Comments closed on the last post. Here’s a new one.
Open thread!
381 thoughts on “Open comments”
It was curious why India was doing so well over the last year, it’s curious no longer. They just set the global record for the most cases in one day, 312K. They have >1B people though, but their uncounted case multiplier is likely higher than the US. Central Africa remains an outlier. Any place with a large unprotected population is a ticking time bomb.
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LA county may have hit herd immunity. https://www.wsj.com/articles/covid-19-rates-in-los-angeles-have-gone-from-worst-to-among-the-best-11619096400
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Flu season is down 100x and the lowest ever recorded. It seems some experts are learning about their powers of prediction:
“Experts are less certain about what will happen when the flu does return. In the coming months — as millions of people return to public transit, restaurants, schools and offices — influenza outbreaks could be more widespread than normal, they say, or could occur at unusual times of the year. But it’s also possible that the virus that returns is less dangerous, having not had the opportunity to evolve while it was on hiatus.
“We don’t really have a clue,†said Richard Webby, a virologist at the St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital in Memphis. “We’re in uncharted territory. We haven’t had an influenza season this low, I think as long as we’ve been measuring it. So what the potential implications are is a bit unclear.â€
I read about India. It’s so sad that the place where much of the vaccine is manufactured isn’t better protected with vaccines!
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I’m getting a flu vaccine in the fall. Even if they don’t know what strains might be circulating, it will be better than nothing.
lucia,
I read about India. It’s so sad that the place where much of the vaccine is manufactured isn’t better protected with vaccines!
My daughter, an analytical chemist who works in big Pharma, says that if she has a choice, she would never take any drug manufactured in China or India. Their quality control is questionable to say the least. She told me about one place, I forget whether it was in India or China, where the building where a still operational drug manufacturing facility was located had partially collapsed after a fire.
I read India was reverting to the much maligned “vaccine nationalism” and restricting exports until they had their own situation under control. Vaccine nationalism is quite the expected behavior in my view. They are still on a pretty steep exponential increase. It’s entirely unpredictable where these things peak.
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I don’t really know what it takes to max out manufacturing, but it seems like everyone should be doing whatever it takes. I think we are nearing 1B doses worldwide though which isn’t too bad, but not enough to prevent serious outbreaks for a while. The US should be working harder on vaccine hesitancy instead of the constant tiring political activism. We are just starting to hit the demand threshold now. If we can get to 70% then we should see a serious dent in future outbreaks.
Speaking of India, on worldometers.info, they had more new COVID-19 cases/day/million (227) than the US (196) yesterday. The seven day trailing average of new cases/day in India doubled in about ten days from April 2-11 and from April 11-21, so they’re probably still far from the peak.
In fact, there are a whole lot of countries with a higher new case rates yesterday than the US, including places like Germany (332) and Canada (222). In some cases, a whole lot higher. Turkey, Croatia and Sweden, for example, are all over 700 new cases/day/million.
DeWitt,
The EC bureaucracy delayed vaccine distribution in Europe….. maybe after the pandemic is over some people will look at the UK versus the EC and reconsider how competent the EC is….. IMO, not at all competent.
SteveF,
As I remember, one of the reasons the UK left the EU was to get out from under the EU bureaucracy.
Johnson’s Government took an early gamble and signed contracts for millions of vaccines long before most had been approved. That gamble has paid off and now the EU can only look on in envy as the UK surges ahead in the race to escape the pandemic.
Meanwhile, the EU response – to threaten a blockade on EU made vaccines entering the UK – seems like vindictive posturing.
It doesn’t inspire much confidence in the European project. When the Brexiteers are right you know there’s a serious problem.
It’s also looking like the recent ‘surge’ in cases in the US may have been caused by more contagious variants burning through the remaining susceptible population. Eyeballing the new case rate data, it looks to me like we have seen the peak and we should see a rapid decline in new cases in the next few weeks.
DeWitt,
“…..the recent ‘surge’ in cases in the US may have been caused by more contagious variants burning through the remaining susceptible population.”
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That may be contributing, but I think there are a couple of potential factors:
1) More contagious strains
2) Change in behavior (we won’t kill granny now she’s vaccinated)
3) Loosening of rules/people getting ever more tired of restrictions
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Hard to say which dominates.
Here is the crazy part of covid: I am vaccinated (2nd dose 4 weeks ago), as is my wife. So as far as I am concerned, I have extremely low risk of any symptomatic illness, and almost as low a risk of contracting asymptomatic illness and passing the virus to someone else. Yet every covid rule/restriction still applies to us: masks everywhere, ‘wash your damned infected hands in ethanol’, stay distant from other people, etc, etc. There needs to be a rational adjustment as the vaccines become available to everyone (at least in the States). To those who don’t want the vaccine: OK, but please don’t ask everyone else to change their behavior to reduce your personal risk. To government: get the hell out of the way.
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But I still see no end to the craziness; excepting a few places, nothing has changed. And heaven forbid that you stop wearing a mask. Really, it is all nutty, all silly, and there is no end in sight.
SteveF,
I think that craziness is happening because of the weird interaction between the desires of the vaccine “hesitant” who don’t want anyone to be “encouraged” to get the vaccine by allowing the vaccinated to be allowed to take advantage of their immunity and those of the “ridiculously worried” who think even the tiniest chance that vaccines don’t work the way vaccines are supposed to work.
