross Laundry Files novels, but haven’t read the rest. Maybe now I won’t. I haven’t read any Neal Asher. I’ve been bingeing Kindle Unlimited books recently. They’re fun, but not at the level of Glen Cook or Banks.
What I didn’t see in the NEJM piece was information on the immunity status of the staff, nursing and support, of the participating nursing homes.
DeWitt,
Yeah. The staff and support being innoculated could make a big difference. This would be especially true if nursing home patients are being socially distanced from each other so that most infections would be communicated by staff.
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It’s still a bit surprising that the innoculated didn’t do better than the not-innoculated. But the rate of infection really plunged.
The study was good news. The infection rates dropped 10x after full vaccination. I would have thought that the unvaccinated would have done worse especially considering the ~40% unvaccinated rate of the staff. It’s entirely possible that the staff are regularly tested (or were for the study) so that they were effectively prevented from spreading the infection through that way.
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“Residents were tested every 3 to 7 days when there were confirmed cases in their facility and were tested if they had any new symptoms or potential exposure.â€
“Our observation of a reduced incidence of infection among unvaccinated residents suggests that robust vaccine coverage among residents and staff, together with the continued use of face masks and other infection-control measures, is likely to afford protection for small numbers of unvaccinated residents in congregate settings”
There is an exponential rise of masklessness in Florida! I counted 6 people without masks last week in the grocery store and there must have been 25 this week (maybe a quarter of the customers). That’s a doubling time of only 3 days.
Legoland actually has signs up saying fully vaccinated aren’t required to use masks.
I’ve read many of Glenn Cook’s books on Black Company and Garrett, Private Investigator. I find that the Garrett P.I. books are much in the vein of Terry Pratchett’s Discworld. He takes the classic fantasy tropes and twists them around, although not with as much overt satire as with Pratchett.
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I should give Black Company another read. It was nearly forty years ago the first time I read them.
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If it hasn’t been mentioned before, the Harry Dresden books are a lot of fun. Author is Jim Butcher.
The Dresden books were turned into a tv series around 2000. Didn’t last long though. Haven’t read them myself yet.
Earle,
I always thought of the Garrett, P.I.books as being more related to Rex Stout’s Nero Wolfe than the Discworld, with Garrett in the role of Archie Goodwin, Dean Creech as Fritz and the Dead Man as Nero Wolfe.
If you haven’t read The Black Company since The White Rose was published in 1985, you’ve missed several books written later, including a book that fits between The Black Company and Shadows Linger published in 2018 and a yet to be published book.
The Books of the North
The Black Company: May 1984
Port of Shadows: September 2018
Shadows Linger: October 1984
The White Rose: April 1985
The Books of the South
Shadow Games: June 1989
Dreams of Steel: April 1990
The Books of Glittering Stone
Bleak Seasons: April 1996
She Is the Darkness: September 1997
Water Sleeps: March 1999
Soldiers Live: July 2000
Forthcoming novels
A Pitiless Rain, the conclusion of the series, release date undetermined[1]
Spin-offs
The Silver Spike: September 1989 (set after The Books of the North, featuring characters who did not head south)
Speaking of Harry Dresden, I thought they also made some bad choices when adapting it for TV and wasn’t surprised when it was cancelled. I think they’ve done a lot better with The Expanse TV series because they followed the books (also highly recommended) by James S.A. Corey (the pen name for Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck) more closely. I’ve been getting the audiobooks of that series and I was totally hooked after the first part of Leviathan Wakes. The Expanse is pretty hard science fiction, no faster-than-light space ships, but interstellar travel is possible through gates, which reminds me of another series whose name I can’t remember right now.
Speaking of The Black Company, while researching this post I came across a link that Eliza Dushku, Faith in Buffy the Vampire Slayer, is developing a Black Company TV series. My guess is that she may be planning to play The Lady in the series.
Tom Scharf,
“There is an exponential rise of masklessness in Florida!”
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Good. By the time I return to Florida in October I can just throw away my masks. It has gone on way too long.
Leviathan Wakes was really good. The rest of the series was good but slowly declined. One can only take so many “the main character almost died several times but miraculously survived” books in a row. It’s not a surprise that the most successful books made into a video series closely adhered to the book plot. Very closely adhered.
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The recent Hail Mary Project was good. As was Harbinger (another found object plot), and Klara and the Sun (this was very strange but well written).
DeWitt, if you mean a book series with gates, there’s the Hyperion cantos by Dan Simmons.
DaveJR,
It was before the Hyperion Cantos. Somewhat Spoiler alert: The lead character is a woman who has a weapon in the form of a sword with what amounts to a black hole at the tip. Strictly speaking the chief protagonist is a man she recruits. She is traveling through the gates to destroy them, as they actually allow time travel and thus disrupt the stability of the universe. On each world that has a gate, there are actually two, one to enter and one to leave. IIRC, each gate is linked to only one world. The risk, of course, is that as the gates are destroyed by passing through them, you might end up on a world with no exit. I think there were three books and, given the premise, there was no conclusion.
The Morgaine series by CJ Cherryh. Which reminded me of the Death Gate Cycle fantasy series by Weiss & Hickman, which I enjoyed when I read them.
DaveJR,
Yep, that’s it. Thanks.
I liked a lot of CJ Cherryh books, but the Foreigner series became entirely too repetitive and I finally gave up.
SteveF, I live in Sarasota, Florida and I am feeling out of place wearing my mask in most places [Dr. office the exception]. It seems only us decrepit folks with underlying health issues are wearing masks.
Another in the series of “we only want to censor the real Nazis”.
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Inside the Simon & Schuster Blowup Over Its Mike Pence Book Deal
Petition demanded publisher drop potential blockbuster, saying it betrayed company’s promise to oppose bigotry, while CEO defended commitment to broad range of views
https://www.wsj.com/articles/inside-the-simon-schuster-blowup-over-its-mike-pence-book-deal-11621607009
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“During an April workplace-culture session, one of many in the past year held by book publisher Simon & Schuster, topics included how to evaluate proposals from Black or LGBTQ+ authors and how best to promote them.
Not on the agenda, to the frustration of some gathered on the Zoom call, was the company’s recent deal with former Vice President Mike Pence for a memoir of his life in politics and the Trump administration.
Publishing the book, some staffers said at the session, would be a betrayal of the company’s promises to oppose bigotry and make minority employees feel safe.
