This is an interesting speculative article:
Is a COVID-19 vaccine developed by nature already at work?
The premise is “the accumulation of killed/inactivated/degenerated SARS-CoV-2 associated molecular particle patterns (SAMPPs)” which are deposited pretty much everywhere “[mediate] the development of immunity against SARS-CoV-2 infection, which has caused an increase in the incidence rate of asymptomatic cases and a decrease in mortality rate”.
Basically dead shed virus gives some people partial immunity which results in an increase in asymptomatic cases. It’s mostly a “thought” paper.
Speculative but interesting.
Open Thread.
“Most of the touchable surfaces in the designated hospital for COVID-19 are heavily contaminated with virus [12], suggesting that the environment is a potential medium of presence of SAMPPs.”
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Statements like this make it easier to do a take down on the paper.
Scare tactics thrown in with a lead in to their premise.
No need to do it.
While the rooms of patients with known SARS would have a reasonable amount of SARS in the room of the patient most of the other rooms in the hospital would be definitely COVID free.
The concept is nice. trace particles capable of causing great changes whilst present in small amounts.
Standard theory is that inactivated particles are denatured and hence are no longer capable of causing immune system activation.
Short of licking the floor one is unlikely to get enough particles to try the theory out.
There are a number of theories for why people would not, should not get the infection while others do.
I see the number of people writing on natural immunity due to prior infections with similar viruses died out with the second and third waves.
Reality has a habit of intruding on delusion.
So where do we put this idea?
Look, it’s a nice idea.
Fits in with a lot of theories about reducing allergy by rolling around in the dirt with your pets.
Apart from trachoma and hookworm nothing wrong with that.
Fits in with homeopathy as well.
The amounts of virus residue available would be well below any immune system stimulating dose.
Perhaps someone will plan to vacuum up the hospital dust or bins and put a tiny amount in a liter of water and sell it.
Hmm just like a vaccine without the needle.
Australian government letting us oldie astra zenecas have a so called booster shot of a different vaccine [hence not a booster at all] . Pfizer or Moderna here I come.
Remember the advice on a variety of vaccines being the cure.
angech,
“I see the number of people writing on natural immunity due to prior infections with similar viruses died out with the second and third waves.”
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No need to keep writing papers when existing papers are extremely clear: plenty of people do indeed have measurable cross-resistance from previous infection, and blood samples taken from donors before covid-19 show this. ‘Resistance’ doesn’t mean perfect immunity to large doses of virus; it does almost certainly mean lower probability of symptomatic infection with lower virus doses. The more infectious delta strain appears able to infect at least some of the people who were resistant to the original strain.
angech
I know hospitals have cleanliness standards. But I don’t see how surfaces in waiting rooms, cafeterias etc. be entirely free of virus if some virus (dead or alive) is circulating in the air. These surfaces aren’t disinfected every 15 minutes. And we at least believe virus– some dead, some alive– is shed by people who are symptom free. So the issue isn’t just sick patients shedding copious amounts of live virus. They are discussing mostly dead stuff.
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(Note: I know the term “live” vs “dead” is difficult with “virus”. But in the above, by “live” I mean: “capable of infecting” and “dead” means something that is somehow ‘broken’ and so can’t infect.)
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The paper’s speculation may certainly be wrong. But I don’t think patients rooms in hospitals being “Covid free” (even if entirely true) is fatal to this theory.
Over my life, I’ve seen lots of “standard theories” in medicine which were “standard” merely because people came up with them through some chain if “logic”. The “logic” often included quite dubious assumptions. (e.g. when I was in high school, and sometimes read the more medical stuff, I was assured that menstrual cramps in young women were “psychological” because (having sought no cause) no one knew a cause! This was pretty much based on “we don’t know” combined with “women are emotional”. btw. I didn’t suffer bad cramps– but I had friends who did. In contrast to doctors non-medical people did not think they were “psychological”.)
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These sorts of “standard theories” were then debunked when someone bothered to test. Has this particular theory been tested? That is: has anyone ever subjected people to non-infectious particles and seen if that can trigger a mucosal immunity response? Real question btw. But if there has been no actual testing I tend to be dubious of the notion that “standard theories” should be treated as strong assumptions.
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Well… yes. which is why many “standard theories” in medicine are discarded once someone does tests or learns more! (And it’s not just medicine. )
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That’s a broad claim if applied to every possible pathogen! You don’t know either (a) how much is available nor (b) the level required for an immune system stimulating dose.
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There is at least some reason to believe (a)asymptomatic people shed a fair amount of virus, (b) much or all of it might be dead (or it might be alive), (c) many of these people don’t wear masks and (d) other people may encounter this on surfaces in grocery stores, while doing ballroom dance and so on and so on. You certainly don’t know enough to support your claim. It may be true– or not.
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The argument doesn’t rest this happening in hospitals only. The main issue with hospitals is we staff do who never seemed to have infections do end up with antibodies at relatively high rates. But of course we aren’t going to vaccuum up hospital dust and distribute it. We know hospitals are sources of other pathogens!!! And for all your claims about “knowing” patient rooms will be Covid free, we know that nosocomial transmission is a real thing. So as hard as hospitals try to prevent transmission inside their walls it happens. So no: no one is going to create a path from hospital rooms to the world by sweeping up hospital dust, bottling it and selling it. But not for the reason you insinuate. They won’t do it because people could get sick!.
So… you are suggesting this would be a good thing. 🙂
Nasal spray vaccines exist. Some are being developed for Covid-19. Polio boosters were oral.
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Of course I’m getting a real vaccine. This paper is advocating against it. But the existence and importance of the real vaccines doesn’t mean we shouldn’t discuss pathways for natural immunity that either are or might be present.
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I think this paper makes it perfectly clear their idea is speculative. But if this happens, it would explain some things we see during epidemics and this one in particular. There may be other explanations, and this one might not be correct. But I don’t thing the criticisms you post hit the mark.
WRT to what can and can’t trigger an immune response, I think this suggest that all sorts of things can be “antigents”: https://www.news-medical.net/life-sciences/What-is-an-Antigen.aspx
Even just a “protein” could potentially be an antigen.
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If this is correct, dead virus or bits of virus could be “an antigen”– at least hypothetically.
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I’m dubious of unsupported claims that inactive (‘dead’ virus) absolutely cannot trigger an immune response.
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Ok… and now I’m pretty sure I know dead virus can trigger immune response:
https://www.umms.org/coronavirus/covid-vaccine/facts/mrna
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If previous vaccines used dead pathogens it’s pretty clear dead pathogens must be able to trigger an immune response!
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So that plank of the article is not necessarily unrealistic.
If they understood virus transmission they would be able to predict it with some skill. I am all for trying to find out factor X for virus transmission but this explanation doesn’t seem too compelling. Something pretty major appears to change causing outbreaks and declines, so factor X should be a parameter that changes over time. Perhaps I am just biased against a multi-factor mess and want a simpler explanation.
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Even the NYT is starting to recognize this:
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The Covid Fable
When we treat Covid as a simple morality play, we can end up making bad predictions.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/08/briefing/covid-restrictions-delta-caseload.html
“The main determinants of Covid’s spread (other than vaccines, which are extremely effective) remain mysterious. Some activities that seem dangerous, like in-person school or crowded outdoor gatherings, may not always be. As unsatisfying as it is, we do not know why cases have recently plunged. The decline is consistent with the fact that Covid surges often last for about two months before receding, but that’s merely a description of the data, not a causal explanation.
“We still are really in the cave ages in terms of understanding how viruses emerge, how they spread, how they start and stop, why they do what they do,†Michael Osterholm, an epidemiologist at the University of Minnesota, has told me.”
“The more infectious delta strain appears able to infect at least some of the people who were resistant to the original strain.”
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Maybe, but unproven. We don’t have any baseline measurement of active virus in the community other than caseloads. Apparently the sewer can be used but we don’t even have that. We don’t really have any feel for virus dosage versus infection severity. We don’t really have much at all so this speculation is as good as many others. Challenge testing could unveil a lot of stuff, but we can’t do that. I think the level of ignorance is going to stay that way for quite a while, I’m pretty disappointed in the science community here. They are too conservative and their lack of bold action (inaction) is costing lives in many different ways.
One definition of a dead virus is it doesn’t duplicate. The vaccines could be thought of as dead viruses (and some vaccines are exactly that). They force production of spikes which then trigger an immune response but they don’t duplicate. If you ate or breathed in a pound of dead covid you would probably trigger an immune response(?). My guess is this is a dose issue for triggering an immune response but separately the dead virus will not cause disease because it doesn’t duplicate.
FYI: Vaccination versus previous infection:
https://arstechnica.com/science/2021/10/prior-infection-vs-vaccination-why-everyone-should-get-a-covid-19-shot/
“That data—which we’ll get into below—has consistently shown that immune responses from natural infections are extremely variable, thus unreliable. Vaccines, on the other hand, have repeatedly been proven to generate highly protective immune responses.â€
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For the record, the author here has proven to be quite politically biased over the past year (numerous red staters deserve what they get vibes). Her take here is quite predictable with some dubious talking points. Included because this discussion in the media is almost nonexistent. YMMV.
Tom Scharf,
“we do not know why cases have recently plunged”
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Ummmm…. because the virus runs out of enough susceptible individuals to say above a replication rate of 1.0? This seems obvious, almost by definition. There is remarkable consistency in the ‘delta surge’, with the size of that surge (relative to total population) greater in states with lower vaccination rates and smaller in states with higher vaccination rates. For certain there are other factors, but when the number and accessibility of vulnerable people falls to where replication rate drops below one, the ‘surge’ declines. Yes, there are potentially many factors that control ‘accessibility’, but as FL shows, the case rate can fall very quickly. That seems to me consistent with not enough fuel remaining to maintain the fire.
Tom Scharf
That was my impression. Dead virus can trigger an immune response. There would be a minimum does to trigger some immune response and presumably a larger does would trigger a larger response. We also don’t know the minimum does of dead virus that would trigger a response (which the papers perfectly well know.)
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But it’s not utterly implausible that dead virus being “around” because people are shedding it might create a degree of resistance in people. There’s a lot of air between “utterly implausible” and “likely” and even “likely” doesn’t get us to true. But it’s possible that something encountering dead virus would give some people’s immune response a head start when the encounter a live virus. Even if they don’t become immune, a head start would be helpful to avoid worse outcomes.
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(And the paper doesn’t suggest “don’t get vaccinated” based on this theory. It would be nuts to not get vaccinated based on this.)
FWIW,
I plan to stay away from hospital cleaning dust/dirt/grime and related consequences, and get the Pfizer booster. Seems simpler.
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As to whether such viral debris, if inhaled, could add to resistance: Sure, but it would seem to require massive doses. Not sure how realistic that is.
SteveF,
The paper isn’t advocating going and trying to breath stuff in as a practice. They are just saying it might explain some of what we see — specifically more asymptomatic cases.
Of course, it’s not clear that the explanation is required.
FL didn’t run out of susceptible bodies in the first several waves and they declined pretty quickly as well. FL is likely around 90% herd immunity now but I’m not sure that is enough. I still look at the UK (sustained still and about the same death rate) and Israel (declining now, lower death rate) and remain unable to say much with confidence about the future. India remains low. It’s fair to say the worst is very likely behind us absent a major new variant.
I am prone to hyperbole at times.