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I read Illinois “phase 5” will keep capacity limits in place, but the vaccinated won’t count toward the limits. But I haven’t read of any proposed method to allow merchants, bar and restaurant operators to identify who is vaccinated.
Yes SteveF, its insanity. I refuse to wear a mask outdoors and have recently been chided a couple of times. My response is to point out that the cloth masks the chiders are wearing are totally ineffective. The mask thing I think highlights the ideologically driven insanity the Western world seems to have entered. The evidence on their effectiveness is mixed and inconclusive at best. There’s also plenty of documentation of harmful side effects such as facial rashes and even some hypoxia incidents that can be dangerous. The suspension of the Bill or Rights by states is I think unprecedented in American history. I hope someone brings suit and the Supreme Court is eventually forced to rule on it.
For those who want a good laugh there is a post at ATTP explaining why lockdowns really work despite the fact that the evidence indicates they don’t. It’s a good example of vague narratives with no quantification that dominate viral epidemiology.
It’s like arguing that chemotheropy works with lung cancer despite the scientific evidence that it doesn’t help much if at all. You just note that the chemicals differentially kill cancer cells and the reason the trials don’t show much is that the treatment was not applied early enough when there were only a few cancer cells. Of course that’s mostly impossible since lung cancer is usually symptomless until it is advanced.
Lucia,
“But I haven’t read of any proposed method to allow merchants, bar and restaurant operators to identify who is vaccinated.”
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Sure, which is part of why this is all so nutty. The fundamental issue is the “nanny state” versus individual’s with agency (AKA liberty). Those who set the ‘rulz’ (mostly diaper wetting bureaucrats) want nobody to have agency. At some point I have to believe this situation will no longer be tolerable, and the ‘rulz’ will be ignored.
FL never had outdoor mask rules, at least not in my county. 95%+ of everyone I see outside is sans-mask and you see people taking them off within 6 feet of leaving a grocery store. Some states have mandatory outdoor masks even when alone, ha ha. That’s psychotic, but some people really like to be controlled, or more likely like to control others. For their own good of course, the controllers have the very best of intentions.
The 7 day average of new covid cases dropped over the past 10 days. I think it’s quite likely we’ve see the last ‘spike’ and it was a mini-spike. Every adult who wants a vaccine can sign up now. Within a month every adult who wants one will have had at least their first and many will get the one-shot J&J. Plus summer is coming; cases are going to pretty well vanish for a while. (My guess is they’ll never rise much again).
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SCOTUS has shown willingness to not uphold every rule a governor might put in place. At least they are insisting on governors having to justify rules when the burden religion. It’s going to be well nigh impossible to justify why people can’t gather in church if the number of cases is tiny. And once people are gathering in church with no incident it’s going to be really hard to get people to follow lots of other restrictive rules.
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I think politicians will be hard pressed to get people to follow rules pretty soon. I’m willing to wear a mask now because I don’t want to make things difficult for the poor grocery store managers or dance studio operators and so on. But in a month or so, it’s going to be really hard to get everyone to accept these things.
‘You’re never fully dressed without a mask’ ….is the way the song goes I think. I will be wearing my N99 respirator till they pry it from my cold dead face. My style of mask is not designed to protect people around me…. It is designed only to protect me. No flu, no colds and no Asthma for me over a twelve month period…. I credit that to the respirator mask. It is not Covid approved because it has exhaust valves, but I don’t care what the rules say…. I’m wearing it. https://rzmask.com/collections/m2-mesh
Russell Klier,
Whatever floats your boat. I haven’t had much of a cold or flu in about 5 years (one sore throat with slight headache and low fever last year… covid?). I’ll be pleased when I can forget about masks.
I’ve got an appt to get vaccinated tomorrow. I’ll report on any unusual signs of zombieism.
Mark,
Based on experience until now, chances are good that those around you will not have their brains eaten after you go zombie. I hope it is nothing more than a sore shoulder.
mark bofill,
Did you have to go through your state government to get an appointment? Did you have to get permission from the state government? Did you have any choice over which vaccine you get? Did you have a choice over where and when, or did you have to take what the state assigned you?
SteveF,
After my first Covishield injection, I checked for local availability of headcheese.
Russel/SteveF,
I’m not going to constantly wear a mask even if it prevents mild colds. I can’t deal with my glasses constantly getting foggy.
P-E Harvey,
Now that you mention it, I should check for brains in the meat counter at the store. I”m sure there must be delicious brain recipes online. (Just googled. I found “Simple Brains a al Creme”. (Surely, that’s not the real name. It’s just not right to mix English and French that way.) I found “Deep-fried Brains” and “Caramelized Calf-brains”.)
I also found
What do brains taste like?
The taste of the brain is unlike any other animal. It is very creamy but firm. It is not like eating meat, but you are eating meat. It is not gamey like eating a kidney but has a buttery undertone with a savory flavor.
So, brains taste different from other animals. That’s interesting.
P-E Harvey,
From Wikipedia:
“The parts of the head used in the dish vary, though commonly do not include the brain, eyes and ears of the animal used. ”
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So your hankering for headcheese probably did not really reflect underlying brain-eating desires. 😉
Lucia,
“That’s interesting.”
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Oddly enough, I don’t find it interesting. Must be a lack of inner zombie.
Mike,
Did you have to go through your state government to get an appointment? Did you have to get permission from the state government? Did you have any choice over which vaccine you get? Did you have a choice over where and when, or did you have to take what the state assigned you?