A petition soon followed, signed by more than 200 staff members, or 14% of the staff, plus about 3,500 outside supporters, including Simon & Schuster authors. It demanded that the company scrap the Pence memoir, part of a two-book deal, and refrain from making any deals with members of the Trump administration. It said Mr. Pence advocated for policies that were racist, sexist and discriminatory, and that publishing the book would be “legitimizing bigotry.—
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Yada, yada, yada. CEO “bravely” pushes back against the activists, as if publishing a book by a VP of the USA is somehow edgy for a major book publisher. SSDD.
I enjoyed the first three Expanse books too. They were a gift to my wife from our nephew. Haven’t yet looked into the later volumes.
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I stopped reading Black Company after The White Rose. I am clearly far behind in my reading!
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It seems I stopped reading when I got married and started raising a family. It’s only in the last few years that I’ve taken the time to pick up the books again. It’s amazing what opportunities arise when you’re recovering from surgery. 😉
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Thanks all for the discussion on books. There have been a lot of books published since Pournelle and Niven were in their prime.
Lucifer’s Hammer!
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Also Footfall and The Motes in God’s Eye were good. I pretty much have worn out the Apocalypse genre, likely not a coincidence I took such interest in the recent pandemic.
Me too. I tried watching the Snowpiercer TV series, but the premise is so utterly ridiculous I finally gave up. I’m willing to accept faster-than-light spaceships, but not massive snowfall when there is no liquid water left on the entire planet’s surface and the air temperature is winter Antarctic plateau level, and that’s not to mention the about as ridiculous explanation of how the temperature got that low in the first place.
China Meiville writes some “interesting” books. One, The Iron Council, has a snowpierceresque plot where rebels steal and escape on a train, tearing up the tracks and relaying them in front to go where they like. Political machinations are the main story. Together with “The Scar”, I wouldn’t be surprised if hallucinogenics were used in the writings.
DeWitt,
Good observation. I think it may have even occurred to me way back when about the similarity to Nero Wolfe, but it was so long ago may be just creating a memory.
DaveJR,
Several China Meiville books are in my library. I don’t remember The Iron Council being one of them. Besides The Scar, I have Perdido Street Station and Kraken, possibly one or two more I can’t remember. The advantage of one’s memory being somewhat less sharp is that you can reread your older books and they’re almost like new. Of course it helps to have over a thousand books in boxes here and there.
It’s somewhat on the Romance side, but I really like Patricia Briggs’ Mercy Thompson and the spinoff Alpha and Omega books with many characters crossing between series. Vampires, the Fae, werewolves (mostly, although Mercy’s other form is a coyote), what’s not to like.
Does anyone know the name of the book series that is set in the Sherlock Holmes universe about a priest trying to ward off demons centered around I think an orphan?
I remember the author’s name as Bell, but not sure.
Early books had the Baker Street irregulars show up.
MikeN,
Are you referring to the Netflix series The Irregulars? AFAICT, that was an original creation rather than a book or book series adaptation. It was cancelled after one season.
Probably not. The books were not centered around the Baker Street Irregulars. However, the fighting off of supernatural elements suggests this might have been a source.
I read these books in either the late 1980s or early 1990s.
It looks like CDC is playing with the data to improve the calculated effectiveness of the vaccine.
Only considering cases that involve hospitalization.
CT count is <=28 for a vaccinated person test, while unvaccinated can have higher cycle count.
Is CT something that is measured, or the number of times a sample is processed during testing?
https://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/covid-19/health-departments/breakthrough-cases.html
Mike N,
I don’t understand your claim. Can you explain why you think considering only hospitalizations improve calculated effectiveness?
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It might do the opposite since people who have been vaccinated might not seek out covid tests when they have mild cases and so mild symptom vaccinated cases might be under counted. If so, including mild cases might over count effectiveness.
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Hospitalization is a bit more concrete at least.
I believe the CDC is only counting hospitalizations as “vaccine breakthroughs”. This could be justified in the sense that vaccines are not prophylactic but also allegedly work at minimizing the seriousness of infections. Either way as long as they count things consistently they can compare groups correctly.
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There is enough data now from multiple studies that I don’t think there is any malfeasance going on.
Tom,
That’s the way I see it. I’m not entirely sure the goal is to calculate “effectiveness”. It’s to see if we start getting “breakthrough” from variants. So they have a method to define what “broke through”.
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If it was testing “effectiveness”, they would definitely have to compare counts using the same CT cutoff. They can do that if reporting forms report that number even if the cuttoff for reporting is different. You just post-process.
Cycle time is the number of PCR amplification cycles. Using a high cycle time gives you more chance of detecting a signal, or producing a false positive, so high cycle numbers wouldn’t make the vaccine look more effective.
Edit: reread and see your point.
MikeN (Comment #202357): “CT count is <=28 for a vaccinated person test, while unvaccinated can have higher cycle count."
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That is a very serious charge. What is your source? I don't see it at the link you provided.
One would assume mask advocates would be eagerly awaiting new case data to prove the efficacy of masks now that the CDC has largely dropped mask wearing advice for most of the country. This is a perfect scenario for science, an almost step change in behavior.
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Obviously all the other forcings still exist and would need to be normalized, an almost impossible task given the political pressure. My point is that I don’t get the sense at all that mask advocates want to know the answer and aren’t confident this will help their cause. A lot of bet hedging happening.
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There have been a few recent articles on the “Neanderthal” thinking in Texas when they dropped mask mandates which resulted in … a big nothing burger after the usual doom and gloom predictions. They are speculating that behavior didn’t actually change blah blah blah. But this is the problem with desperate politically enforced narratives, if the first line of evidence supports your narrative you stop analysis, if it doesn’t then you proceed to second and third level evidence to still be right … somehow.
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However the overall basis of “media science” has failed, they asserted they were an authority, made a prediction, and it failed. This reduces confidence. Repeat that enough times with a clear narrative bias and people stop listening (as they have on climate change).
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The Texas Mask Mystery
When the governor lifted the state’s mandate, liberals predicted disaster. But it never came. Why?
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/05/texas-mask-mandate-no-effect/618942/
My second vaccine shot has wiped me out. Tiredness, chills, fever, nausea; all of it. No urge to eat brains (ugh). Went shooting yesterday, the soreness from my shotgun kicking my right shoulder is nothing compared to the soreness from the shot in the other arm. Funny.
Mark,
Too bad! Get better.
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I know that many are worried about the “long term” effect of the shots. I can report no desire to eat brains has developed so far. I keep monitoring. Just. In case.