Lucia
“That was my impression. Dead virus can trigger an immune response. There would be a minimum dose to trigger some immune response and presumably a larger dose would trigger a larger response. We also don’t know the minimum dose of dead virus that would trigger a response”
My impression too.
That is how vaccines used to work by using dead virus particles to stimulate an immune response.
Nowadays it is a bit more complex.
You can use a weak live attenuated virus as a vaccine [like cowpox in place of smallpox or sabin 3 types for polio].
Generally dead virus [inactivated] was used as with flu vaccines.
The idea of dead virus particles in the environment being ingested
is basically saying one can be vaccinated [develop an immune response ] by exposure to enough of these dead particles to trigger the immune response thus developing immune or asymptomatic people in the community.
The idea has just enough potential parts to give a semblance of possibility.
Which is bad because it can be used as an argument by people opposed to vaccines to say if your lucky enough or tough enough you can pick up enough immunity naturally to not need to take the vaccines.
Which is an offshoot of ideas claiming natural immunity already existed in a subgroup of people because of prior exposure to viruses similar to Corona virus building up their, whatever it was, T cell immunity? Also vastly overclaimed.
Steve F summed it up
“”As to whether such viral debris, if inhaled, could add to resistance: Sure, but it would seem to require massive doses. Not sure how realistic that is.”
So to recap.
In the laboratory large [massive is an understatement] amounts of inactivated [dead] virus particles which are not deactivated [ie rendered useless for antibody production are gathered together and injected into people [and no we would not want to use ral life alive virus in the mix]
In this theory small amounts of dead viral material somehow get ingested and cause enough of an antibody reaction to cause natural immunity.
It just does not happen due to the large numbers, small numbers problem.
The shed virus attaches to every bit of dust dirt and grime it lands on. Any thing active on it as a protein is activated and it breaks down, disassembles and becomes unusable as an antigen.
It just cannot work to cause immunity as it is no longer recognizable as a viral protein.
The virus can still be detected in waste and water supplies.
Surely this shows it is around in large enough amounts?
The method of detection is usually polymerase chain reactions PCA.
One bit of virus, like a needle in a haystack, can be found by this arcane technology.
That one bit triggers an avalanche of chain reproduction and it is the testing finding millions of copies of the chain from 1 antigen bit that enables the chain to be detected.
In real life the particles that might be useful are homeopathic. undetectable by the body and its immune system.
Tom Scharf,
Maybe, maybe not. Given the heterogeneous nature of the spread of the original strain where most infections were the result of a few superspreaders, the 20% caused 80% thing, the herd immunity threshold could be quite low, possibly as low as 20%. Then there were lockdowns, masking and social distancing. That had to have some effect on the rate of spread.
Δ, OTOH, apparently has a much higher Ro than previous strains and if it spreads from everybody instead of a relatively few, then the HIT becomes a lot higher. Combine that with much less mitigation activity and it should substantially increase the available pool of susceptibles compared to less transmissible strains.
angech,
If they are undetectable by the immune system, then how are they useful? Real question.
People become allergic to quite simple chemicals, so something as complex as a protein is not necessary to trigger an immune response that results in, say, contact dermatitis.
Tom Scharf,
I haven’t read the article you linked, but I’m betting that the variable immune response to infection is based on serum antibody testing, not actual reinfections. If so, I’m not impressed.
Tom Scharf (Comment #206430): “FL didn’t run out of susceptible bodies in the first several waves and they declined pretty quickly as well. FL is likely around 90% herd immunity now but I’m not sure that is enough.”
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Indeed. Herd immunity depends on the immune being unable to transmit the virus. So the vaccinated might not count, or might only count for a little while.
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Tom Scharf: “I still look at the UK (sustained still and about the same death rate) and Israel (declining now, lower death rate) and remain unable to say much with confidence about the future.”
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It is starting to look like predicting what the virus will do next has similar odds as winning the lottery. 🙂
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DeWitt Payne (Comment #206433): “Given the heterogeneous nature of the spread of the original strain … the herd immunity threshold could be quite low, possibly as low as 20%.”
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Except that there were multiple waves of the original strain, which put paid to that theory.
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DeWitt Payne: “Then there were lockdowns, masking and social distancing. That had to have some effect on the rate of spread.”
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But they were no notable differences before and after such measures or between places that tool such measures and places that did not. And the many predicted superspreader events (FL beaches, Sturgis, Thanksgiving, Christmas, Super Bowl, college football games, …) all turned out to be false alarms. So any effect was minor.
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DeWitt Payne: “Δ, OTOH, apparently has a much higher Ro than previous strains”.
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That is actually a circular argument. It is based on the fact that delta surged in the presence of the vaccine, but a more reasonable explanation is that the vaccine did little to stop transmission. Data on relative incidence of delta and alpha or from growth curves in places with low vax indicate that dleta is somewhat more transmissive, 20% to 50%, IIRC.
Mike M,
The graph of vaccination rate by age over time in the UK helps to explain why the delta surge continues, yet the death rate per case remains low (under 1 death per 200 confirmed cases). https://www.bbc.com/news/health-55274833
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The UK’s overall vaccination rate is very modestly higher than in the States, but the vaccination rate for those over 50 is much higher than in the States… somewhere around 90% of those over 50 have been vaccinated. There remains in the UK plenty of people who can spread the virus, just not so many who will likely die doing it. The vaccines save lives.
I think the vaccine does save lives. It does not stop the virus from spreading, but it will likely stop it from killing you.
DeWitt Payne (Comment #206434)
” In real life the particles that might be useful are homeopathic. undetectable by the body and its immune system.”
“If they are undetectable by the immune system, then how are they useful? Real question.”
Sorry.
Being ex medical comes with a lot of biases built in by the system.
When I said the particles that might be useful were homeopathic I meant that they were not useful at all.
The reason they are not useful is that they are not detectable by the immune system in a way that is capable of activating an immune response.
I could digress on homeopathy, which works on a principle of belief and similarity.
Unfortunately belief and science are incompatible at times.
Suffice to say the immune system detects many substances in trace amounts but does not respond unless the system is alerted by an algorithm of consistently repeated or prolonged doses of detectably large amounts of chemical substances foreign to the body.
“People become allergic to quite simple chemicals, so something as complex as a protein is not necessary to trigger an immune response that results in, say, contact dermatitis.”
This is testing my understanding big time. Thanks!
A protein is certainly something that we both agree can trigger an immune response, and so it should.
We would both agree that the dead viral particles or subsets thereof are protein and in large enough repeated amounts would trigger an immune reaction.
The question is not whether simple chemicals trigger an immune response but why these protein particles as surmised by this study are not capable in my eyes of triggering an immune response.
I might be wrong.
My reasons already given cast a lot of doubt.
Hyperbole and not meaning to be rude, I just think laterally.
If virus shedding gave rise to a lot of inactivated particles capable in very small doses of mediating immunity in a large [detectable] number of people then we could use a shroud of Turin treatment.
Simply collect all the sheets from the infected patients rooms and after 4 weeks distribute them to uninfected people to sleep in and pass on after a week. Each sheet should immunise 10 people.
angech
I think it’s really unwise for public health advocates to say things that sound like they are willing to distort conversations toward incorrect ideas out of fear of what anti-vaxers might argue is a reason not to take vaccines. People who don’t want to take vaccines don’t want to take them. And public health people saying things that makes public health communicators, doctors and so on sound untrustworthy is much more likely to make anti-vaxxers hardnen their opinion than hearing that some environmental situations might happen to confer immunity or resistance to some fraction of the population.
I think they said resistance which is somewhat different.
“People become allergic to quite simple chemicals, so something as complex as a protein is not necessary to trigger an immune response that results in, say, contact dermatitis.”
This is testing my understanding big time. Thanks!
Do people become allergic to simple chemicals ? No?
People become allergic to proteins in their own bodies , Auto immune reactions.
People are allergic to foodstuffs but nearly all I can think of are proteins, not simple chemicals
Peanuts, mango, etc.
Some Renal Auto immune disease is when an antibody to a throat pathogen causes antibodies that react to proteins in our own kidneys.
Allergies to dyes and coloring’s are presumably protein.
Allergies to latex [rubber] extremely common are to a protein, eg not a simple chemical in the bathmat.
Perfumes are mainly protein.
Sugar intolerance, fructose and lactose intolerance.They are organic constructs, not what I would call simple chemicals.
There are metal allergies.
Poorly understood. The metal probably reacts with skin proteins forming complex allergens and stays in the body a long time as it is not broken down by the bodies other natural non immunogenic mechanisms and is able to stay long enough to activate the immune system
Aspirin 81 mg and clot prevention in COVID.
https://www.jpost.com/health-and-wellness/aspirin-lowers-risk-of-covid-new-findings-support-preliminary-israeli-trial-681127
angech,
My dear wife (PhD, clinical chemistry) for many years developed environmental test kits based on monoclonal antibodies. The monoclonals were produced by exposing lab animals (rats, IIRC) to a targeted material, the harvesting antibody producing cells, and isolating a single cell line which produced antibodies to the target materials, and cloning that cell line. Antibodies harvested from the monoclonal cell lines were then chemically attached to the surfaces of sub-micron polymer beads (‘latex particles’). When a trace amount of the originally targeted material came in contact with the coated polymer particles, the antibodies on the surfaces would bind to the target material, and the particles would aggregate. (There were several other strategies using monoclonals, but all involved the antibody binding to the target.) Being monoclonals, the targeting was very specific. Serial dilutions of samples, each tested for reaction with the monoclonal antibody, allowed crude determination of the quantity of the targeted material present.
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The point of which is: The targeted materials were all “small molecules” like pesticides, herbicides, and the like, NOT proteins. For certain, antibodies against small molecules not only are common, they are commonly used in diagnostic testing. You are mistaken that only proteins can raise antibodies.
Asprin, good for what ails you: headaches, fever, stroke, heart disease, and now covid:19. https://m.jpost.com/health-and-wellness/aspirin-lowers-risk-of-covid-new-findings-support-preliminary-israeli-trial-681127
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Maybe with Merck’s new oral antiviral, monoclonal antibodies given once IV, and an aspirin every 8 hours, covid will soon become a very rarely fatal illness. But still, get vaccinated, no matter what, or you will suffer the endless rage of very woke Karens.
P-E Harvey,
Sorry, I didn’t see your post about aspirin.
SteveF
“The targeted materials were all “small molecules†like pesticides, herbicides, and the like, NOT proteins. For certain, antibodies against small molecules not only are common, they are commonly used in diagnostic testing. You are mistaken that only proteins can raise antibodies.”
Perhaps.
Looking further into it the type of testing you are talking about
[monoclonal antibodies and ELIZA tests?? etc]
might only be able to be done in conjunction with something called coating antigens.Which have to be proteins.
Your targeted materials were only detectable because they had already formed complexes or agglutinates with a coa=ting material or had a coating material included in the test which, once it stuck to the pesticide was then able to activate the antibody which then caused the latex particles to sticjk together.
Non- protein Pesticides, herbicides are possibly haptens.
Haptens are small molecules that elicit an immune response only when attached to a large carrier such as a protein; the carrier may be one that also does not elicit an immune response by itself (in general, only large molecules, infectious agents, or insoluble foreign matter can elicit an immune response in the body)
Antibodies do not form against small molecules per se,
only when they attach to proteins in a way that the protein/small molecule agglomerate is considered allergenic.