~grins~ You’ve got the wrong end here. I’ll have to ask my very special personal manager and assistant who actually set this up for me (my wife) to find the answers to those questions. I know getting vaccinated is reasonably important for somebody my age but it’s extremely difficult sometimes for me to find time outside of my schedule to mess with this type of thing.
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Everyone else,
~bigger grin~ You guys are awesome. I deliberately tried to provoke a response like this by saying ‘unusual signs of zombieism’, and now that people have responded with the headcheese and brains as food discussion I’m completely grossed out. Serves me right.
So we heard a lot about how cases were rising in a lot of states a few weeks ago. Now that cases are declining in most of those states, except Oregon and Washington, crickets.
Oregon has the third fewest cases/million (42,229) and Washington has the fifth fewest (51,731), so even if the multiplier is 6, there are still a whole lot of susceptible people even with about 40% of the population in Oregon and Washington having had at least one shot. There’s also a new mutation of the UK B.1.1.7 strain detected in Oregon, which probably means it’s in Washington as well.
SteveF,
I think I was too subtle. I think it’s “interesting” they distinguish meat from brains from “X from other animals”. Many animals have brains (and kidneys and muscles.) Whatever the animal, I suspect meat from brains taste different from other parts of the same animal.
MikeM,
You didn’t ask me but,
Did you have to go through your state government to get an appointment?
Thank heavens no. It would be horrifying if the government stepped in and interfered almost certainly slowing the process!
Did you have to get permission from the state government?
Thank heavens no. It would be horrifying if I needed government approval to get an appointment! It was bad enough they made me wait.
Did you have any choice over which vaccine you get?
Yes. But I would have had to wait for Pfizer or Moderna, so I took the first one available to me. My husband had a choice on the day he signed up. He went J&J because of the one shot aspect.
Did you have a choice over where and when, or did you have to take what the state assigned you?
The state didn’t assign me a vaccine. So it’s not possible to answer this question.
I did have a choice of where and when to take the vaccine. I would have had to wait to make a different choice. But I certainly had a choice. Lucky for me, the government didn’t compel me to wait to create some illusion of “more choice”.
Oh. Yeah, this was certainly voluntary. I had choice over when, in the sense that if my wife had scheduled next week my appt would presumably come later, and if she never scheduled I’d never have gotten one, etc.
I read that vaccinations are open to everybody over 16 in Alabama now, so I don’t believe my wife had to jump through any hoops with the State government, but I’m not 100% sure. I think she scheduled it through CVS pharmacy? At least that’s where I’m going tomorrow.
[Edit: My confirmation email says Moderna, two doses scheduled, first dose tomorrow.]
Lucia, The exhaust valves direct the exhale down away from your glasses…. for workmen and athletes, no fogging. In addition to reducing communicable disease the ultra fine particle filter dramatically reduced my asthma problems.
Create a profile by filling out the registration form. Once the form is complete, you will receive a confirmation code.
Step 2: Complete Your Profile
Use your confirmation code to access your profile and enter your chronic medical conditions, employer information, insurance information, and demographic information.
Next, we ask you to wait for the New Mexico Department of Health to notify you when vaccine is available for you in your community.
Step 3: Schedule your Appointment
Once you receive a notification, enter your special event code and select a location, day, and schedule your COVID-19 vaccine appointment.
Step 4: Receive the COVID-19 Vaccine
On the day of your appointment you will be able to complete the medical questionnaire. Attend the appointment at the location and receive your COVID-19 vaccine.
It seems that step 3 allows more flexibility than it used to. But I don’t know if that extends to shopping for which vaccine.
The above seems like a nuisance, but not such a nuisance that it would stop me if I badly wanted to get the vaccine (I don’t). A bigger concern is that it looks like it is setting the stage for making everyone get the vaccine and/or vaccine passports.
In FL they didn’t explicitly tell you which vaccine you were getting in many places, but you could tell easily enough:
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1 appt = J&J
2 appts, 3 weeks apart = Pfizer
2 appts, 4 weeks apart = Moderna
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My area had all kinds of options over time.
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My family went through the county health agency, which went through several different scheduling systems (incompetence…) before they got their sh** together. Now it works pretty well. Sams, Walmart, CVS, Publix each have their own scheduling systems which all work OK and generally speaking only carry one version of the vaccine. Tampa has two large scale federal sites (Bucs stadium and dog track) that are walk/drive up and do J&J (temporarily Pfizer now). There was also a bunch of weird pop-up “secret” sites at churches and so forth that were apparently targeting equity.
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Thankfully all this is now behind us as we hit demand = supply. Whether we learned anything for the next time is TBD. We are one month away from 50% fully vaccinated and my guess is two months away from a sustained decline, hopefully sooner but this has always been too hard to predict and I don’t think Imperial College academic models are going to be helpful.
Russel,
I don’t have asthma. I don’t get many colds and when I do, they aren’t a big deal. So I’m not going to wear a mask. If you or others do: fine! I have no problem with that.
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I similarly have no problems with people who are reluctant to get vaccinated.
MikeM,
We could register with the county while also registering with private pharmacies some university campuses and so on. There is an Indian (Hindu? Sikh? Moslem? Just general Indian?) group whose organize a vaccination site out in Aurora (I think.)