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The only side effect from my J&J shot was a bit of a sore arm, barely worth mentioning. Well, I also had some migraine symptoms, but since I get migraines those have an alternate explanation.
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But still it was 3+ hours of my time to get a shot the authorities supposedly want to encourage people to get. And probably another hour to get one of the two shot vaccines. I bet I can think of a way to get more people to take it, without resorting to lotteries or fast food coupons.
MikeM,
I think mine took about an hour and a half including communting. The mass vaccination site I went to was efficient and it was pretty near.
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But yes, time is an issue for some people. I think that might be why the free pizza is working. People go, get a vaccine and have some lunch! 🙂
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“They” are evidently also looking into making sure vaccines are distributed in locations where the vaccination rates are low. Part of the reason they are low is they vaccinations were far away for those people. Imagine having to take a bus!
My vaccinations were set up as timed appointments at Publix (supermarket) pharmacies. Walk in, sit down, get jabbed, wait 10-15 minutes to make sure you don’t collapse, and then go. Couldn’t have been easier.
It took me at least two hours on the internet and phone to get an appointment. Then it still took about an hour at the supermarket pharmacy: waiting in line, waiting for the guy to finish tapping on his computer, filling out yet more forms (redundant with the ones I completed on line), waiting for the jab, then 15 minutes to make sure I did not go into shock.
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Florida sounds better and better.
Thanks lucia.
MikeM,
“The only side effect from my J&J shot was a bit of a sore arm, barely worth mentioning.”
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As they say in Brazil: milagres acontecem.
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I am happy that you have been vaccinated. Now if the 20% of over 65’s who have refused vaccinations in Florida would do the same as you, then the 50+ per day deaths from the virus would drop to near zero.
SteveF (Comment #202371): “Now if the 20% of over 65’s who have refused vaccinations in Florida would do the same as you, then the 50+ per day deaths from the virus would drop to near zero.”
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Perhaps. But the people most likely to die from the virus are the people least likely to be helped by the vaccine. With luck, sufficient vaccination and naturally acquired immunity will cause transmission to collapse. But since nothing else has gone as the experts predicted, I am not betting on it.
Tom Scharf,
WRT the Texas mask mystery: I think it simply shows the utter dishonesty of the woke left: they can’t imagine that they are mistaken about anything. But mistaken they usually are. About everything.
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I watched the PGA golf championship in South Carolina with some bemusement: not a mask in sight among ten thousand players, caddy’s and spectators. The masquerade is finally ending…. and none too soon.
Jim said he noticed they aren’t running the CDC mask or distancing announcement at the grocery store now.
New Mexico has changed its policy so that masks are not required if vaccinated. Effectively, that means not required. The fact that the Governor is finally letting us get some benefit from getting vaccinated is what tipped me far enough to push through the artificial barriers to getting vaccinated.
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Still not much effect where I live. Some stores have signs up requesting people to wear masks and everyone seems to be complying. Others have signs saying mask required if not vaccinated, but of course no enforcement. Some people unmasked, most still masked. At this point, I am going by “when in Rome”. But once I am officially fully vaccinated, the mask goes.
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It seems like a lot more people are not wearing masks outdoors.
Dr. Curry nails it…again! “Collapse of the fake consensus on Covid-19 origins” https://judithcurry.com/2021/05/23/collapse-of-the-fake-consensus-on-covid-19-origins/
Home Depot today was 75% maskless.
What always bothers me are the weird social dynamics at play when a consensus position changes almost overnight based on little more than the “cool kids” frivolously changing their minds based on no new evidence. Shouldn’t there have been a pro and anti lab leak theory groups from the beginning? I think this type of stuff is the result of rigid consensus enforcement on social media that just didn’t exist thirty years ago, plus the ideological capture of legacy media by the left.
Tom Scharf,
As I pointed out somewhere above, there was a strong consensus in the US geology community in the late 1950’s against continental drift sufficient to be a risk to an academic career in geology. Curry in her post refers to research cartels and knowledge monopolies:
Needless to say, climate science also qualifies as a knowledge monopoly. Remember the classic response to someone with a seemingly valid problem with the science is for them to write it up and publish it in a peer reviewed journal. GFL.
Tom Scharf (Comment #202378): “Shouldn’t there have been a pro and anti lab leak theory groups from the beginning? I think this type of stuff is the result of rigid consensus enforcement on social media that just didn’t exist thirty years ago, plus the ideological capture of legacy media by the left.”
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There were pro lab leak theories right from the beginning. But a bunch of powerful scientists,protecting their own interests, were quick off the mark in squelching speculation. That made it hard for other virologists to speak up, thus making it easy for the media and tech companies to treat the lab leak theory as fringe nonsense. The Chinese government brought its full weight to bear on the coverup. WHO does the bidding of the Chinese government, so they were taken out of the picture. The tech companies are all in bed with the Chinese, so they were glad to help with the coverup. The lab leak theory would have distracted attention from “It’s all Trump’s fault!”, so the corporate media were on board with the coverup.
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It is not just consensus enforcement and social dynamics. It is consensus enforcement on behalf of powerful special interests. That is called tyranny.
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The tech companies and corporate media are not private actors. They do the bidding of those who would be our masters.
WSJ Today: Intelligence on Sick Staff at Wuhan Lab Fuels Debate on Covid-19 Origin
Report says researchers went to hospital in November 2019, shortly before confirmed outbreak; adds to calls for probe of whether virus escaped lab
https://www.wsj.com/articles/intelligence-on-sick-staff-at-wuhan-lab-fuels-debate-on-covid-19-origin-11621796228
“Three researchers from China’s Wuhan Institute of Virology became sick enough in November 2019 that they sought hospital care, according to a previously undisclosed U.S. intelligence report that could add weight to growing calls for a fuller probe of whether the Covid-19 virus may have escaped from the laboratory.”
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From the US Intelligence Community, so YMMV.
What almost nobody in the media discusses is how this mystery can be solved. Genetic tracing. What is the state of this effort and how close a match in an animal needs to be found for it to be convincing evidence it naturally jumped to humans? 95% 99% 99.9%? How big is the gap to the closest thing that can be found to patient zero? All I is see is hand waving assertions and appeals to self authority.
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I also half believe the Chinese government has no knowledge that it escaped a lab, but are scared to death that their own bureaucrats would cover it up. Those bureaucrats would be very wise to do so.
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China sentences top banker to death for corruption and bigamy
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/jan/05/china-sentences-top-banker-to-death-for-corruption-and-bigamy
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Three weeks later, he was dead.