This makes sense because our bodies are full of small molecules urea, oxalate etc that do not cause allergic reactions.
Not because the cells are smart but because they do not combine with proteins to cause true antigens.
I mentioned metal allergies before and antibody testing is done for metals but it turns out the reaction is caused by the metals combining with proteins to form an antigen, not the metal itself.
Wiki nickel allergy is caused by nickel metal ions penetrating the skin and binding to skin proteins.
This was a a relief because antibody reaction is about identifying foreign proteins, not small molecules
SteveF,
That’s fine. I put this reference in order to elicit comments from people like you.
Looks like an observational trial with aspirin which brings with it all the usual problems. People who have to take aspirin are a self selected group. This should be able to be studied pretty easily though and replicated with real testing so the truth should come out. I’m always hesitant to believe these kind of things.
Matt Taibbi’s latest rant on the media and Merck’s drug is pretty funny.
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The Cult of the Vaccine
“The jab” is just the latest story to be reported as mantra
https://taibbi.substack.com/p/the-cult-of-the-vaccine-neurotic
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“This was the beginning of an era in which editors became convinced that all earth’s problems derived from populations failing to accept reports as Talmudic law. It couldn’t be people were just tuning out papers for a hundred different reasons, including sheer boredom. It had to be that their traditional work product was just too damned subtle. The only way to avoid the certain evil of audiences engaging in unsupervised pondering over information was to eliminate all possibility of subtext, through a new communication style that was 100% literal and didactic. Everyone would get the same news and also be instructed, often mid-sentence, on how to respond.”
angech,
Yes, the process of generating the initial antibodies involved binding to proteins, but the antibodies that were generated were specific to the small molecules, not to the small molecule protein conjugate…. the reaction of the antibodies was to unbound small molecules, and the in-the-field tests were run on samples with no proteins added. Since common proteins do have non-specific binding to many kinds of things (including ubiquitous proteins like albumen….. very ‘sticky’ molecules) it seems to me almost certain that small molecules can elicit an immune response, even if that involves non-specific binding to proteins. Heck, lots of small molecules cause handling problems in industrial settings because upon multiple exposures people can become severely allergic to those compounds.
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I do not know the size a small molecule must reach to itself (not bound to protein) generate an immune response, but it seems likely anything in the multiple-hundreds of Daltons range would be big enough.
Tom Scharf,
Yes the vaccine Karens are bonkers….. like one commenter here noted, death alone is not punishment enough for not getting vaccinated…. the unvaccinated deserve to be flogged.
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The left is inherently evil, and its true believers consistently advocate horrible policies. Someone like Taibbi (and Glen Greenwald) seems always shocked by that evil. I can only conclude that he is remarkably unaware of the garbage that passes for ‘scholarship’ on the left, and how that garbage in the schools and universities has produced so many intolerant, detestable, and yes, evil individuals.
Even The Atlantic noted the other day everyone who has forced a vaccine mandate has not even thought about what the conditions would be for lifting that mandate. It’s pretty clear the thinking is these are indefinite forever.
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16% of home health care workers did not meet the deadline in NY for a vaccine. I bet the NYT could even find a few minorities in that bunch to take a social justice angle if they wanted, but some disparate impacts are more equal than others.
angech,
Iodoform, HCI3, can cause an allergic reaction in sensitive people. You may say that’s because it binds to some normally present protein, but to the person who is allergic, the solution is to avoid iodoform since the protein is likely always present.
Urushiol, the irritant in poison ivy is an alkylated catechol. People can become sensitized to other alkylated catechols and even catechol (1,2 dihydroxybenzene, C6H6O2) itself.
DeWitt,
You got me at poison Ivy. I took cortisone for poison Ivy earlier this year.
Steve F
Yes, the process of generating the initial antibodies involved binding to proteins, but the antibodies that were generated were specific to the small molecules, not to the small molecule protein conjugate…
Finally a bit out of my pay range I feel.
Thank you for that information.
Sen. Roger Marshall Blasts AP for Hit Piece Bashing Reality of Natural Immunity: ‘Journalistic Malpractice’
Sen. Roger Marshall (R-KS) over the weekend blasted the AP after it published a hit piece criticizing the senator for shining a light on the reality of natural immunity to the Chinese coronavirus.
“He (New York Mayor Bill de Blasio) says the city will eliminate the entrance exam given to 4-year-olds, which sees about 2,500 students admitted to the program each year. Critics say that this is too young to sort out high achievers, and that it contributes to a school system in which whites and Asian-Americans are overrepresented in elite programs.â€
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There is simply no shame now in elimination of merit programs in order to drag high achievers down. They are not trying to improve low achievers, they have simply given up. There could be some debate about how these programs are structured but they specifically call out racial disparities as the reason.
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A bigger question is why the “critics†think this could possibly change anything. It is punishment for being a high achiever. Are high achievers simply going to stop trying because a gifted program was eliminated? No, when they get tested in 4th grade or whenever the same people will be the high achievers because they have been genetically gifted and/or they work harder and/or their parents push them harder.
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Ultimately high achievers will have to abandon the public school system. The rich ones already do, and the poor Asians and others will end up having to spend their last dime on private education. Apparently de Blasio thinks Idiocracy was a documentary.
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What might actually happen though is the new mayor next month might reverse this decision immediately. We shall see. The entire thought process of competency shouldn’t matter (or doesn’t even exist) might work in a sci-fi novel of an infinitely rich world with infinite resources but this isn’t what we have.
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There is plenty to debate about education but this isn’t the fix that makes sense. It’s little wonder NYC has one of the worst and expensive education systems in America.
If history is any guide, the next mayor will chide DeBlasio for not going far enough and vow to double down. Only when things blow up in their face do they consider that maybe the outcome isn’t what they said it would be, and even then, it’s just as likely they consider this as evidence the measures didn’t go far enough.
DaveJR,
Doubling down on a failed policy is the traditional political response. After all, they know the policy was the right thing to do so if it didn’t work, they just didn’t try hard enough or didn’t spend enough money. Thomas Sowell wrote a book about it: The Vision of the Annointed: Self-Congratulation as a Basis for Social Policy.
One of the examples was sex education in the public schools. Did you know that teen pregnancy was actually declining before they declared it a crisis and decided that sex education was the solution. So, of course, teen pregnancy increased and the response was yet more sex education.
Tom Scharf
Is he going to eliminate the program or just the exam? Logically, if it’s too young to sort out high achievers (and it sort of is), then it’s to young to sort them without the exam also. Logically, that means you shouldn’t have a program that assumes kids have been sorted.
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The thing is: it’s probably not too soon to sort who is prepared for a particular level. In many cases that sorting does over represent potential high achievers because given the same “raw talent” exposure to material will result in learning and better test outcomes. This is because more intelligent kids end up “prepared” with less investment of time and effort. But, admittedly, the test will actually sort by preparation.
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I don’t consider sorting on preparation a bad thing.
Will some kids who were not prepared by their parents later move on the be high achievers out of sheer brilliance? Yep. That will happen. Will some kids whose innate talents “justify” them being in a gifted program miss out on getting into it because their parents didn’t “prep” them. Yep. That both answers are “yep” is not a good justification for not sorting at all. Because, if “right” is defined as “some sort of innate brilliance” there is no alternative that will get 100% of the “right” kids into the program either! The test is the best way to sort to create groups of kids who can grasp the same material and move at the same speed right now. The test maximizes the educational benefits of sorting overall.
Tom
If the city implements a test at grade level 4, private tutoring will explode for passing that test. So will weekend and evening tutoring centers for kids in k-3.
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Private elementary schools are also going to benefit. The Indian community especially may follow the Catholics of past eras and establish their own schools. Families with “above average” kids– even some who would not have to gotten into the test-only public school will send their kids to those schools. (I would. If my kid was at the 60% percentile– so not “good enough” for Stuyvesent, I’d send them to an India run school if I could afford it!!)
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The politicians will fail to achieve what they consider ‘equity’. Public school teachers will, in the end, be annoyed that they only get the…. ehrm…. non-cream. They’ll complain the other schools only do better because they get “the cream”. (You know the group that can’t be identified. 🙂 )
My understanding is “they” are trying to eliminate gifted programs in early education in the hope that those who are gifted and have bad early training (parents) get some time to catch up before the sorting occurs. NYC has been trying to eliminate dual track trajectories for a while now. While this all seems reasonable I think it will be ineffective for the reasons stated and I also believe this is really just window dressing on a transparent push for affirmative action / social equity initiative.
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Why are groups behind in college? High school. Why are groups behind in high school? Middle school. Why are groups behind in middle school? Elementary school. … Kindergarten … Pre K. That they just can’t even open the door to a discussion on parenting and dysfunctional educational culture is why this continues to be farce IMO. I’m completely open to a discussion on over parenting and too much focus on academics in a * child’s * life.
Tom Scharf
Sure. I grasp the “idea”. But it won’t work. The ones with “bad early training” are mostly kids whose families will not start giving them training after school starts. In some cases, those are kids whose families are disfunctional. School time is rarely enough to let them bloom to reach the top 1% on a test by 3rd grade.
Meanwhile, other kids will continue to get outside school training. What this is going to do is make the sorting effect worse because kids whose families spend on formal outside school training will have an even bigger edge. They will start out-testing 3rd graders who are more “naturally” talented whose parents are merely functional but don’t enroll them in after school programs.
They are going to find this step favors the heavily trained even more.
The elimination of gifted programs is just standard socialist philosophy. “To each according to his needs….” DeBlazio is a straight out socialist, so his effort to eliminate gifted and talented programs is perfectly consistent with his philosophy. Socialists pretty much all refuse to admit that some kids are just dumb, and some are just smart. Parental support, training, preparation, effort will improve outcome for any kid, of course, but that doesn’t make the dumb ones any smarter, just better trained.
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When testing is eliminated or severely dumbed down, which is what DeBlazio is doing, that just makes it more difficult to identify which kids are smart and which are not….. and that is the whole point. It is the same with many colleges and universities which have vowed to eliminate consideration of standardized test scores (SAT, ACT) in admission decisions….. even while those test scores are the very best indicator of academic success. The goal is not promoting and rewarding excellence…. it is ensuring equal outcomes for students with very different capabilities.
Ultimately they will need to dumb down the college classes so everyone can pass them. I think that is already happening. It is more than a little ironic that the merit testing system was put in for transparency and to prevent elites taking advantage of a system that others don’t understand. Academia is becoming more corrupt.
Tom Scharf,
To paraphrase DeWitt: Like entropy, the intellectual corruption of academia always increases.
“Transitory” inflation continues to go up. I trust economists prediction of the future as much as I trust covid models. It’s almost like they don’t fully understand large complex non-linear systems.
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Inflation Remained High in September
https://www.wsj.com/articles/us-inflation-consumer-price-index-september-2021-11634074529
The basic idea is that parents must give up their privilege to achieve equitable schooling.
https://www.mathedleadership.org/docs/resources/positionpapers/NCSMPositionPaper19.pdf
That “culture” is going to be difficult to dispel because part of being smarter is usually learning faster. But even apart from that “they already learned it” should generally mean “time to move them on to the next topic”.
It’s going to be difficult to successfully reeducate teachers to not notice that some kids in the class get 100s on their tests after much less instruction that other kids (who may never even get 50s.)