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The county had Walgreens and CVS personels running some large vaccination sites. So I could find instructions similar to yours. They just weren’t the only way to get a vaccine. The sites usually explained that if you wanted the vaccine, it was wise to check around.
but not such a nuisance that it would stop me if I badly wanted to get the vaccine (I don’t)
I thought I said my impression is you weren’t going to get it and then you said you were going to get it. Sounds like you aren’t going to get it.
MikeM
A bigger concern is that it looks like it is setting the stage for making everyone get the vaccine and/or vaccine passports.
I’m not seeing how this likes like setting the state for everyone getting the vaccine or passports.
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That might happen, but I’m not seeing how what you showed “sets the stage” for that.
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I suspect we in Illinois may get some sort of vaccine documents that make it easy to prove vaccination. Everyone giving vaccination took ID and recorded who got the vaccine, which type, the date and so on. This was both so they could bill insurance and likely so they could track adverse effects if they occurred. Also: it ensures a vaccinated person who has ill effects can sue the correct manufacturer. 🙂
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All that is sufficient to facilitate vaccination documents if they are needed.
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Honestly, I’d like to have some sort of hard to counterfit app that shows status so I can show it to potential dance partners or to people running dance parties. People running parties are worried about spread, and one of the studio owners has kids. I’m sure it would give her peace of mind to know that my visits to her studio have a negligible chance of passing Covid. I’d love to be able to prove my status. But I can’t because we don’t have documents that aren’t easily counterfited.
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I get you are worried about “passports”. But proof of vaccination would be very nice to have. How they should be used can be debated, but there existence would be nice.
I just don’t see most public places like restaurants wanting to be the vaccine police even if they were tasked to do so.
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It’s way too early for that anyway, the task at hand is to get as much voluntary compliance as possible in the next couple months, and I don’t think you are going to get that by threats of future penalties and treating the unvaccinated like 2nd class citizens. If we can get to herd immunity voluntarily (and through B117 infections on the unvaccinated) then all is good. This first.
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If we aren’t going to force vaccinations on healthcare personnel in old folks homes then I can’t see us doing it anywhere.
Tom,
I think restaurants and bars will not want to be vaccine police. I think some individual social dancers will. I know some social dancers who are vaccinated but only want to dance with the vaccinated for reasons of their own. I know one social dancer who is almost certain to change teachers looking for a vaccinated one.
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Her teacher is definitely dead set against getting a vaccine. Her daughter is special needs. She is, perhaps, unduly cautious. But I don’t think it’s my place to insist that she’s irrational to worry about what might be true because we “don’t know” if vaccines give full immunity in the sense that she can’t transmit to her daughter.
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I would happily show these sorts of people a document if I had one and they wanted to see it. We don’t have them. I’m not pushing for them to exist. But I would definitely find them useful even if some people throw out words like “vaccine passport” to suggest any and all sorts of documentation used for any and all possible reasons must be some horrifying infringement of liberties.
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Heck, if I were looking to be hired to tutor kids in a home with a resident unvaccinated infant, teen or even stubborn grandma, I think it would be reasonable for parents to want to know if I was vaccinated. I am vaccinated. Currently, I could not provide them any unforgeable document to prove my status. So they would have no ability to check if a tutor they hoped to hire had been vaccinated. (Same with cleaning ladies and baby sitters.)
lucia (Comment #201753): “The county had Walgreens and CVS personels running some large vaccination sites. So I could find instructions similar to yours. They just weren’t the only way to get a vaccine. The sites usually explained that if you wanted the vaccine, it was wise to check around.”
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Maybe I have not checked enough, but I am 95% sure that in New Mexico the *only* option is to go through the state.
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lucia: “I thought I said my impression is you weren’t going to get it and then you said you were going to get it. Sounds like you aren’t going to get it.”
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My general position has been that I am happy to be at the end of the line. In no hurry to get it, but not opposed to getting it. That has not changed although my degree of hesitancy has waxed and waned.
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lucia (Comment #201754): “I’m not seeing how this likes like setting the state for everyone getting the vaccine or passports.”
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If the state has a list of *everyone* who has been vaccinated, then they also know who has not been vaccinated and have all the information needed to act on the difference. If only *some* people go through the state, then there is not a big problem unless CVS etc. are required to report all vaccinations to the state.
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lucia: “I get you are worried about “passportsâ€. But proof of vaccination would be very nice to have. How they should be used can be debated, but there existence would be nice.”
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I agree. There are situations where requiring vaccination might make sense and some situations where people might want the ability to prove they have been vaccinated. But I don’t want to have to prove vaccination status to eat at a restaurant or to have my teeth cleaned.
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But don’t you get a card when you get vaccinated. Why is that not sufficient proof? I get that they might be easily counterfeited, but that should not be an issue unless the stakes are high.
Mike M,
“That has not changed although my degree of hesitancy has waxed and waned.”
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Frankly, it is impossible for me to understand this; do you wear a seat belt when you drive? A vaccination is not as intrusive as, say, a colonoscopy, and the risk of death from covid-19 for those over 65 is much higher than colon cancer.
MikeM
If the state has a list of *everyone* who has been vaccinated, then they also know who has not been vaccinated and have all the information needed to act on the difference.
I googled “new mexico covid vaccine locations”. You can get vaccines at Pharmacies in New Mexico.