Tom Scharf,
In the Larry Niven Known Space future history that includes the Ringworld books (yet more good reads) there was a phase in human history when the demand for organ transplants was so high that the death penalty was applied for relatively minor infractions so the condemned could be broken up for parts. See, for example, The Patchwork Girl. I’ve heard stories about current events in China that remind me of that.
Tom Scharf,
I see a lot of argument from ignorance. “There is zero evidence that SARS-CoV-2 escaped from the WIV.” The problem with that argument is that there is also zero evidence that it jumped from bats through a wild host either, as opposed to genetically engineered mice in a lab at the WIV. Which is why it’s called the argument from or appeal to ignorance. We simply don’t know for sure. And the fact that we haven’t found a wild animal host isn’t proof that the virus escaped from the lab. But it had to come from somewhere.
I’ve also seen a similar argument that the Steele Dossier has never been debunked so it must be true.
Apparently the animal source for SARS(1) and MERS was found within a year. They have tried very hard to find the animal source for covid and have not found it yet. This is part of the reason the lab theory is growing.
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The misleading argument from the medical community “sufficient evidence has not been found” has been used so often during covid that it is a very weak argument at this point unless they finish the sentence with the rest of the argument weighing alternate evidence. Mask efficacy was not sufficient, human to human transmission was not sufficient, aerosol transmission was not sufficient, etc. It’s OK to say these things but they are using it to infer these theories are false, but everyone read in on the inside baseball of medical speak knows that these are only statements that things have not been completely decided yet. It’s now a red flag for preferred narratives are coming for experts to use this type of language when speaking to the public.
Tom Scharf,
Add to the list: we don’t know how long infection acquired or vaccine acquired immunity lasts with the implication that it doesn’t last very long, i.e. however long it’s lasted in the field is the upper limit, not the lower limit, and vaccination immunity is somehow better than infection acquired immunity. Arguments from ignorance are not convincing and certainly not probative.
Tom Scharf,
“This is part of the reason the lab theory is growing.”
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Sure, because the weight of the evidence is that gain of function work at the Wuhan laboratory was remarkably successful, even if done with insufficient safety. Of course, the CCP is never going to admit hat one of its laboratories killed off several million elderly people, so it is highly unlikely an actual investigation will take place. It is good to keep in mind the motivations of people in China….. if you make a big mistake, even inadvertently, then the CCP may well kill you, and do it fast, with no possibility of appeal.
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Even if there are people from the Wuhan lab who know for certain there was an accidental release, there is near zero chance they will ever come forward.
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WRT masks: In Massachusetts, all the larger chain stores are still absolutely adamant that you wear a mask to enter. Small restaurants seem a little more relaxed. Charlie Baker has ended mask mandates as of May 29; it will be interesting to see if stores, hotels, and restaurants continue to insist on masks. My bet: many will.
DeWitt,
I love the frequently sprinkled “evidence” that is pretty much just “It usually jumps from animals”.
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Well. Yes. Of course. In fact before genetic engineering existed, that would have to be the path. So, pretty obviously, the 1917 flu wasn’t from a lab leak. So, yes, zoonotic viruses “usually” jump from animals. That’s the normal path. It used to be the only one.
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I “like” this Forbes article which decides to combat a strawman:
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https://www.forbes.com/sites/startswithabang/2021/05/20/no-science-clearly-shows-that-covid-19-wasnt-leaked-from-a-wuhan-lab/?sh=5d10fa665585
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It turns the a relativly unadorned theory that the virus escaped the lab that was doing genetic research on bat viruses into a much, much more elaborate theory that includes the notion that there was weapons research, researchers were specifically trying to make a virus that specifically killed humans, that this killer was intentionally released, yada, yada, yada.
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They then proceed to explain things like it would be very hard for a researcher to know which mutations would make this jump to specifically to humans before doing it and testing. Well. Sure. But that doesn’t mean they weren’t doing things that turned out to make it jump to humans. (And in fact, their not expecting a change to make something transmit to humans would make it more likely to be sloppy and do things that might result in a leak!)
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(Oddly later in the article, they say something that sort of contradicts the notion that a researcher wouldn’t know a particular change would make something more infective. Well, they couldn’t absolutely know. But researchers had reason to strongly suspect furin cleavage sites are important to transmissibility in mammals, and they might have wanted to study that. So they might do it without fully knowing.)
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Anyway, I have no doubt someone, somewhere ascribes to this comic book version of the “lab leak” theory. But there are plenty much simpler less elaborate one, which is: Researcher were doing research on coronaviruses for any number of reasons. They may have tried many different types of genetic substitutions. Then, somehow this one got out. (For all we know, other strains or that infect no one also got out. But of course, we’d never discover the other leaks because they don’t spread!)
Restaurants aren’t insisting on masks around here. They can’t because you have to lower the mask to eat. I didn’t peak in windows of the bar/restaurant (mostly bar) near the studio where Jim and I dance on Fridays. They have an outdoor area (just completed). No one is wearing masks in the outdoor area. Presumably that’s the attraction to eating there.
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That studio is still requiring masks in the main studio.
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The studio where I have most my lessons does not require the masks. A few people are wearing them. Most aren’t.
This article from 2014: “Coronavirus MHV-A59 infects the lung and causes severe pneumonia in C57BL/6 mice”
Describes “severe pneumonia” in mice from a specific coronavirus, and goes on to suggest that this virus may be a good mouse model for the original (and often fatal but not easily transmitted) SARS illness.
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This December 2020 article: “Furin cleavage sites naturally occur in coronaviruses” (the point of the article was to declare escape from a laboratory “very unlikely”; it was published by a group of Chinese researchers) shows the frequency and sequence of many Furin cleavage sites for many different coronaviruses…. Furin cleavage sites are in fact not uncommon.
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But I noted that the only difference between a bat coronavirus spike protein sequence the human SARS-Covid-2 spike protein sequence (with the added Furin cleavage site) was an addition of exactly 4 amino acids in a row, three of those the exactly same three amino acids which form the Furin cleavage site in the coronavirus described in the 2014 article on a mouse model for SARS. The rest of the amino acid sequence (55 amino acids in a row) in that part of the spike protein is identical to the bat virus spike protein….. only the added Furin cleavage site is different. Coincidence? Maybe, but maybe not. If evolution of the virus were responsible for the migration from bats to humans, then there ought to be other inconsequential changes in other amino acids in the spike protein, but there are none.
Somehow gain of function research never came up in the Forbes article, ha ha. The argument that this “he who shall not be named” type of research is instrumental in preventing future pandemics rings pretty hollow right now.