“Communicate” is doing a lot of work here. You can “communicate” this all you want. But if your kid has to just sit and wait to take algebra they will not remain competitive with kids who got to take algebra at a younger age.
These evidently need to magically appear. And teachers will need to somehow manage to present and distribute all these different materials– each to the appropriate student– in the brief time in the class.
And guess what? The teacher needs to decide who to give what in each classroom.
That’s just a bare claim.
So, who is going to get the “differentiated materials” aimed for the lower ability students. Isn’t that still positioned as “not as smart” even if you are in the same classroom? Kids aren’t blind. They’ll see this and know.
What the heck is a “culturally responsive pedagogy” in math? I’m guessing no one knows. Notice the statement doesn’t say using culturally responsive pegagogies helps specifically “in math”.
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I have no doubt that using math tasks that are “group worthy and rich with detail ” is a good idea. But honestly, it’s not entirely clear what that means.
I’m absolutely sure it won’t.
I bet they’ll have even bigger problems with teacher recruitment, training and retention if they detrack. 🙂
Social injustance is not why tracking exists. I grew up in a nearly 100% lily white community and our gradeschools tracked. There were white kids in the fast track and white kids in the slower track!
(1)Value judgement.
(2) Lots of kids in the “high” track are poor and not-wealthy asians.
(3)Oh. And by the way: the ones who used to be in the fast track will not be willing to give up the privilege just because that’s what you want. The will find ways around this. Tons exist.
This is the paper that “shows” you can detrack. Sure…. with tons of extra support and resources. (How this district got those funds I do not know. )
https://www.aasa.org/SchoolAdministratorArticle.aspx?id=14020
So it looks like there is an extra teacher.
An extra support class was added.
Money and resources were provided for the extra work. Students are provided extra help in their support classes.
It sounds like a success. But they did a hell of a lot more than just detrack.
Making a huge effort with really great teachers improves outcomes, but my understanding is that those improvements fade over time (they are rarely continuously sustained) and by adulthood the usual factors still dominate peer comparisons.
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I guess I can see why there are screaming matches at school board meetings if this is what is being presented. It’s is genuinely funny and one could easily mistake it for legitimate satire.
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It’s not just the teachers who know who are smart, I went to school and it took little effort to know who was bright and who wasn’t over the years. A mountainous tome of woke speak isn’t going to change the fundamentals. The privileged will certainly sacrifice other people’s kids for the cause, but they aren’t ever going to sacrifice their kids for it. Ever.
The school district does seem to be successful. Here is some data
https://data.nysed.gov/essa.php?instid=800000049383&year=2019&createreport=1®ents=1&expend=1&staffqual=1&gradrate=1
It also looks like a rather small school. A cohort of high school students who were in the district in 9th grade is 267. There are
* zero english language learners.
* zero Migrants.
* zero parents in armed forces.
* Zero in foster care.
Per pupil expenditure is $27,778 compared to $22,024 statewide. No teachers are teaching out of their subject/ field of specialization. It’s
76% white.
It’s worth nothing that Rockville Centers approach was to put all the kids in 8th grade math. This was their only detracking option because New York state requires schools to offer 8th grade math. So, the “cutting down the poppies” approach was barred them.
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They provided extra help. This is a relatively wealthy community, the school is small.
https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2021/10/13/1045485935/study-of-covid-vaccine-boosters-suggests-moderna-or-pfizer-works-best
“If you got the Johnson & Johnson vaccine as your first COVID-19 shot, a booster dose of either the Moderna or Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine apparently could produce a stronger immune response than a second dose of J&J’s vaccine. That’s the finding of a highly anticipated study released Wednesday.”
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I got my Pfizer booster today. Made an appt within one hour and one mile this time.
Tom Scharf,
“I got my Pfizer booster today. Made an appt within one hour and one mile this time.”
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Three things:
1) You are a fine and upstanding citizen (the FBI will not be after you).
2) Those who want vaccinations got them a long time ago.
3) The rest is mostly lower intestinal gas.
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I grow tired of discussion of who will/will not accept vaccination. Really, who cares? Those who will not be vaccinated are either 1) afraid that the vaccine will cause more harm than good, 2) have already had covid and are immune, or 3) refuse to accept that the Federal government can force you to accept medical care.
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It is an ugly situation, and one that is not going to go away unless the Supreme Court states clearly that forced vaccination is contrary to the Constitution.
“… unless the Supreme Court states clearly that forced vaccination is contrary to the Constitution.”
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And I think the chance of that is minimal, sad to say. The SC is populated mostly by people who don’t really much care about personal liberties. It is very strange to me, but pretty obviously true.
This detracking and equity in math is being considered in at least 22 states. In dome places they hide it by blending together subjects, and there is no separate algebra and geometry and algebra 2 to know exactly what students are being taught.
Virginia is doing this, only they will in reality be blending prealgebra, geometry, algebra 2 and keeping only the parts that are practical for people in everyday life.
I predict that after detracking, the US will fall further in international rankings of student math ability. But clearly social justice is worth far more than being competent in math and science.
Yes, obviously we want to just randomly pick citizens to design our nuclear plants, bridges, and buildings. It would be unfair to do anything different. We absolutely do not want to compare designs for competency or test those designs because we might find out one group’s output is dangerous and that might hurt their feelings.
DeWitt,
I predict the same. The reason is that I anticipate the vast majority of schools will detrack by eliminating ‘honors’. They won’t do it making “honors” the standard. One reason I think it’s going to happen that way is that they write things like this
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If the plan was to make everyone take grade algebra in the 7th or 8th grade no one would be giving up anything. The fast track kids would be on the same track as before. It’s just that the school would have a plan to move the slow ones onto that track.
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That was done at the “successful” school by paying teacher to develop the extra curricula, by paying them to stay after school to help, by adding extra teachers to “help” those struggling on the fast track and yada, yada, yada. So the slow students were able to move faster by being given extra instruction (while not forcing the ones who already got it to sit through it!)
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But the rhetoric in the detracking documents all sound like “cutting down the tall poppies” strategy. Detrack by making the fast kids go slow. If they do that, the fast kids will learn less. (Or, their parents will find other schools– online if necessary.)
This group also detracked successfully. It looks like it was done by giving the formerly remedial group double the instruction time.
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https://sc.edu/uofsc/posts/2017/07/math_tracking_rhonda-jeffries.php#.YWhqdHlOmMI
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If you are going to do it, that’s the way to do it. But, I wonder what the other students did in those 45 minutes. Was it band? French? Cheerleading practice? Loitering around study hall? Making out in the janitors closet?
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If those kids got to take an additional academic course in those 45 minutes, people are still going to howl that they continue to “get ahead”. (Which they will.)
Yes, Harrison Bergeron is the obvious strategy for succesful results. The effort required to pull off the reverse just isn’t sustainably available on the scale that’s required.
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Of course, it’s not even clear that success is an actual goal. A lot of these people seemed filled with a spiteful, jealous, hatred and I wouldn’t be at all surprised to see much backslapping among such people as US education continues to slip down the ranks. It is the overperformance of the USA they are truely interested in correcting.
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As an aside, one of the, I think, commencement speeches at Evergreen State College referred to “cutting down the tall trees”.
SteveF (Comment #206658) you wrote:
“I grow tired of discussion of who will/will not accept vaccination. Really, who cares? Those who will not be vaccinated are either 1) afraid that the vaccine will cause more harm than good, 2) have already had covid and are immune, or 3) refuse to accept that the Federal government can force you to accept medical care.â€
… and I add 4] they are selfish buttheads who don’t care about the weak and vulnerable people in society.
I got my third dose of Moderna on Monday. I had only mild systemic side effects for 48 hours. I will get the booster too, if it is recommended by my physician.
Russell
Or rather than (4) perhaps they are people who know the vulnerable can (a) get boosters and (b) shelter themselves.
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Or those vulnerable can be selfish buttheads who want to force the world to bend to their convenience so they can have fun while others bend.
The last year has seen a big drop in public school attendance as pandemic restrictions have sent parents to private schools or homeschooling. CRT nonsense will only add to that trend, as will detracking (it might work in experiments, it won’t work in general). For every parent who pulls their kids out of public school, there are many more who would like to but lack the resources.
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It seems to me that the public schools are doing a great job of recruiting parents to the school choice movement. Big changes might be in the offing.
Russell lives! I hope you are feeling a lot better about the Florida situation now. Being on the other side of “let it rip” is the right place to be. I thought the 3rd dose was the booster?
Gallup: Americans’ Trust in Media Dips to Second Lowest on Record
https://news.gallup.com/poll/355526/americans-trust-media-dips-second-lowest-record.aspx
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Dem: 68%
Ind: 31%
Rep: 11% (up a point! ha, ha)
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This alone is evidence of bias, but as we all know, and have been righteously instructed repeatedly, reality has a liberal bias.
Tom Scharf,
Confirmed cases in Florida are down by a factor of 7 from the August peak, and the trend looks like it will continue downward for at least a while. Of course, there is no rate of cases which will eliminate the shrill (and I think obviously immoral) demands for mandated vaccines. Mandates are not about risk, they are about some people controlling other people. The longer the Biden administration delays releasing the details of their mandates, the more obtuse those mandates will become. There is a delta-surge in virtually every state, and the case rate for the whole of the country is already falling. At some point the absurdity will be recognized by enough people to freighted politicians….. except Biden, because he will never run for re-election and is demented to boot.
Tom Scharf (Comment #206675) “I thought the 3rd dose was the booster?†With Moderna the booster may be a 50% dose. So me and my retired doctor buddy decided to fib a little and get a third, 100% dose of Moderna. I just embellished on my steroid intake. It was at my normal pharmacy and they know how infrequently I take steroids. They even had to look up my records because I didn’t have my vax card with me, but they were happy to accommodate.
We also wanted to avoid the crowds that will come with Moderna booster approval.
Russel,
The 50% doses aren’t out yet… right? The third full dose is being used as the booster right now. But later, they may reduce the amount to specifically have boosters.
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I’m tempted to go get an mRNA booster by lying. . .
Got a booster yesterday at CVS. Checked in online. You check a box saying you qualify, with link to CDC website, and that was as far as checking you qualify went.
Lucia, you are right. My pharmacist was eager to accept my fib…… even helped me along.
Blowing that “Natural Immunity†crap straight out of the water… I prefer to get my scientific information from actual, you know, scientists. Here’s a researcher at the Mayo Clinic on the subject. [I know it’s a Twitter feed, but it’s a double-blind, peer-reviewed Twitter feed.] https://twitter.com/vincentrk/status/1447967441380859908?s=21
The vaccine wouldn’t work if natural immunity wasn’t a thing, so…
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Ask Fauci how his HIV vaccine is going. No natural immunity. No vaccine.
DaveJR (Comment #206683)
Read the link before you comment.
The Pfizer shot has full FDA approval, you should stand a pretty good chance of having your doctor just prescribe that shot for you given the study results put out this week saying mRNA works as a better booster for J&J.
From Russel’s post:
“Given the rate of reinfections we are seeing, it is worrying that COVID doesn’t seem to produce an enduring immune response in everyone.”
What are those rates? Not specified or linked. To my knowledge we don’t even really know. Some info from KY and Israel have contradictory results. What little I have seen shows vaccinated and previously infected account for maybe 1% of all infections, and reinfections could be milder and thus less reported.