These three places cam up as locations
Smith’s Pharmacy
Pharmacy · Edgewood, NM · (505) 286-9040
Appointment required·Limited to certain patients
Website
Walmart Pharmacy
Pharmacy · Edgewood, NM · (505) 286-3053
Appointment required·Limited to certain patients
Website
Walgreens
Pharmacy · Edgewood, NM · (505) 281-0950
Appointment required·Limited to certain patients
You seem to need an appointment, but “Walgreens” and “Walmart” are not at a “state” locations.
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So I suspect you are mistaken that the only way you can get it is the path you happened to find. Your impression may have been formed because you aren’t trying to get a vaccine so you haven’t learned all your options. There seems to be no particular reason to suspect that “the state” has collected all the information. Of course, they may have. Perhaps they required Walmart, Walgreens and Smith’s pharmacy to send it all to them.
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But don’t you get a card when you get vaccinated. Why is that not sufficient proof?
It’s easily forged. Many have been. That’s why I would want one that is not easily forged.
I get that they might be easily counterfeited, but that should not be an issue unless the stakes are high.
My friend who is planning to change ballroom dance teachers thinks the stakes are high for her. She may be mistaken, but she still thinks it. A person with an unvaccinated baby or living with a stubborn unvaccinated granny who might want to hire me as a tutor or someone as a house keeper might think the stakes are high for them. An unemployed housekeeper who wants a job but for some reason doesn’t want to be vaccinated might think the stakes are high for them. So I think it is an issue for those people who might want to prove their status who who might want someone to prove their status. The stakes are high to them.
lucia (Comment #201759): “So I suspect you are mistaken that the only way you can get it is the path you happened to find. Your impression may have been formed because you aren’t trying to get a vaccine so you haven’t learned all your options.”
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I suspected the same, which is why I said I was 95% sure that method I found was the only one. Change that to 100%. I went to the Walgreens site, clicked on the schedule vaccine link and found this: https://www.walgreens.com/findcare/vaccination/covid-19?ban=covid_vaccine2_landing_schedule
Residents of New Hampshire and New Mexico
Please select your state to schedule your COVID-19 vaccination.
New Hampshire
New Mexico
The New Mexico link took me to the state registration site.
Ahh! Interesting. I don’t think that happens in Illinois. Jim got his vaccine at Walgreens. I don’t think it went through the state in anyway (unless Walgreens reported.)
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I don’t think Illinois’s method will make it difficult for them to have a “vaccine app” if they want one though.
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New York seems to have one. https://covid19vaccine.health.ny.gov/excelsior-pass
They also appear to let you show the card as proof though. For the paper documents, the forgery issue certainly exists. I don’t know how the NY app collects data to present your “Covid-ok” status.
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It doesn’t seem you need the app to shop for groceries. I have no idea what a private dentist might wish or be permitted to do.
SteveF
Thanks for asking. He is in a medically induced coma and still on a ventilator. His condition waxes and wanes. It is really tough on his family. They are not allowed to go to the hospital and rely on hospital staff to transmit periodic reports.
After all the Spring Break falderal my state [Florida] and county [Sarasota] had about a 30% increase in case rates. This past week however the trend seems to be turning back down…. One disturbing bit of data… vaccine administration rates seem to be falling over the last two weeks. We are starting to see pro vax ads from the government. https://business.fau.edu/covidtracker/data/florida-data/index.php
We saw the SpaceX Crew-2 blast off today, viewed from our front yard. It is always an exciting experience…. even from 185 miles away! I have pics if anyone is interested.
COVID-19 hospitalizations among older Americans have plunged more than 70% since the start of the year, and deaths among them appear to have tumbled as well, dramatic evidence the vaccination campaign is working.
That sounds very encouraging. And the article clearly implies that the reason is the preferential vaccination of older folks.
… vindicating the U.S. strategy of putting elderly people at or near the front of the line for shots when the vaccine became available over the winter.
Two-thirds of American senior citizens are fully vaccinated, versus just one-third of all U.S. adults. Over 80% of senior citizens have gotten at least one shot, compared with just over 50% of all adults.
But wait a minute: Total cases and deaths are down nearly 80% since early January. Shouldn’t the drop in cases among seniors be much larger than for the population as a whole? And since most deaths are among the elderly, shouldn’t deaths be down by a much bigger factor than cases?
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I don’t have a point, only questions. Am I missing something?
Mike M.,
IMO, the drop in case rates is as much or more due to having passed the herd immunity threshold from uncounted infections as from vaccinations. Since we don’t know how many people have actually been infected, we also don’t know how many of those being vaccinated were already immune.
Deaths are a lagging indicator so a drop in the death rate would be related to an up to 30 days earlier drop in new cases. So it’s not surprising to me that the current drop in the death rate is about the same as the current drop in the new case rate.
Personally, I think the focus on case rates is a distraction from the real issue of greatest importance to the public with regard to risk assessment and to public policy, which is deaths. Noone gives a damn how many cases of rhinovirus there are at any given time. We don’t get warnings every time cases start to increase and suggest people suspend daily living.
Mike M,
As with all things covid-19, I suspect it is far more complicated than the headlines. One big issue is: “at least one shot”. It takes probably two weeks for a reasonable level of immunity to develop after the first shot, and more than three weeks after the first shot to reach maximum immunity (about 83%-85%). A second shot plus a couple more weeks surely helps, of course (95%). But the headline ignores that long delay. It is also on average 2 to 3 weeks from diagnosis to death among those who die, so death rates ought to trail vaccinations by upwards of 5 weeks or even 6. Five or six weeks ago, the number of vaccinated seniors was considerably lower…. only about 20% of the entire population (all ages) had received their first dose, versus over 40% today.