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I know this is probably a very bad idea, and I’m not the first to think about it, but one can imagine a highly transmissible vaccine being designed to prevent a pandemic. A virus that replicates and is highly transmissible but doesn’t kill you, but protects you from one that does. What could go wrong here? At least the global production problem would be solved.
lucia,
Maybe I should read the article, but from your summary, the author(s) don’t have a clue how GOF research is actually done with, for example, mice genetically engineered to have ACE2 receptors. Run enough generations and you know you have something that will infect humans and will not have all the signs of a lab synthesized virus. It’s called no-see-um.
IOW, the Forbes article is an elaborate straw man.
See Fig 1 here for interesting comparison between all vaccines as well as recovery from infection.
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Neutralizing antibody levels are highly predictive of immune protection from symptomatic SARS-CoV-2 infection
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-021-01377-8
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Legend:
mRNA-1273: Moderna
NVX-CoV2373: Novavax
BNT162b2: Pfizer
rAd26-S + rAd5-S: Sputnik V
ChAdOx1 nCov-19: AstraZeneca
Ad26.COV2.S: J&J
CoronaVac: Sinovac
Convalescent: Recovery from actual infection
Tom Scharf,
“A virus that replicates and is highly transmissible but doesn’t kill you, but protects you from one that does. What could go wrong here?”
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Sure sounds like an end-of-the-world movie script…. where an unforeseen mutation in the “vaccine virus” turns most people into brain-eating zombies.
Tom Scharf,
Three things:
1. I’ve seen an article that claims that IgG testing will miss a lot of people who have actually been infected, possibly as much as half. The article recommended IgA and IgM as well as IgG.
2. Health care workers are likely a worst case scenario as they are more likely to be exposed to relatively high virus levels.
3. The number of reinfections of initially seropositive people was small, meaning that a single false positive would change the results a lot and make infection acquired immunity look a lot better, incidence dropping from 0.11 to 0.05.
IOW, it is not possible from these results to conclude that convalescent immunity is worse than vaccine conferred immunity. It also appears to last at least six months, not the three months I have seen reported on TV.
And in other news: Biden’s Secretary of Education is in violation of Marbury v. Madison.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/marbury-v-the-education-department-11621893306?mod=opinion_lead_pos7
SteveF,
There are so many thing wrong with the Forbes article’s suggestion that if a furin cleavage site mutation can happen naturally that means that it could not have been genetically engineered. It’s ridiculous as it stands. So in some sense, the main issue is “it doesn’t follow”. After all, just because something can happen by accident never means it could not happen on purpose!!
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But as you point out, it’s also highly improbably that this would have been the sole mutation. Not impossible of course, but highly, highly, highly improbable. The article doesn’t engage that point.
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It’s really very careful to craft a bunch of weak strawman argument to rebutt and then pretend it’s rebutted the whole lab leak scenario.
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I mean: they know furin sites are important to transmissibility. Even if science was merely motivated to fulfill curiosity, this would have made those curious want to learn more about furin sites. To be motivated, they don’t have to know exactly what can happen in humans. They only need to be curious about how furin sites work.
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And beyond that, they could have all sorts of motivations for wanting to understand furin sites. Sure, they might have diabolical motives wishing kill all mankind. But people wanting to save mankind might equally insert a furin site and then study how to block its action in a lab.
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Either way, once created there is at least the hypothetical possibility that it would leak.
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I don’t know if it leaked from a lab. We may never know. But we don’t have strong evidence of the zoonotic theory either because no animal path has been identified.
Steve wrote “Sure sounds like an end-of-the-world movie script…. where an unforeseen mutation in the “vaccine virus†turns most people into brain-eating zombies.”
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“I Am Legend” was a virus cure for cancer, but it did mutate and turn people into semi-zombies.
Lucia wrote: ” To be motivated, they don’t have to know exactly what can happen in humans. They only need to be curious about how furin sites work.”
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Indeed, and inserting mutations to add/remove amino acid motifs to find out what they do and how they work is a very common line of investigation.
Lucia,
“But we don’t have strong evidence of the zoonotic theory either because no animal path has been identified.”
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Yup, and that animal pathway would likely involve many mutations….. just as it did with MERS and the original SARS. As you say, we may never have proof of origin, but any analysis that flat out dismisses gain-of-function research that escaped the laboratory as the source is either misinformed or simply dishonest.
It is impossible for the President to defy Marbury vs.Madison. That is the only reason that the decision stood; Jefferson would have loved a decision that he could have defied.
The idea that the furin cleavage site was an accident of nature seems implausible, to put it mildly. It is not the minimal furin cleavage group; it is the more effective multibasic form. It appears to have been created by insertion rather than point mutations. It is part of an unusual sequence of 12 amino acids that form a long loop with a strategically placed proline and a strategically placed arginine, which make the site especially efficient by making the site highly accessible to the enzyme and increasing binding. The codons for the cleavage site are not the ones expected in a coronavirus, but are the ones expected from human genetic engineers.
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It sure looks like the site was inserted by people, then the virus was optimized for human cells by many passages through cells in culture or in humanized mice.
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Oh yeah, the source: https://arxiv.org/abs/2102.03910
“An open debate on SARS-CoV-2’s proximal origin is long overdue” by R. Segreto et al.
Mike M,
Great link. They present a strong case for the virus being created in the lab and escaping. There are now multiple groups pointing out the improbability of a highly efficient Furin cleavage sequence being inserted into the bat coronavirus spike protein with virtually no other surrounding mutations.
In addition to the endless strawman arguments in the Forbs article, there is a glaring factual error: the article states the the RaTG13 bat virus is not where the covi-19 virus came from. That is simply false. RaTG13 is by far the closest relative virus, as any casual inspection of the amino acid sequence for the two viruses shows. The Forbs author (Siegel) doesn’t know what he is writing about….. which seems to me is true of most everything he writes; every time I read an article he has written I have to roll my eyes. His knowledge strikes me as a sorry mix of superficial and super-conformist. Almost certainly he is a dedicated lefty.
Mike M,
“It is impossible for the President to defy Marbury vs. Madison.”
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It was impossible for Jefferson to defy, but Marbury v Madison did establish SC precedent. If those people appointed by Trump bring a lawsuit over their appointments, seems to me Marbury v Madison will set the background. John Woo knows a bit of law.