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“It’s possible that 2 vaccine doses given too close to each other may also not produce a durable secondary response.”
This is somewhat interesting as far as the UK goes. They had a much larger separation between shots and seem to have much lower death rates than Israel now.
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I agree that vaccinating the previously infected will very likely do nothing but help, but how much it helps is unknown. It is inexcusable we don’t have those answers other than hand waving. If I had already had covid I would get one dose vaccinated … voluntarily.
It is a separate question whether they should be forced to be vaccinated when they arguably have equivalent immunity already, and the public health authorities seem to have little interest in finding out for a situation ~1/3 of the US is in. I’m also more than a little concerned that there is very little dissent or discussion on this.
The CDC’s official page on reinfection. TLDR: We officially know nothing. Shameful at this point in a pandemic.
https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/your-health/reinfection.html
All the evidence I have seen shows that natural immunity is superior to vaccine induced immunity.
I have not read Russell’s link. I don’t have convenient access to twitter and when I take the trouble, I find that it is almost never worth it.
Mike,
I glanced at the tweets briefly. I gathered the argument was largely that vaccination on top of immunity due to prior infection is superior to just immunity due to prior infection. At least that’s as far as I got before I decided the tweets didn’t in fact ‘blow that natural immunity crap [straight] out of the water’ and that I was wasting my time trying to figure out Russell’s point.
Obviously you guys aren’t under the righteous spell of The Ministry of Truth:
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Google’s official answer:
“Do people who have recovered from the coronavirus disease develop immunity?
While individuals who have recovered from SARS-CoV-2 infection might develop some protective immunity, the duration and extent of such immunity are not known.â€
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We know nothing, nothing!!!!! I don’t usually like going down conspiracy road, but this sure smells like another noble lie. I’m not even sure what outcome they think they are justifying.
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It “might†develop some protective immunity? Is that what science actually says? They have no evidence of this at all? Yet somehow their conclusions on a vaccinated person’s risk of reinfection is definitive. This kind of stuff is why I am losing trust in institutions. The institutions themselves are making me lose trust. Unbelievable.
LOL.
Look, I’m just a dumb programmer from the sticks, so maybe I got this wrong. But I always thought the whole point of a vaccine was to introduce the virus (or something sufficiently similar) to the immune system so that the immune system could ‘learn’ how to fight the virus for future reference.
Yes, here; the CDC is part of the Ministry isn’t it?
There’s also the most respected World Health Organization:
DaveJR said The vaccine wouldn’t work if natural immunity wasn’t a thing, so… and I guess his point didn’t take, so I thought I’d find Ministry approved sources to support him.
This is all really common sense stuff, but. AFAICT, the only thing that makes vaccines really shine is that they can provide immunity to diseases that can cause one to become seriously ill (or dead) with a much lower probability of one becoming seriously ill (or dead). That’s it. Vaccines don’t provide more powerful immunity. The CDC link I provided:
It’s not unreasonable to suspect that the CDC thinks the closer the vaccine is to the actual virus, the better the immunity provided.
Tom scharf,
“We know nothing, nothing!!!!!”
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They don’t want to say anything which might keep people from getting vaccinated, and the only way to do that is to “not know” the relative resistance of immunity acquired from infection versus immunity from a vaccine. Of course, the best data we have (2+million people in Israel) say natural immunity from illness is far better than immunity from a vaccine, but a vaccination on top of natural immunity is better (factor of ~1.5?) than acquired immunity from infection alone. The CDC’s pronouncements about natural acquired immunity from illness are just dishonest. At this point, I expect nothing but dishonesty from them.
This recent paper says (infected+vaccinated) provides greater protection than two dose vaccinated.
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https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-021-04085-y
“While both groups retained neutralization capacity against all variants, plasma from previously infected vaccinated individuals displayed overall better neutralization capacity when compared to plasma from uninfected individuals that also received two vaccine doses, pointing to vaccine boosters as a relevant future strategy to alleviate the impact of emerging variants on antibody neutralizing activity.”
Tom scharf,
But that does’t answer the important question: how does the resistance from previous infection compare to vaccination alone?
Well, here’s a preprint that hasn’t been peer reviewed yet.
https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.08.24.21262415v1
In general prior infection provides better protection, but there are some exceptions
https://www.chop.edu/centers-programs/vaccine-education-center/vaccine-safety/immune-system-and-health
Tetanus, HPV, a few others. It’s not impossible that COVID is an exception, but all things equal it’s less likely than not.
mark bofill (Comment #206689): “I glanced at the tweets briefly. I gathered the argument was largely that vaccination on top of immunity due to prior infection is superior to just immunity due to prior infection.”
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Thanks, mark. After infection, antibodies decline but you still have immunity via immune memory. No doubt, a vaccine will then trigger that immune memory and produce a bunch of circulating antibodies. So in that sense, you might then be deemed “more immune”, at least for a time. But that does not mean that the vaccine will provide any significant extra long term protection.
If only we had a government agency tasked with answering important questions like this.
The new mayor of NYC has committed to keeping the gifted program and said “I would expand the opportunities for accelerated learning”.
In Virginia, they are planning to put everyone at algebra/geometry/algebra 2+ modeling/data analysis/stats/probability from 8th-10th grade.
At least that’s what they claim they are doing.
There have been some schools that have put everyone in honors classes.
Riverside is the name of a study that considered three schools and looked at their performance after implementing detracking at Riverside. One professor managed to figure out the actual names of the schools and demonstrated the data didn’t say what was claimed, and the school did not do well.
The parents ended up rejecting this and they got rid of the integrated math and put back tracking.
In the name of equity, some school districts have stopped grading homework. It is not fair for kids who do not have parents at home who tell them to do their homework. Also, deadlines should not be given, and test retakes should be allowed.
See the video Grading and Equity on the VA DOE Youtube channel.
Death Match: Joe Rogan vs. CNN’s Sanjay Gupta. Joe Rogan is probably in the “sane anti-vax” camp and he challenges Gupta with some interesting points. This is a rare actual discussion versus a preaching exercise from the alter on high.
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Rogan after 50 year old Gupta saying he’s not worried about a breakthrough infection: “Do you realize that what you are saying, you’re not worried, is exactly the same thing people feel about their unvaccinated children?”
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Gupta says all the expected things. At 1:20 they discuss natural immunity. Gupta: “This one surprises me … I think it’s weird 2 years into this we don’t do enough testing to know whether people still have (natural) immunity”. Gupta crazily thinks infected people get immunity.
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Rogan: “What you should do is get vaccinated, then go get covid”, ha ha. The horse dewormer stuff was pretty funny, he really gets on CNN for this. Another 3 hour marathon podcast. Spotify only unfortunately. Worth wasting some time if you are bored.
I saw some of that interview. Rogan beat the crap out of Gupta about the CNN lies about ‘horse dewormer’. Gupta sounded as much a fool as he obviously is is.
There are lots of miracle education interventions that have been oversold for decades. Extremely motivated people who really want them to work sometimes try a little too hard in the studies, perhaps to the point of cheating. They either never really worked in the first place or do not scale well (give everyone the top 1% of teachers). It’s an extremely difficult problem that will take generations to fix. People selling easy answers (busing, detracking, etc.) should mostly just be ignored. The radical people who advocate simply to stop educating and measuring are completely crazy, why anyone cares what they think is baffling. Even charter schools are mostly an illusion, they are mostly an effort to break up the hegemony of the current system to allow more experimentation. I truly feel sorry for parents who would have to send their kids to these schools that want to run an insane social engineering experiment. These thing will not happen and die on the vine 99% of the time. We shall see.
Actually if you listen to the whole thing Gupta is pretty reasonable. He is very suspicious of a lab leak for example and uses the word coverup for China’s behavior, also brings up the EcoHealth furin cleavage proposal on his own.
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He sticks to the party line for the most part because he has to. His attempt to get Rogan to vaccinate after his infection wasn’t very compelling. Rogan vs Gupta vs most people around here agree on most everything realistically, at least the parts where there isn’t a huge amount of uncertainty.
Tom Scharf,
The other problem with education studies on anything “big” is many are just nearly impossible to do cleanly. Suppose you want to find out how well “detracking” really works. In principle, you would need to decide what “detracked” vs “tracked” was. They you have to find a sizeable number schools that were all previously “tracking” in the same way. Then randomly assign half to “detrack” (with this all done in the same way– and that way should be described well enough to be able to tell they did it.) If you don’t assign randomly, you at least have to assign carefully to not predetermine the outcome.
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Then measure the outcome of interest at the schools and do a proper statistical test.
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But what you usually have are “case studies”. Worse there may be many changes made simultaneously.
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For example in the case I described above, they didn’t just detrack. (And the didn’t actually eliminate honors. The put remedial and average together.) They then added lots of resources and made formerly remedial take 2 45 minute sessions of math a day whereas the average students took 1 45 minute session.
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So was the success due to “detracking”? Or was it due to giving the formerly “remedial” twice the amount of math instruction? There is no way to tell. It could have been the first, the second or both. But the tone of the article made it sound like the success was just due to “detracking” rather than a program that had an element of detracking and a lot of other stuff too..
Tom Scharf,
“The radical people who advocate simply to stop educating and measuring are completely crazy, why anyone cares what they think is baffling.”
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It is the demand for equal outcomes which drives the ‘crazies’. It is a simple refusal to accept reality, and 100% politically motivated.
There’s no such thing as controlled testing for new education modalities. IMO, it’s all ‘that sounds good, let’s try it.’ There’s also no proper evaluation after the fact. The replacement of phonics with look-say was not based on anything rational, AFAICT. It also was a disaster. Then there was New Math. But at least with that there was the intention to actually teach mathematics.
Netflix fires an employee leaking documents who was protesting the Chapelle comedy special. Apple fires an employee leaking documents who was leading the AppleToo movement. Google has fired multiple socially disruptive employees over the past year or so. Companies are pushing back against disruptive dissent on non-company related issues. The message seems to be you won’t get specifically fired for woke stuff but you better have the employee manual memorized because you will have a target on your back.
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Companies are rediscovering why my generation didn’t allow politics at work. So far Netflix is holding up to Twitter pressure. My guess is once a few companies brave the posse there will be a tidal wave of blowback. Maybe that’s more like my fantasy, ha ha. A large percentage of the latest craziness is quite unreasonable because the permanent protesters already picked the low hanging fruit.
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What has become quite common now in media coverage are statements like “making statements seen as transphobic†and “comments by the comedian that LGBTQ advocacy groups say could incite harm against transgender peopleâ€. You have to search pretty hard to find the actual words which usually lead to some pretty overwrought interpretations. The reader is now rarely allowed to make his own judgment on the actual words, the usual media suspects instruct the reader what they should think.
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A sad sign of what has become of art critique, politics dominates the review. This is now blatantly obvious in book reviews as well:
“The Closer†was the fifth-most-watched show on Netflix. Although its Rotten Tomatoes score from critics is 43 percent, audiences gave the special a score of 96 out of 100.
Massive increases in antibody levels after booster in older healthcare workers in Israel. About 50X in 10 days, but limited by max measurement limit. See supplementary PDF. This is not surprising but just adds to the data. The question is how long those higher levels will be maintained.