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WRT to total case loads: as we have seen in the past, total confirmed cases per million has changed dramatically, both up and down, even with no vaccinations: behavior, weather, government restrictions, etc all no doubt contribute. Since we are heading into spring, it means less time indoors and more sunshine (and vitamin D)…. so case rates should tend to fall, all else equal.
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To clearly see the influence of vaccinations, we will need to wait another couple of months. Since nearly all deaths are among those over 55, the overall future death rate will depend strongly on how many people in the over-55 population choose to remain unvaccinated. The overall case rate will depend on multiple factors, with vaccination rate among younger people likely having a strong influence.
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Among the vaccinated, I think the pandemic will be over save for the shouting by two months from now. For the rest: hard to know with any certainty. For unvaccinated elderly people, deaths will probably be controlled mainly by how many cases there are in the population as a whole….. and that will depend on multiple factors, including how many younger people get vaccinated.
Mike M,
The USA is about 10 weeks behind Israel in rate of vaccinations. The pandemic in Israel (currently well over 60% vaccinated, reached 40% in mid February) is now just about over: >95% reduction in cases, and 93% reduction in deaths from their respective peaks, with deaths continuing to fall.
It’s easy enough to compare deaths per * fully * vaccinated versus deaths per unvaccinated (and previously uninfected) over the same timeline. I haven’t seen this done yet curiously. Also the death rates by age group normalized would show the vaccine effect. Long term care death rates also dropped relatively.
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There have been a few articles showing clear effects of vaccines but they are all confounded by background changes. Death rates by age shows a very clear decline by age group, but maybe not as dramatic as one imagined yet.
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The delay of the effect is definitely longer than I had anticipated and likely due to a lot of the things SteveF commented on. Also the vaccine effect is also battling the B117 effect which would likely otherwise be sending us into a more pronounced 4th wave. There is conflicting data on whether B117 is more deadly. Obviously everyone can see what they want given all the confounders but if there were a lot of people vaccinated dying I think it would be flagged by our click bait media patrons.
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‘Breakthrough’ COVID Infection Rates as Expected
— Low numbers of breakthrough infections among the fully vaccinated; national count unknown https://www.medpagetoday.com/special-reports/exclusives/92071
DaveJR
Personally, I think the focus on case rates is a distraction from the real issue of greatest importance to the public with regard to risk assessment and to public policy, which is deaths.
I’m not sure there is a “focus” on case rates– at least not to the exclusion of deaths. I do think, ultimately deaths are more important. But case rates are useful to examine. Right now they do give an indication of whether vaccines are working, whether we are reaching herd immunity and so on.
. Of course we wouldn’t really care if Covid never lead to deaths. But Covid is life threatening to a large enough fraction to worry about and it’s a bit odd to suggest we must narrow our interest to one and only one metric. Both case rates and deaths are worth watching.
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I’m glad to see case rates dropping in Illinois. I’m not going to ignore that and only watch death rates.
The early data I recently saw suggested that if you did get a breakthrough covid infection your chances of a serious illness was about equal to an unvaccinated person (i.e. the IFR was about the same after a positive test). I was hoping this would not be the case, it’s too early to know for sure yet though.
It sounds like I am not misinterpreting the article. The data do not support the conclusions drawn.
———-
DeWitt Payne (Comment #201766): “Deaths are a lagging indicator so a drop in the death rate would be related to an up to 30 days earlier drop in new cases. So it’s not surprising to me that the current drop in the death rate is about the same as the current drop in the new case rate.”
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True. But cases have been flat or slightly rising for at least a month. Currently 58K/day, about the same as early March, with a range in that time of 54-70K. And deaths have been nearly flat recently at about 700/day. So the recent CFR has been about 1.2%; no big decrease. At least, not yet.
———-
DaveJR (Comment #201767): “I think the focus on case rates is a distraction from the real issue of greatest importance to the public with regard to risk assessment and to public policy, which is deaths.”
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Absolutely. Cases are of interest because there is much less lag. But deaths do not seem to be down relative to cases.
————-
SteveF (Comment #201768): “death rates ought to trail vaccinations by upwards of 5 weeks or even 6. Five or six weeks ago, the number of vaccinated seniors was considerably lower…. only about 20% of the entire population (all ages) had received their first dose, versus over 40% today.”
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That may be an explanation for what I did not say, but might be inferred from what I did say.
Case rates are only interesting in that they are an early real time indicator of future death rates in a month. If you were looking at this 10 years from now I would assume one would not even look at case rates and instead estimate them from the more reliable death rates.
Lucia,
“I’m glad to see case rates dropping in Illinois. I’m not going to ignore that and only watch death rates.”
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Sure. Of interest is the lack of rise in deaths in Illinois (at least so far) in spite of the bump/rise in cases. That does seem like the expected effect of vaccinating those most likely to die. We can see the same thing in multiple states.
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Israel still has ‘only’ 63% vaccinated, but they reached >80% of those over 65 by mid February; Israel’s death rate is now minuscule.
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One thing that is a little scary: in Europe, many countries (eg Netherlands) have held down infections with extreme restrictions on personal activities. Unless they get their elderly population vaccinated before the restrictions are lifted they will see a big surge in cases and deaths.
SteveF,
Yes. The lack of rise in death rates meant vaccination of the vulnerable first did what we hoped.