Going on memory here. Madison’s predecessor wrote letters appointing Marbury and others to federal offices, but never delivered them. Madison refused to deliver the letters. Congress ordered Madison to deliver the appointments. Madison continued to refuse. Marbury sued, on the basis of the action taken by Congress. The Court ruled against Marbury on the grounds that Congress acted unconstitutionally. I don’t see how that helps the current complainants.
Mike M.,
The SC ruled that Madison did not have the right to refuse to deliver Marbury’s commission, which is why Biden’s Secretary of Education is in violation. The Court, however, also ruled that the commission itself was not legal because the underlying law was unconstitutional. I seriously doubt that the creation of the NBES would be ruled unconstitutional. It was created in 2002 and Trump was clearly acting within his authority to appoint new members to the NBES.
Interestingly, the one person the forbes article cites as promulgating the lab leak theory describes the leak as likely an accident.
Forbes article:
https://www.forbes.com/sites/startswithabang/2021/05/20/no-science-clearly-shows-that-covid-19-wasnt-leaked-from-a-wuhan-lab/?sh=5d10fa665585
So what does the error-filled, misleading piece actually suggest about the lab leak?
This sort of over reach by the Forbes isn’t in the realm of not really groking science. It’s a garden variety overreach you see in all sort of arguments. The Forbes article simply mis-represents the case he is attempting to “demolish”. He then criticizes claims never made.
(If you are interested, you can also click the links in the words “disgraced” and “journalist” in the forbes article and decide if Wade is a “disgraced journalist”. This phrase is clearly an ad hom argument– i.e. the claim is made by someone who is “disgraced”. But also, I think the more accurate statement is that Wade is a journalist who has written a book that claims race is a real biological construct. His book been criticized in in a journal article published Human Biology. He also wrote some thing else that has been criticized in a blog post. Well, Wade is a journalist “science writer”, and I would hardly be surprised if his writings on science are less than stellar. But I hardly thing that makes him a “disgraced journalist”! Nor would his being wrong on one thing make him wrong on other things. )
In addition to noting the manifist problems with the Forbes article, one is left imagining that if the Forbes author could have engaged the real argument, he might have at least tried to do so. But no. He resorted to constructing and attacking a strawman and insinuating the claims were made by someone who clearly did not make them.
lucia,
I believe the specific ad hominem argument used against Wade is called poisoning the well. Also the assertion that Wade’s article is misleading and error-filled is not supported. But if you don’t believe Wade, how about the May 14 letter to Science signed by 18 prominent scientists supporting a real investigation of the laboratory origin hypothesis.
DeWitt,
Agreed. The first link (under “disgraced” ) to to an article criticizing him for having written a book that says race is real. Evidently Wade may also think that race extends to more than appearance.
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Now I think there can be two side to the argument that race is real or not. Some aspects are arbitrary and is many cases it’s hard to draw distinct lines in some areas of the world. But I do think it’s pretty obvious that people with genetic origins in the far east look different from sub-saharan africans and both look different from Europeans as a whole. At least in a descriptive sense there is some sort of “race”. That remains true even if at boundaries, you get people who have features that seem to be a mix of two races.
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It’s also pretty clear many of the features involved in appearance are genetic, not social.
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Things get much more ambiguous when making claims about personality especially intelligence. It’s just flat out harder to even diagnose personality traits and it’s also clear quite a bit of that is social. And unlike hair color where you can see the difference between natural hair color and the color someone dyed it to be, you can’t easily distinguish between a “natural” personality trait and a “socially induced one” in any individual. So it’s just hard.
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But for sure, linking to his article criticizing him for saying “race is real” is definitely an attempt to poison the well. (The second article just criticizes him for something about chemistry. But that blog article does say that some scientists agree with Wade. I don’t know the chemistry, but I could hardly say that article “discredits” Wade. Maybe it does. Maybe it doesn’t. )
It appears Wade definitely thinks race extends to more than appearance including explaining lots of difference in accomplishment to that. Whenever I’ve read articles like that, I’ve found the arguments weak. But that’s not to say I find the idea utterly impossible.
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I haven’t read Wade’s book so I can’t make any specific criticism of his argument about race. I don’t actually know what they are!
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I think we can certainly say he’s someone who is willing to advance arguments that might piss people off. I’d guess he has pissed lots of people off.
For people in journalism who think that race isn’t real, they sure find a lot of time to call out white people for all their various sins against humanity. The contradiction based on what race is being targeted is ever present. They are very explicit in their targeting of the white race (regardless of class of local culture) so I find them talking umbrage at someone else talking about race to be a tiny bit hypocritical.
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Everyone knows the rules, targeting whites is open season, targeting other races is a moral sin. All derived from the hand waving logic of CRT. Deviations from this clownish view of society are punished with efficiency by the mob.
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The logic of the Forbes article is what was holding together the “conspiracy theory” of a lab leak narrative from the beginning. What makes it even more bizarre is that they are protecting the Chinese communist party (the far enemy) just to score some cheap political point against the right (the near enemy).
FYI: Recent update on vaccine breakthroughs:
https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/70/wr/mm7021e3.htm
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https://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/covid-19/health-departments/breakthrough-cases.html
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“Vaccine breakthrough cases occur in only a small percentage of vaccinated people. To date, no unexpected patterns have been identified in the case demographics or vaccine characteristics among people with reported vaccine breakthrough infections.”
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They are at great pains to say “nothing to see here”. Perhaps this is true. This is from voluntary reports so an undercount of absolute cases.
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One interesting point is that they say:
443 (25%) of 1,811 hospitalizations reported as asymptomatic or not related to COVID-19.
63 (18%) of 353 fatal cases reported as asymptomatic or not related to COVID-19.
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A look into how much of this is “dying with covid, not from it”. Median age of vaccinated death was 82. Old and frail likely makes one more susceptible to covid even if vaccinated.
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This may be why there is a floor to the death counts as cases get smaller and smaller. I think they should continue to report any death with covid to make sure stats are consistent.
More on the dying with covid from an article at NPR:
“Hospitalization numbers look worse for COVID-19. But those numbers are inflated as a result of the CDC’s reporting rules. The CDC requires every child admitted to a hospital to be tested for the coronavirus.
Dr. Roshni Mathew, a pediatric infectious disease specialist at the Stanford University School of Medicine, says experience at her hospital found that 45% of the time, a child who tested positive for the coronavirus was not actually sick with COVID-19. The findings have been published online in the journal Hospital Pediatrics.
In those cases, hospitalization was due to “a completely unrelated diagnosis, like appendicitis or femur fracture or something else,” she says.”