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanmic/article/PIIS2666-5247(21)00272-X/fulltext
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There continues to be mixed messages from public health about the efficacy of masks but a rather unenthusiastic response to the general availability of boosters. Boosters would appear to help reduce transmission and symptomatic disease more than masks. YMMV.
It looks like they’ll be authorizing 2nd J&J shots for all J&J peeps soon. (Fingers crossed.)
China has tested a nuclear capable hypersonic glide vehicle that has some defense writers all worked up, but I don’t see the reason for panic. It can defeat anti missile systems and even warning / detection systems, but at the end of the day it seems to me that the doctrine of MAD still governs. Say China wipes us out with an undetected or late detected first strike. Our ballistic missile submarines will still retaliate. Fourteen boomers, twenty four missiles apiece, and multiple independently targeted reentry vehicles on each missile.
It’s not great news that China has this capability, but I don’t yet see why it changes much strategically.
[Edit: Oh. link.]
Yeah, I don’t see the Chinese development as a game changer. We can’t defend against it. But we can’t really defend against conventional ICBM’s either. It seem to be an implementation of the Silbervogel/X-20 idea.
Thanks Mike, I hadn’t read about the Silbervogel design. We learn something every day. Well, I do. Well, some days. 🙂
@mark bofill,
TIL (today I learned)!
CDC has published data on breakthrough case rate and death rate by vaccination status and brand of vaccination over time. Only 30% of the Country is reporting but it yields interesting numbers. eg…. Set the graph to deaths by age group and set the filter to show only ages 50-64 and 64-79. The younger age group death risk for unvaccinated is 11.33 per 100,000 and the older age group for vaccinated is 2.04 per 100,000. It also shows a small but measurable advantage to the Moderna vax over the other two brands.
“Rates of COVID-19 Cases and Deaths by Vaccination Status†https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#rates-by-vaccine-status
@RUSSEL KLIER
Great, now do it with “previously infected”.
Earle (Comment #206721) you wrote: â€Great, now do it with “previously infectedâ€.
As far as I know reinfection data is not available. I would like to credit Biden and the CDC with the wisdom to cherry pick the data it publishes so the comparison could never be made. [Perhaps Michael Mann is advising them?] But alas I think the miscreants are the state and local governments that have not recorded that data. Oh, the problems with living in a republic. If only we could have a wise central government like China.
“Increases in COVID-19 are unrelated to levels of vaccination across 68 countries and 2947 counties in the United Statesâ€
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“Vaccines currently are the primary mitigation strategy to combat COVID-19 around the world. For instance, the narrative related to the ongoing surge of new cases in the United States (US) is argued to be driven by areas with low vaccination rates [1]. A similar narrative also has been observed in countries, such as Germany and the United Kingdom [2]. At the same time, Israel that was hailed for its swift and high rates of vaccination has also seen a substantial resurgence in COVID-19 cases [3]. We investigate the relationship between the percentage of population fully vaccinated and new COVID-19 cases across 68 countries and across 2947 counties in the US..â€
..
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8481107/
Ed, high vaccination rates tend to go with lowering of restrictions which I think make that data hard to interpret when that is not factored in. It also needs to do breakdown on unvaxed versus vaxed cases. While substantial amount of young people are unvaxed, there is readily infectible pool for continuous transmission and easy routes for virus to find unvaxed in older population.
Russell Klier,
Not in the USA anyway. Israel is effectively the Phase IV trial for Pfizer and has lots of data because their health system is more organized. It helps to be smaller. But as far as the FDA, CDC and the MSM are concerned, if it didn’t happen in the US, it didn’t happen.
As an example of lousy record keeping in the US, some states don’t even report recoveries. Active cases are equal to total cases.
There’s an article in the news section of the WSJ that actually talks about infection acquired immunity as being the reason why some people don’t want to get vaccinated. There’s a lot of hand waving about why this is wrong, but very little real data. They go on about antibody levels, but don’t talk about reinfection rates.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/some-workers-want-covid-19-recovery-accepted-as-evidence-of-immunity-11634648215
Dewitt Payne “There’s an article in the news section of the WSJ that actually talks about infection acquired immunity as being the reason why some people don’t want to get vaccinated. There’s a lot of hand waving about why this is wrong, but very little real data.” Today’s USA Today also has a lot of words but not much data on reinfection.
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/health/2021/10/19/natural-infection-vaccination-which-protects-better-against-covid/6034141001/
Phil Scadden (Comment #206724): “high vaccination rates tend to go with lowering of restrictions”
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I think that is backwards of the situation in the USA. We are told that the vaccination rates are higher in blue states. And there is no question that restrictions are lower in red states.
Fauci is saying the J&J should have been a 2 dose regimen all along.
At the time he was praising J&J for being a single dose without need of too much cooling in transport and storage.
Maybe, but certainly applies in other countries. The paper is critical of vaccination as only way forward:
“In summary, even as efforts should be made to encourage populations to get vaccinated it should be done so with humility and respect. Stigmatizing populations can do more harm than good. Importantly, other non-pharmacological prevention efforts (e.g., the importance of basic public health hygiene with regards to maintaining safe distance or handwashing, promoting better frequent and cheaper forms of testing) needs to be renewed in order to strike the balance of learning to live with COVID-19 in the same manner we continue to live a 100 years later with various seasonal alterations of the 1918 Influenza virus.”
However, it isnt really tracking vaccine effectiveness in reducing hospitalizations and death, which seems to be why most countries are linking easing restrictions to vaccination rate. I’m all for better treatments and better vaccines.
J&J’s single shot regimen seemed more like an arbitrary (marketing?) choice. They were likely guessing along with the mRNA shots but people would have been better off with two J&J shots which would have been a lot closer competitor to mRNA.
WSJ: “Some health experts say disregarding immunity from prior infection when some research shows it to be durable is damaging the credibility of public-health authorities and hardening vaccine hesitancy among holdouts.”
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Some? I’m not aware of any research that shows it isn’t durable relative to vaccines. Antibody levels fade over time but I think that is common with almost all immunity.
I think the J&J single shot choice was simply that they thought 1 shot would be enough to pass approval back before the designed the first efficacy test. That tests involved 1 shot and it was enough to be approved. No one had expected vaccines to be even better.
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It was good enough and got approved. But since that time, they are testing the second shot and it improves efficacy. I don’t think there is a big “marketing” issue involved. It’s just decisions made based on probability judgements.
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People will now get their second shot. We may be able to chose J&J or an MRNA vaccine. I guess we’ll know in a week or two.
Our government working diligently to generate the data needed to make rational and informed decisions
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https://www.osha.gov/coronavirus/faqs#collapse-vaccine
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OSHA
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Are adverse reactions to the COVID-19 vaccine recordable on the OSHA recordkeeping log?
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“ DOL and OSHA, as well as other federal agencies, are working diligently to encourage COVID-19 vaccinations. OSHA does not wish to have any appearance of discouraging workers from receiving COVID-19 vaccination, and also does not wish to disincentivize employers’ vaccination efforts. As a result, OSHA will not enforce 29 CFR 1904’s recording requirements to require any employers to record worker side effects from COVID-19 vaccination at least through May 2022. We will reevaluate the agency’s position at that time to determine the best course of action moving forward.â€
Robert Malone the doc who designed the technique for making mRNA vaccines has a number of serious concerns about the vaccines. For instance, at 2:50 of this video he says spike proteins were designed to properly get into needed cells but not designed to be safe even though it is well known that spike proteins have toxicities. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K4obw7bdEVg&t=1221s
In a different video he states that the spike proteins are known to be going places where they don’t belong. https://trialsitenews.com/dr-robert-malone-inventor-of-mrna-technology-discusses-the-spike-protein-interview/ (skip the first 15 minutes of this)
He also states that there has been very little human testing of the proteins. Later, I will go into more detail about his serious concerns about the safety of the vaccines, including the possibility that the vaccines could ultimately disable the immune systems ability to fight the virus.
To me the bottom line is that there is virtually no reason to vaccinate healthy people under 30 [because they are at such low risk) and that there are serious, scientifically valid reasons not to get vaccinated unless you are markedly in danger from the virus.
Realize many people don’t like videos, so when I get time, I will post the point in time where he makes important points. He is in no sense an anti-vaccine ideologue.
Tom Scharf (Comment #206731)“I’m not aware of any research that shows it isn’t durable relative to vaccines.â€
This research scientist at the Mayo Clinic says natural immunity is a crap-shoot. Sometimes the infections confer long term immunity and sometimes not. This stuff is above my paygrade but I haven’t seen anyone dispute him.
Vincent Rajkumar:
“When first exposed to an antigen, virus or vaccine, the immune system produces a primary immune response. On exposure to the same antigen again, it produces a better, bigger, and more durable secondary response. Basic immunology. Sometimes the first infection gives a long enough exposure to the antigen to stimulate the secondary response. Sometimes not. Depends on the virus and duration of infection.†https://twitter.com/VincentRK/status/1447967448683139078?s=20
https://microbiologynotes.com/differences-between-primary-and-secondary-immune-response/
JDOhio,
Thanks for giving a synopsis of the video instead of just a link. The thing that is generally annoying is when someone write “Person X writes about Y. [link to two hour video or podcast]”.
RUSSELL KLIER (Comment #206735): “Sometimes the first infection gives a long enough exposure to the antigen to stimulate the secondary response. Sometimes not.”
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I suspect that depends on how you define “infection”. If you define it as having had a positive PCR test, then it may not produce an immune response. The PCR tests likely give many false positives and definitely give many meaningless positives. But if you define infection as a positive antibody test, then it should reliably produce a durable immune response.
Mike M. (Comment #206737)
Mike did you read the article referenced? It says there are two types- Primary and Secondary Immune Response. Primary Immune Response is weaker and shorter term. Secondary Immune Response is more robust and longer term. To get Secondary Immune Response requires either a reinfection after a month or a longer more complicated initial sickness.
This stuff is above my pay grade but it makes sense to me. I wonder if the J&J ‘one and done’ vax is starting to fail now because of this principle?
The referenced article- “Differences between Primary and Secondary Immune Responseâ€
https://microbiologynotes.com/differences-between-primary-and-secondary-immune-response/
RUSSELL KLIER (Comment #206738): “Mike did you read the article referenced?”
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What article? There was just a link to a twitter feed.
Oh. There were two links run together. One is a summary of elementary immunology. I don’t see the point.
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The important thing is that you have immune memory that can respond when you are exposed to the pathogen in future. Antibodies are temporary, immune memory can be permanent. Just because you don’t have antibodies does not mean you are not immune.
Russell Klier,
Your Mayo Clinic response is purely speculation and hand waving. It says precisely nothing about COVID-19. ‘Sometimes’ being a key waffle word. If infection with SARS-CoV-2 did not reliably produce immunity, then why were there only a few reinfections reported during most of the pandemic before the vaccines became available? The data from, for example, North and South Dakota before the Delta variant arrived, looks much like a classic SEIR infection rate curve.
I don’t know squat about immunology. But unless you can prove Covid is somehow different from the antigens in the article, I’m sticking with this Mayo Clinic guy. He says sometimes an individual develops long term secondary immunities and sometimes they do not, depending on a lot of stuff, including how long and severe the individual’s case was. https://twitter.com/VincentRK/status/1447967448683139078?s=20
and:
https://microbiologynotes.com/differences-between-primary-and-secondary-immune-response/
Russell Klier (Comment #206741): “I don’t know squat about immunology.”