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Let’s hope Europe gets their people, especially elderly vaccinated. Also, hope India can get vaccine out. It’s horrible there.
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Lucia,
RE India: it is all relative. Based on population, their death rate stands at 132 per million population, vs the USA at 1760 per million population. Yes, India will see a huge number of deaths (unfortunately), but compared to the USA and Europe (on a per million basis) they will end up much lower. The median age in India is only 28 years, versus 38 years in the USA,and higher in Europe.
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Could they have done better? Sure, their government could have made purchase and distribution of vaccines the absolute top priority. They didn’t. That is not how huge bureaucracies work.
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Still, compared to many other developing countries (like Brazil, Argentina, and similar), I am sure the Indians will be OK.
I know. It’s still sad right now!
Hey! Weird thing I’ve noticed since my wife had a mastectomy two weeks ago so we’re watching all her tv. She really likes watching the hallmark channel since it ends all happy every time (that kills me, the 15 minute before the end of movie relationship crisis) anyways I’ve been seeing a lot of anti- Asian violence commercials on that channel. How does that work? Middle age white women are the problem? Or solution?
Jerry,
Democrats are looking for votes from middle aged white women, based on a fabricated story of ‘racial hatred’. Asians suffer just about the lowest rate of violent crime in the country…. and what they do suffer is certainly not at the hands of white women.
Jerry (Comment #201780): “I’ve been seeing a lot of anti- Asian violence commercials on that channel. How does that work? Middle age white women are the problem? Or solution?”
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Middle class white women are the target audience for corporate virtue signalling.
Apparently India is vastly undercounting their covid deaths. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/24/world/asia/india-coronavirus-deaths.html
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“It’s a complete massacre of data,†said Bhramar Mukherjee, an epidemiologist at the University of Michigan who has been following India closely. “From all the modeling we’ve done, we believe the true number of deaths is two to five times what is being reported.â€
“Sickness, sickness, sickness,†Mr. Suresh said. “That’s what we write.†When asked why, he said it was what he had been instructed to do by his bosses, who did not respond to requests for comment.
“Over 13 days in mid-April, Bhopal officials reported 41 deaths related to Covid-19. But a survey by The New York Times of the city’s main Covid-19 cremation and burial grounds, where bodies were being handled under strict protocols, revealed a total of more than 1,000 deaths during the same period.”
“Even in a good year, experts say, only about one-fifth of deaths are medically investigated, meaning that the vast number of Indians die without a cause of death being certified.”
Vaccine effect:
“A federal estimate of Covid-19 hospitalizations based on a sample of counties in 14 states, including Michigan, showed more patients between the ages of 18 and 49 hospitalized in mid-April than those over age 65. In early December, it was the other way around, and by a large margin, with more than twice as many patients over 65 than in the younger group.”
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This is from yet another another “young people with covid!!!” article at the NYT. They go on to blame more bad behavior and also lower standards of admission for hospitals when they are less full.
Tom Scharf,
So did they give the total number of hospitalizations now vs early December? My guess would be no, they didn’t. My guess would also be that the number of hospitalizations now is a lot less then in early December, but stating that would cloud the desired message. The line about lower standards for admission with hospitals less full should be a clue.
The editorial guidelines at the NYT are clear: unless you are talking about African-Americans, people should NEVER EVER be allowed to do what they want. Once you keep this rule in mind, every position the NYT advocates, and every dishonest misrepresentation of ‘facts’ in every ‘news’ story, become easy to understand. And who should be in charge of what people are allowed to do? Why the reporters at the NYT, of course, or at least the lefty politicians they support. The NYT is staffed by dishonest worms.
Tom
They go on to blame more bad behavior and also lower standards of admission for hospitals when they are less full.
Young people have been being unfairly slammed with the whole “bad behavior” thing. Yes, some college students partied hearty when they likely should not have last March. But back then, the “reason” was they were supposed to sacrifice all their self interest for their elders. (Never mind that no one seemed to want the elders to sacrifice for others.) So they were all called selfish.
. Now they are being slammed for… well… mostly taking on a small risk to themselves. But ‘the world’ keeps going with the whole “young people these days”.
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Seriously, no one ever expected us younger boomers to sacrifice our interests like this for “others”. There may be other generations who might be able to point to all they did for others. (For example: Jim’s Dad fought in WWII.) But kids my age weren’t even drafted!!
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The majority of young people have been amazing during all this.
Lucia,
Part is that there just are not that many young people.Young people are supplemented with very young Hondurans, Guatemalans, Mexicans, etc, but people born in the USA between 1965 and 1980 are not a political force like baby boomers were (are?). We baby boomers are in our political decline of course, but still of some political import. The group that follows us? I am not so sure. Probably revolted by the lefty ‘woke’ ideology, but unwilling to confront it.
Odd coincidence… People my age [72] were the target age group during the Polio epidemic….now we are the target age group for Covid. Thanks to Dr. Salk we were rescued from Polio. Now if we will see if we will be rescued from Covid by Donald Trump.
SteveF,
The ones who really get slammed for “behavior” are high-school, college and just out of college age now. So born decades surrounding ~2000. But honestly, as a group, they’ve behaved well. Certainly they have been no worse than any other group of 18-30 has ever been.
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I feel sorry for their lot.
Oh, I do agree with your points about political clout.