Not directly on topic but just a hypothesis: The American “Innocent until proven guilty” principle should not apply to China in the Corvid virus origination investigation. China has blocked access to information and issued false facts continuously since the onset of the pandemic. My proposal is they should be considered “Complicit after [and possibly before] the fact”.
Russel,
I don’t think the issue with lab leak or not is “guilt” vs. “innocence”. The origin is something that would be helpful to know. It helps us better gauge the true likelihood of zoonotic leaps of this magnitude and also helps us better identify what practices are required to reduce lab leaks (if one occurred.)
Russell,
My inclination is to treat those who behave badly (eg. the CCP) very badly, but what we most need is an honest evaluation of where this nightmare came from. My honest best guestimate is it was gain of function research gone astray at the Wuhan laboratory. The CCP will never accept responsibility, of course, and will block any honest evaluation. But reasonable people can use this very sorry episode to help guide public policy: don’t ever financially support research with the potential to produce catastrophically bad outcomes. Fund gain of function for cattle? or chickens? OK, fine. But not gain of function against people. That is pure madness.
Here is something that is, strangely enough, actually on topic:
“7 Reasons Why We Should Not Need Boosters for COVID-19”
https://leaps.org/booster-shot/particle-1
MikeM
We don’t yet really know if #6 is true for all variants.
on this
Ehrmmm… We know they have mutated enough to create variants that spread faster. So these are variants with different characteristics. Sure, influenze may mutate faster. But that’s not sufficient to ensure we won’t need boosters!
It may turn out we need boosters. Or not. If Moderna creates a booster that covers variants and I can take it, I will. It seems to give the best protection. While I’m happy I took J&J when I did, I have no objection to getting better immunity.
I don’t know, but I suspect that natural immunity is variable from person to person. How an individual’s immune system decides to fight off the infection probably produces different attacks on the virus. If this is true then natural immunity is a catch all for various immune responses that will have variable ability against the variants.
Mike M.,
The leaps.org article you linked shouldn’t be surprising. What should have been surprising is all the fear mongering about mutations, short length of immunity and denigrating convalescent immunity. And I use the term ‘fear mongering’ advisedly as those claiming to be experts who make those statements are either not actually expert or are being disingenuous if not outright lying to maintain the government lockdown stranglehold.
Speaking of lockdowns. The pattern of rising and falling new case rates in the Czech Republic appears to follow quite closely the imposition and relaxation of public health measures. But those measures did not appear to reduce the total number of infections, it just spread them out over time. Flattening the curve, then, appears to indeed be possible. Crushing the virus was not because in many countries the public health measures were not sustainable.
So far the vaccines are quite effective against the variants. I saw some early data that showed Pfizer was 88% effective against the India mutation (good news), but that the India mutation spread up to 50% faster than even the B117 (bad news). You need two shots though.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2021-05-25/india-variant-sparks-concern-in-u-s
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The US may have been a little late to avoid the third surge with the vaccines, but it was in time to avoid B117 and B1167.
Mix-and-match COVID vaccines trigger potent immune response
Preliminary results from a trial of more than 600 people are the first to show the benefits of combining different vaccines.
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-01359-3
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“Vaccinating people with both the Oxford–AstraZeneca and Pfizer–BioNTech COVID-19 vaccines produces a potent immune response against the virus SARS-CoV-2, researchers conducting a study in Spain have found.
Preliminary results from the trial of more than 600 people — announced in an online presentation on 18 May — are the first to show the benefits of combining different coronavirus vaccines. A UK trial of a similar strategy reported1 safety data last week, and is expected to deliver further findings on immune responses soon.”
Tom Scharf,
I count four peaks in the US new case rate data with the third peak, which reached its maximum in late December/early January, being by far the largest. Is that what you refer to as the third surge?
Yes, if we had the vaccine earlier we could have avoided the biggest and deadliest surge. I never could find out whether production could have been ramped up earlier to meet a theoretical earlier approval though, it might be a moot point.
lucia (Comment #202419): “We know they have mutated enough to create variants that spread faster. So these are variants with different characteristics.”
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A variant that spreads a bit faster can be the result of a single point mutation. I think that is the case with all the variants of concern. It takes much more than a single point mutation to avoid the immune response.
MikeM
Perhaps. But we know they mutate and at a rate considerable enough to have spawned numerous variants of concern.
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Also, the single point mutation is the portion of concern. Is there evidence that’s the only mutation? (Real Q).
lucia (Comment #202427): “But we know they mutate and at a rate considerable enough to have spawned numerous variants of concern.”
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And we know that they mutate slowly, even in comparison with other viruses for which infection or vaccines give lifetime immunity.
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lucia: “Also, the single point mutation is the portion of concern. Is there evidence that’s the only mutation? (Real Q).”
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I don’t know what you mean. Normally evolution proceeds via single point mutations. There can also be recombination, but that requires a cell infected by two different coronaviruses at the same time. So maybe if the Wuhan virus infects cats, we get a hybrid of that with a feline coronavirus. But still, to infect humans the new virus would probably have to keep the human virus spike protein, so we likely would still be immune.
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“It mutates” need not be a cause for alarm. Enteroviruses are among the fastest mutating viruses, right up there with rhinoviruses. Poliovirus is an enterovirus, but vaccines last a lifetime.
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We can not be certain that we will have long term immunity to the Wuhan virus. But it seems that is a pretty good bet.
MikeM
I haven’t said otherwise. But mutating “slowly” is insufficient to make the case we won’t need boosters. The issue is if it’s (a) slow enough and (b) what the mutations are.
After one mutation occurs, then another one can follow. Do all these variants only differ by 1 mutation from the original? I’m pretty sure the answer is no. Yes, the mutations happen one at a time. That doesn’t mean they stop after one.
I don’t know what you mean by “keep”. The shape of the spike has changed. As far as I can see if the shape changes enough, it might escape.
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I didn’t say it was cause for “alarm”. But, on the other hand, the “it mutates slowly” is the argument given for not expecting to need boosters. We aren’t debating whether we should be “alarmed”. We are discussing whether boosters might be needed or advisable.
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I agree we can’t be certain. I’m not sure what probability constitutes “pretty good bet”. I’m glad pharmaceutical firms are working on boosters. It seems better to err on the side of caution here.
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I figures there’s pretty much a 50/50 chance I’ll need a booster within 2 years. I’ll be happy to get one. This is not “alarm”.
Test…. my comments are disappearing, but not always; very strange.
Steve,
They aren’t in spam.
Lucia,
If I was using a proxy server could they just disappear without any notice?