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Indeed.
What is this “secondary immunity” you are going on about? A secondary immune *response* is what happens when a person with immune memory re-encounters an antigen. That immune memory results from a primary immune response to an unfamiliar antigen.
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Russell Klier: “But unless you can prove Covid is somehow different from the antigens in the article”
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????????????
I am claiming that the Wuhan virus acts like other antigens. There is quite a lot of evidence for that.
https://twitter.com/VincentRK/status/1447967448683139078?s=20
And
https://microbiologynotes.com/differences-between-primary-and-secondary-immune-response/
The two links I keep posting explains primary and secondary.
Russell,
I agree and disagree. Natural immunity likely has move variability than the vaccine, but they also haven’t proven natural immunity is weaker than the vaccine. A stronger dose of the virus probably gets you a better immune response, but also gets you sicker.
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As always my point is that we have 120M test subjects in the US where this could be tested and tracked and we wouldn’t have to worry about competing theories. Just inexcusable.
Florida was #49 out of 50 in covid cases per capita yesterday. Alas it is unlikely we will overtake Hawaii anytime soon. I think our delta debt has been paid for now. Enjoy it while you got it people! There have been a few sporadic predictions in the media about the future but for the most part everyone is just in wait and see and hope mode.
There is a cost associated with an immune system response, you know. It’s not as simple as ‘heightened immune response == GOOD”.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5786166/
Makes sense. I’d think if it was free, having heightened immune responses to all pathogens all the time would be a survival trait.
[Edit: In other words, our immune system wouldn’t have to ‘remember’, it’d just produce all the antibodies all the time.]
Tom Scharf,
“Florida was #49 out of 50 in covid cases per capita yesterday.”
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Delta has infected most who can be and so is declining. Will never reach zero, but right now it is still trending strongly downward. Deaths look to be 18 days behind cases. Returned to FL today. Have not yet seen a mask.
mark bofill,
“Edit: In other words, our immune system wouldn’t have to ‘remember’, it’d just produce all the antibodies all the time.”
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There is a limited carrying capacity in blood plasma for IgG (or for any dissolved polymer). Too much and your plasma would become as thick as cold honey. Antibodies in the blood stream decline because keeping memory cells instead of IgG is the only practical way to guard against the return of the very many pathogens we encounter.
Thanks Steve. My point is just that the heightened, longer term immune response from a secondary infection/exposure may well provide better protection against a specific pathogen, to the overall detriment of the organism. It might be that the organism would be better off not incurring the cost. If the second exposure is avoidable, for example.
The obsessive viewpoint — do anything and everything to minimize COVID — might not be the best overall plan.
mark bofill,
“The obsessive viewpoint — do anything and everything to minimize COVID — might not be the best overall plan.”
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Sure. We are all going to die from something, and the burden on our immune systems to absolutely maximize resistance to covid has to have a cost in resistance to other things (like cancer for example). The huge majority of people who die, even at the peak of the covid pandemic, die from something else, not from covid. The average age at death due to covid is very similar to average age of death for everything else. That alone tells me the covid pandemic has made people lose sight of relative death risks. Which is not unique to covid: every “unusual” risk factor (hurricanes, tornadoes, lightning, plane crashes, etc) seems to make people lose sight of relative risks. You need only see what happens to the inventory of bottled water in Florida when there is even a *slight* potential for a hurricane to see this play out in real time.
marc boffil
I think this manifests as “a fever”.
The thing is: you get sick.
Common increased resources include “chicken soup”.
~grins~
Thanks Lucia.
I take it you disagree with my idea that heightened immune response is not always necessarily good, or that my argument is not applicable to this instance (this instance being Russell’s argument that secondary immune response is … I don’t know exactly. What we should be shooting for in treatment I think is what he’s getting at)?
I don’t know. What I’m thinking could certainly be wrong. But it sounds to me like the characteristics of secondary immune response means your body ‘realizes’ it didn’t beat the infection last time and is hunkering down for a protracted battle against a specific pathogen. I suspect that isn’t free. It might be as I think Lucia suggests that it’s simply a matter of fever and an increased consumption of chicken soup, maybe that’s the limit of the cost. But it might be more than that, too. I guess at this point I’m speculating as well, I’d have to learn more about what happens during a secondary immune response.
Shrug.
[Edit: It costs energy if nothing else. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/9374803/ Maybe it’s cheap enough that it’s a non-issue in general.]
mark boffil,
On the contrary, I agree that heightened immune system operating all the time is not necessarily good. Evolutionary fitness benefits from something that can go on and off.
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Raised body temperature and fever is not good. Raising it too high fries your brain. (Having big brains is, evidently, on of the reasons, we have lower body temperature than other animals.) Through most of history and for most animals, needing more calories and nutrients is also not good. You don’t want the body to activate these defenses 24/7 just to ward off things “just in case”.
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I just laughed at the sort of “generic” way of saying things. I think those are examples.
Thanks Lucia! 🙂
So, I think the devils in the details. There’s some degree of immunity that’s worth acquiring during a pandemic, I certainly don’t dispute that. I’ve been vaccinated, two shots of Moderna spaced I forget how many weeks apart. The ‘costs’ of that seemed worth the benefits to me. It might be that in general two vaccinations spaced out in time have minimal costs and high benefits, I got no quarrel with that either. I just wanted to tap the breaks in case we were headed off the cliff with respect to jacking up immune responses. I’ll freely admit that I don’t know that we were headed there in the discussion; I don’t know exactly where we were going.
On that happy note I’ll shush again.
While opinion on whether the benefits of leaving fever vs treating it have been in dispute for decades, it appears that “overall beneficial” seems to be winning, unless the fever is causing actual issues, of course.
DaveJR,
Mark’s issue has to do with whether it’s beneficially to have everything about your immune system cranked up when you are not infected. That is: running on “high” in anticipation of encountering something. Even if the fever works to help clear the infection (and I think it does) it’s still not a good thing to happen when you aren’t infected. I think it’s more adaptive to have your body be able to turn on defenses when needed, not carry the burden of running them all the time.
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Granted, if we had a higher body temperature we evidently couldn’t get leprosy. But our lower body temperature evidently helps spare our large brains. So… there’s that.
Lucia, Does yesterday’s approval mean you can finally get your booster? I thought you had been waiting for it ….Mix and match is approved too.
The brain is reported to consume about 20 watts of energy continuously (awake or asleep), which is about 20% of the total for the entire body. Were it not for a generous flow of blood, there could be heat dissipation issues. But blood flow is >900 ml per minute, which means with no external heat loss, the blood would warm by about 0.3 C while passing through the brain.
Brain tissue is rapidly damaged if it reaches 42C (107.6F,) but 41C (105.8F) or a bit lower can cause seizures, which themselves can cause brain damage.
There are all sorts of autoimmune disorders that possibly result from an overactive immune system. That includes the cytokine storm that likely killed most of the victims of the 1918 flu and was killing COVID-19 victims until they started giving them steroids.
Here’s what I think is an interesting quote from a (free) financial newsletter I get. The subject was the Fed and how they’re much more worried about unemployment than inflation at the moment. It’s sort of a rerun of the 1970’s with the Arthur Burns Fed:
To which I posted the comment that the corollary to this view is that if something bad does happen, it must be someone’s fault. For almost anything COVID-19 related in the US, that’ person is DJT. See also climate change.
Best booster study to date. Pfizer, U.S., Brazil and South Africa, Delta time period.
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10,000 people all two dose vaccinated, double blind, half given a booster, half given a placebo.
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https://www.wsj.com/articles/pfizer-biontech-covid-19-booster-shot-was-95-6-effective-in-large-trial-companies-say-11634823482
“Researchers found 109 cases of symptomatic Covid-19 among study subjects who received a placebo shot, compared with five cases in people who took the vaccine, resulting in 95.6% efficacy, the companies said.”
“On average, the people received a booster dose 11 months after their second dose.”
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That is symptomatic covid improvement * over a two dose vaccine *, not the unvaccinated.
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Other details not yet published, such as protection against severe disease (likely good for both) and how long the booster patients were studied. Nobody knows how long the boosted protection against symptomatic covid will last, but it definitely provides some significant degree of protection from infection.
DeWitt,
I agree that there is an irrational degree of “human determinism” belief out there. I think a lot of people are very uncomfortable with random acts of nature being a source of problems, they really like to have someone to direct their anger at.
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There are large numbers of economists out there and only a rare few predicted the 2008 market crash, but all of them can confidently explain it in hindsight. I doubt very seriously the Fed really knows what it is doing. It’s a good thing to have smart people try to figure it out, but it is folly to believe they are omnipotent, and I lose confidence in them when they are a little too self assured (e.g. transitory inflation).
The experts face the problem that facing the problem can cause the problem. I think a large economic collapse is just a butterfly’s wingflap away.
Russel,
It should mean I can. I went to Walgreen’s site to see if their page for getting Covid vaxs is updated. 🙂
Economists seems to believe saying inflation causes inflation. I’d rather they don’t get into behavioral economics when reporting data where their biases start to show. Queue up the usual “If we elect candidate X then it will be economic catastrophe” open letters every election season. Then their analysis of the real time situation changes depending on who is in office. National debt only matters when the other party is in office, otherwise government should spend freely (and get credit it for all the “free” stuff).
Tom Scharf,
I think I can believe that inflationary expectations could accelerate an underlying trend. But I also believe that Milton Friedman was correct when he said that: “Inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon in the sense that it is and can be produced only by a more rapid increase in the quantity of money than in output.â€
But simply looking at some monetary measure is not enough. The velocity of money is apparently equally important, specifically the product of money and velocity. Some of the latest thinking is that debt depresses velocity, which is why inflation has been somewhat delayed.
The huge increase in money supply over the last decade or so from quantitative easing has not produced the inflation predicted by monetary theory. I wonder if that might be due to the widespread lack of expectation of inflation. In other words, maybe the expectation of inflation combined with loose monetary policy produces inflation. Take away either, and inflation does not pick up steam. Increasing the money supply allows inflation but does not drive inflation, like giving a lot of rope to a horse that has no desire to run. As DeWitt points out, it might just decrease the velocity of money.
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If that is so and if the public starts to expect inflation, the inflationary horse might start to run. The big increase in money supply is still hanging around, so there is lots of slack in the rope. If the velocity of money starts to increase, there might be no way to rein it in. Uh-oh.
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Maybe that is why Yellen and company are desperate to suppress the expectation of inflation.
It just keeps getting worse for EcoHealth, these people need to be given a level 10 investigation. Read the letter.
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Th NIH just sent a letter to Congress saying EcoHealth violated the terms of it’s contract and did conduct “limited” GOF experiments at Wuhan, adding spike proteins to coronaviruses in humanized mice that got sicker.
https://twitter.com/R_H_Ebright/status/1450947395508858880?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1450996489862459394%7Ctwgr%5E%7Ctwcon%5Es3_&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.foxnews.com%2Fpolitics%2Fnih-acknowledges-us-funded-gain-of-function-wuhan-lab-despite-faucis-denials
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This is certainly the NIH covering it’s butt, but could be the start of a more forceful probe into EcoHealth. They are still dissembling that the goal of the experiments was not to make a more lethal virus, it only accidentally happened. This is the hand waving they use to say this isn’t GOF. it’s ridiculous. That they organized a latter to call a lab leak theory a conspiracy is not aging well. The Darth Vader of virology was part of the WHO team to investigate the origins???
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The US may very well be tied up in a lab leak that caused a pandemic. Ugh.
Tom wrote: “They are still dissembling that the goal of the experiments was not to make a more lethal virus, it only accidentally happened.”
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I’m not sure what they’re saying the goals actually were, but ISTM that they couldn’t carry out what I perceive to be the goals (vaccine research, dangerous evolution etc) without “accidentally” making more lethal strains. I suppose the null hypothesis insists that the outcome of most experiments is just a fortuitous “accident”.
DeWitt Payne (Comment #206767)
I agree that to have price inflation, the money supply has to increase. The Austrian school of economists refer to inflation as the increase in the money supply and not price inflation. I also judge that how we measure price inflation can be somewhat arbitrary. Gauging home price inflation is controversial as is exclusion of equity prices.
I have not posted here for sometime as I have been very busy with family and other matters. I drop in from time to time to read posts dealing with Covid-19 – I think Lucia’s site has some informative posts and discussion on that topic. I have been writing up a summary of my analysis Covid-19 cases as a dependent variable with multiple explanatory variables. I plan to provide a link here when I am finished.
I recently received my Covid-19 booster (Pfizer) and flu (senior dosage) shots at the same time with no after effects. Anecdotally, a niece of mine had Covid-19, was then vaccinated for it and subsequently got it a second time. I am wondering if this rare occurrence had something to do with the viral load as she was taking care of her daughter while she was infected with Covid-19.
This article: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7744920/
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suggests a genetic chimera of the receptor binding domain (RBD) from the Pangolin SARS spike protein with the remainder of RaTG13 virus would be as efficient in binding to human AEC2 as COVID-19.
This article: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-021-21006-9#Tab2
suports that notion. The authors note:
They demonstrate that the binding of the pangolin RBD to human ACE2 is virtually identical to covid-19 virus. The authors never actually come out and suggest that a lab generated chimera with RaTG13 generated the covid-19 virus, but that is the clear implication of the article. Make the chimera, let it grow for a year or two in humanized mice, and presto: covid-19? Sounds more and more plausible to me.
“EcoHealth failed to report this finding right away, as required by the terms of the grantâ€
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For a document that was probably reviewed carefully at the highest levels this is rather non-specific. “Not right away” likely means “not reported at all”.
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The NYT’s take on this revelation (the URL is more enlightening, ha ha):
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/21/science/bats-covid-lab-leak-nih.html
“The N.I.H. also sent Representative Comer a final progress report that EcoHealth Alliance submitted to the agency in August.
In the report, the researchers describe finding that WIV1 coronaviruses engineered to carry spike proteins were more virulent. They killed infected mice at higher rates than did the WIV1 virus without spikes from the other coronaviruses.”
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This is a smoking gun for GOF research on coronaviruses at Wuhan. Fauci needs to change his language or suffer the warranted credibility loss, and I thought Rand Paul was being overly theatrical.
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They assert that the genetic makeup of their specific experiments are different enough that it isn’t a direct source of covid. Perhaps this is true, but IMO an organization that essentially covered up their GOF experiments for almost 2 years cannot be trusted to also not destroy any direct evidence if they did generate the original strain in their lab work. And nobody has access to the raw data in Wuhan.
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I have moved from not really knowing one way or the other to thinking it is a probability it was a lab leak. This is primarily because of the deceitfulness and lack of transparency with what actually happened in Wuhan. One can argue this is just paranoia EcoHealth would be blamed when they are really not the source, but they are behaving like guilty 5 year old’s.
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They were given 5 days to give all unpublished data to the NIH, coincidentally a fleet of paper shredders were seen in front of EcoHealth yesterday ha ha…
Lucia, this may be of interest now that you can mix n match on your booster….It shows vax performance by brand. [I posted it a while back] “Rates of COVID-19 Cases and Deaths by Vaccination Statusâ€
https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#rates-by-vaccine-status
PS The graph is interactive, if you click on it you get the actual data.
Tom Scharf,
“… coincidentally a fleet of paper shredders were seen in front of EcoHealth yesterday.”
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Nobody (not in Wuhan and certainly not Snidely Whiplash and his Eco Health Alliance minions) is going to ever admit to producing a virus that has killed millions of people and cost tens of trillions of dollars, even though it is, IMO, now becoming almost certain that is exactly what happened. The frightening thing is that if the true source of the pandemic is never clearly identified, then national and international laws and regulations will not be put in place to stop the next viral pandemic. The research on mix-and-match viral pathogen generation, already described in multiple published papers, is both foolish and terrifying. It must be stopped.
More info from The Intercept on the recent EcoHealth story:
https://theintercept.com/2021/10/21/virus-mers-wuhan-experiments/
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“But the first release of the documents, which The Intercept received more than a year after it requested them, did not include the (recent NIH) progress report for the grant’s fifth and final funding year.
Yesterday, the NIH provided that missing report for the period ending May 2019, which was inexplicably dated August 2021.â€
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Inexplicably? Intentionally is my theory. Even worse they are doing GOF testing on MERS.
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“EcoHealth Alliance conducted involving infectious clones of MERS-CoV, the virus that caused a deadly outbreak of Middle East respiratory syndrome in 2012. MERS has a case-fatality rate as high as 35 percent, much higher than Covid-19’s. The scientists swapped out the virus’s receptor-binding domain, or RBD, a part of the spike protein that enables it to enter a host’s cells, according to the report. “We constructed the full-length infectious clone of MERS-CoV, and replaced the RBD of MERS-CoV with the RBDs of various strains of HKU4-related coronaviruses previously identified in bats from different provinces in southern China,†the scientists wrote.â€
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This is all starting to look like badly written sci-fi.
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“The Intercept previously asked EcoHealth Alliance about work on MERS-CoV referenced in sections of the grant that NIH released in September. At the time, EcoHealth spokesperson Robert Kessler insisted that the group had not conducted the work. “The MERS work proposed in the grant is suggested as an alternative and was not undertaken,†Kessler wrote in an email in September. Kessler did not respond to a query The Intercept sent yesterday about the apparent falsity of his previous statement.â€
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Read the whole thing, somebody has been lying repeatedly to The Intercept, it is only a question of which party. I would not be the least bit surprised if this work is part of dual use research funded partly of the DoD. If you recall The Intercept reported earlier that State Department officials did not want this to be investigated
SteveF (Comment #206775): “The frightening thing is that if the true source of the pandemic is never clearly identified, then national and international laws and regulations will not be put in place to stop the next viral pandemic. The research on mix-and-match viral pathogen generation, already described in multiple published papers, is both foolish and terrifying. It must be stopped.”
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That is, IMO, the reason for the stonewalling. There seems to be no evidence that the US mad scientists (Fauci, Daszek, Ecohealth) had anything to do with making the actual Wuhan virus that escaped. If they had come clean in a timely manner, they likely could have avoided blame for that. However, “we were involved in making deadly chimera viruses, but not THAT chimera virus”, would still have damaged their reputations and likely been the end of gain-of-function research, except in China and maybe Russia.
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It has been clear for some time that the WIV had been making potentially dangerous chimeras. The latest revelation adds to that as well as showing that some of that work was done with US funding. At this point, I think it unreasonable to claim that the Wuhan virus was not the result of such work. There is a lot of suggestive evidence plus the smoking gun: the inserted codons for the furin cleavage group. Guilty beyond a reasonable doubt.
Of all places Vanity Fair (again) takes a balanced and critical look at the NIH letter:
https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2021/10/nih-admits-funding-risky-virus-research-in-wuhan
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“An NIH spokesperson told Vanity Fair that Dr. Fauci was “entirely truthful in his statements to Congress,†and that he did not have the progress report that detailed the controversial research at the time he testified in July. But EcoHealth Alliance appeared to contradict that claim, and said in a statement: “These data were reported as soon as we were made aware, in our year four report in April 2018.â€
“But the NIH letter—coming after months of congressional demands for more information—seemed to underscore that America’s premier science institute has been less than forthcoming about risky research it has funded and failed to properly monitor. ”
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This one is especially galling:
“Dr. Fauci’s spokesperson told Vanity Fair that EcoHealth Alliance’s research did not fall under that framework, since the experiments being funded “were not reasonably expected to increase transmissibility or virulence in humans.—
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That is complete utter BS. The next Rand Paul vs Fauci theatrics should be interesting. I find it hard to believe how many news organizations are just simply ignoring this story.
Tom Scharf,
“I find it hard to believe how many news organizations are just simply ignoring this story.”
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I find it very easy to believe. Most are NOT really news organizations, they are the propaganda arm of progressive Democrats (AKA ‘Democratic Socialists’). Questioning Saint Fauci’s honesty does not fit with their political agenda, so they ignore his multiple, willful lies to Congress and to the public. Suggesting that the Chinese created the pandemic via dangerous virus research also does not fit with their (socialist) agenda, so they refuse to cover it.
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If a Republican wins in November 2024, Fauci will resign before he is fired. If control of Congress passes to Republicans in 2022, Fauci may be put under enough pressure to resign. I sure hope that happens.
Tom Scharf (Comment #206780) you wrote “I find it hard to believe how many news organizations are just simply ignoring this story.†I smell a conspiracy. The trite old answer that the media and evil democrats are in cahoots and one career bureaucrat went rogue does not begin to explain it. There were two coverups….. the lab leak theory and the gain of function research. I have no answers, only questions: How did these two items go dark so quickly? Why was the State Department actively trying to squelch it? Were they doing the bidding of our spooks? Did they tell the White House to dummy up? Why was Rand Paul the only Republican screaming about this? Was there not one honest scientist at the NIH willing to be a whistleblower? Why did the NIH suddenly fess up [sort of] about both of these coverups? What were the Chi-Coms doing?
I fear that absent a love triangle or murder this will not be a marketable story and no one will do the legwork needed. It will remain a who-dun-it for nerds.
Russel Klier,
You have not been paying attention. The U.S. establishment is largely in thrall to the CCP. That includes most of the big tech companies (who are happy to help the Chinese government suppress their people), many entertainment companies (Disney, the NBA, etc.), and almost the entire leftist and left leaning establishment (corporate media, universities, Democrat politicians, corporate boardrooms, the Deep State). It is partly economic interest and partly that they admire and envy centralized state power.
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The CCP has not merely been stonewalling with regard to the lab leak. They have been conducting a massive, well funded, and highly professional disinformation campaign. Here is one journalist’s view of that from a front row seat: https://spectatorworld.com/topic/wuhan-clan-price-paid-lab-leak-expose/
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Many Republicans other than Rand Paul have spoken out, including President Trump. But the corporate media largely ignore them. Lately Sen. Paul has been the most visible due to his theatrical and prescient argument with Fauci.
Russell,
You illustrate Lucia’s point about rhetorical questions well. I have no idea what you’re trying to say there. I’d ask you to clarify, if I cared about understanding what you were trying to say.
Shrug.
Mike M. (Comment #206784)…. I just remembered another question I had no answer for. Biden asked for a report from his intelligence gang as to the source of the virus. 90 days later intelligence came back with a Sargent Shultz, “I know Nothing”. When a politician asks a public question of his people, he always knows the answer they are going to give before he asks it. What happened here?
Welcome back Kenneth. I have missed your insightful comments.