SteveF,
I made a couple of posts from my iPad the other day that simply disappeared. Don’t know why.
Tom Scharf,
Pfizer announced their vaccine was effective on November 9, 2020. At that point the new case rate was already up to 120,000/day and rising. The only way the third surge could have been avoided is if they could have rolled out the vaccine to the public instead of just the 20,000 people in the vaccine arm of the phase II/III trial starting at the end of July.
The only effect of an earlier announcement of effectiveness by Pfizer would have been Joe Biden watching re-runs of Hawaii Five-O and wondering were his slippers went, instead of the woke left controlling him like a puppet.
Lucia, Mike M,
Way too early to know if/when boosters will be needed. I was not at all impressed by the article linked somewhere above which claimed the decline in circulating antibodies allows a meaningful projection of declining resistance to re-infection. Resistance mediated by T and B cells is longer lasting and known with other viruses to provide often life-long resistance. I do think that the frequency of breakthrough infections, the age/health profile of the people who get those infections, and the severity of those infections, will tell us pretty quickly if boosters will be needed. I suspect we will know within a year or two.
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If breakthrough infections are generally mild, then the chance of spread from those infections should be low…. no super-spreader events.
SteveF,
There is a caveat along those lines buried in the article, but you have to look for it and I’m sure it would be ignored by the media or not mentioned in the press releases.
The weasel words possible and may are disingenuous. I’m reasonably sure the authors are aware that T and B cells are what confer longer lasting immunity for diseases like measles and that there is still no evidence of an increasing fraction of breakthrough infections of convalescent immune patients well more than a year after the pandemic was announced.
We have now had five or six days in a row of the seven day average of new cases below 30,000/day and it’s still decreasing. On a population adjusted basis, today’s 22,738 new reported cases converts to 68/million which put us at #62 in the world. A lot of the countries above us are small, but not all. India is at #33 with 150 new cases/day/million. In absolute terms, we’re at #4 behind India, Brazil and Argentina.
I’ve whitelisted some blocked addresses. The seem to be Tom, Steve and Dewitt. The “reason” given by the spam filter is “invalid token”. That’s the most common reason for blocking (and it’s usually accurate.) I have no idea what the token is nor what makes it be invalid sometimes.
Thanks for mentioning the issue Steve.
SteveF,
I agree it’s to early to know if they will be needed. I’m unconvinced by articles that way they will not be needed. It strikes me as over confident on the “need/not need” diagnosis. I think the correct view is “we don’t know”.
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In contrast: With Pharma companies, I interpret them saying they might be needed as meaning, well, they might be needed. So they are working on ones that cover new variant. That’s not misleading, they are working on new ones just in case.
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We know the vaccines specifically tailored to new variants won’t go to waste. Even if the already vaccinated don’t need boosters, the rest of the world still needs the vaccines. It seems to me there is no harm in future vaccines having “spikes” from multiple variants. Maybe we won’t need them; maybe we will.
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They might as well be developed. And that’s what pharmaceutical companies do anyway. And in this case, developing them seems a win/win.
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We’ll know if the already vaccinated “need” them soon enough.
I had a comment drop yesterday. I assumed operator error. Testing. [Yup, probably operator error]
I whitelisted the 0/24 around your current comment. I’ll be watching the reports today. If anything odd happens, speak up.
DeWitt,
Ya, I saw that small caveat with the weasel words. The whole premise of the paper is dubious: they simply assume the typical mechanisms which infer long term resistance to other pathogens are not going to happen…. which is especially dubious considering that testing done during the earlier trials of both m-RNA vaccines consistently showed “strong T-cell and B-cell” response to the vaccines as blood antibody levels dropped. If I were a reviewer, I would beat them up over the lack of a clear statement that the whole paper depends on no significant T-cell and B-cell mediated resistance.
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If I had to venture a guess, I would say there is a very good chance resistance will be of long duration…. at least multiple years if not decades.
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From a public health perspective, what will matter is not just if there are breakthrough cases, but if they are severe and so more likely to lead to spread of the virus. So long as the breakthrough cases are mostly mild and don’t lead to a resurgence of the pandemic, they won’t present a serious public health issue.
Thanks Lucia, will do.
SteveF
My wife’s brother was a breakthrough case. He died after a month on a ventilator. They speculate that his treatments for autoimmune disease may have reduced the effectiveness of the vaccine.
The covid virus mutates a lot, but I can’t speak to how it compares to the flu and so forth. What we are mostly referring to is effective mutations. See the “covid phylogenetic tree†diagram below as an example of the genetic tracing. This tree is how one can eventually track the virus backwards to its source whether it is an animal or lab. China not releasing the earliest lineages is highly suspicious.
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I don’t think anyone has compiled how many replications there have been, but it is a lot of zeroes involved. Lots of opportunity.
https://www.the-scientist.com/multimedia/side-by-side-comparisons-of-important-sars-cov-2-variants-68388
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https://www.nature.com/articles/s41392-020-00302-8/figures/1
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Changes to the spike are what is apparently driving important things. They know exactly what they are, but that doesn’t necessarily help much in the grand scheme.
I’ve had several comments just randomly drop into a black hole in the past several weeks. I have been able to use the back button to resubmit them and they almost always take the second time. I can tell it’s happening by there being almost no delay in redisplaying the page on submit.
Tom,
Thanks for the link. It’s clear these variants aren’t a single mutation. There multiple ones (numbers like 17, 21) and the ones of concern are usually on the spike protein.
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That was the impression I had.
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Like you, I don’t know how the mutation rate compares to flu. But it seems to me that “lower than for flu” is not a sufficient argument.
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On the comments: I’ve whitelisted your IP. Perhaps that will help.
Russel,
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-science/autoimmune-disease-drugs-may-reduce-vaccine-response-antibody-treatments-ineffective-vs-brazil-variant-idUSKBN2BZ2H1
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“Immunosuppressive drugs for inflammatory diseases like rheumatoid arthritis, multiple sclerosis, and ulcerative colitis can impair the body’s response to the COVID-19 vaccines from Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna, according to new data.”
Viral mutation rates. Coronavirus’s have about 3e4 nt (nt = nucleotides), about as big as an RNA virus gets. Influenza about 1e4 nt.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/20660197/#&gid=article-figures&pid=fig-2-uid-1
But that way understates the difference between them. Influenza has a segmented genome, so they are extremely good at swapping RNA. And the surface proteins on influenza act as camouflage, so they can evolve rapidly without hurting viral function.