Potentially a big case on free speech in SC. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-56886687
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“Brandi Levy sent a profanity-laden post to her friends on Snapchat in 2017, venting her frustrations with cheerleading and her school.
But when coaches at the Pennsylvania school discovered the post, she was barred from the squad for a year.
The case will determine whether schools have the right to punish pupils for what they say off-campus.”
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My view is of course predictable here. The moral judgment of all aspects of people’s lives from afar has gotten wildly out of control. This case is only on government restriction, but would be a step in the right direction.
I think I’ve read about this case as it trickled forwrd.
I think schools should not not be allowed to punish students for behavior outside school.
Without speaking to the legality of the sanctions, I prefer cheerleaders who are polite and wholesome. A potty-mouthed cheerleader is counter to the spirit of the thing…… Defund the cheer squad!
This is like trying to enforce dress codes out of school. I do not want to give a bunch of busybodies the power of sanctions for anything that “disrupts the school community”. These things are usually sourced from personal vendettas and over engaged parents and not from altruism.
Russell,
Well, if the defunded the whole cheer squad for any reason that likely wouldn’t be a first amendment cse.
But if they did that, they’d probably have to fund a different girls sport because cheer probably counts as a sport under Title X. Cheer is probably the least expensive sport going. It can also tolerate the least skilled coach also because the cheer team usually doesn’t formally compete (or no one in the school cares if they win as that’s not the main point of cheer.)
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I’d guess the parents, and local community would be upset if there was no cheer squad at otherwise dreary high school football or basketball games.
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I’d also guess if they defund cheer for off-campus potty mouths they would need to do the same for football and basketball. I bet they would give the star quarter back pass if he did the same thing.
Well… Catholic school. This cheerleader was at a public school.
Lucia,
“I’d guess the parents, and local community would be upset if there was no cheer squad at otherwise dreary high school football or basketball games.”
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Maybe. When I was in High school, the cheer squad seemed to me always to be composed of just about the cutest (and also most fit!) girls at the school. (I often went to dreary games as much to watch the cheer squad as the game.) That may have changed in these very PC times, of course.
Bad behavior out of school is usually reflected in school as well. If you have a bad apple then usually you can just wait for them to do something “officially” bad and take action. Searching social media and cancelling them for any disruptive comments is a bridge too far. Our society has become completely unforgiving (Catholics, ha ha) and I am glad I didn’t grow up where every utterance of mine was recorded for future criminal social prosecution.
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Teenagers can’t make mistakes? What a crappy society to live under, this is just a cultural revolution, bring out the struggle sessions. Perhaps this power is usually only used wisely in extreme cases by sane people, but the chilling of speech is obvious when auto-deleted private posts are saved by our little legions of red guards to be used against their peers and enforced by disgruntled helicopter parents. No thanks, I’ll take speech chaos any day.
[The school district] argues that staff commonly take action against pupils for speech and actions that happen off-campus
Mostly this argument strikes me as beside the point: Either the school is are violating rights or not.
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That the district often violates students 1A rights is not a good argument for violating them. If they aren’t violating rights. the get to do it. Frequency is beside the point.
– and that in recent times this has become more important, as pupils learning remotely due to Covid-19 has blurred the lines between off-campus and on-campus communications.
The did this before Covid. The lines weren’t blurred when they did it. That they might be blurred in some other circumstances would be a fact specific issue. But they weren’t blurred here.
It also says that, as Ms Levy’s Snapchat post was sent to her school friends and fellow cheerleaders, it disrupted the school community.
This doesn’t strike me as something that would significantly disrupt the “school community”. If I recall correctly I think some teachers (who pick cheerleaders) were miffed. And some cheerleaders who got picked were annoyed at the implication choice were unfair. Well. Sorry snowflakes. That’s not “disrupting the community”
The district argues that a decision in favour of the teenager would make it more difficult for schools to police bullying, racism and harassment that occurs outside of school hours on social media.
So freakin’ what? It’s not the districts job to police bullying, racism or harassment that occurs outside school. Even if it were, that doesn’t mean they can go overturning the first amendement rights of students to do it.
They also don’t have a right to take over everyone’s life just because they are teaching them reading, ‘riting and ‘rithmetic!
Lucia, ” teaching them reading, ‘riting and ‘rithmetic!”
This ain’t reading, ‘riting or‘rithmetic, this is an extra curricular activity. It is voluntary. A lot of young ladies want to be on the cheer squad and only a limited number make the team. If they can throw out a girl for being fat, they can throw a girl out for being uncouth.
Virginia’s eliminating tracking and advanced math made national news, and now the department is backtracking under pressure.
They are claiming this was all hysteria, school districts can feel free to put in multiple levels of classes and have kids advance forward. The sources on their website are still there that have language like
Therefore, the goal of detracking will not be realized without working to dismantle the various social, political, and cultural reasons tracking persists. Those that have been privileged by the current system must be willing to
give up that privilege for more equitable schooling.”
They are still going forward with revising classes to eliminate algebra/ geometry/ algebra 2, and replacing them with blended classes in grades 8-10. I don’t see how this is practical given that they are now taking the weakest kids and putting them in a harder class, as algebra is typical a grade 9 class, but they are making them more applied math as they are combining in math modeling and data analysis.
Russel,
I know it’s cheer is not reading,riting or rithmethic. Schools also don’t gain the right to take over kids lives because the schools runs elective extracurricular activities. In fact, the idea that running extra curricular activities some how grants the school the right to take over kids lives is even more ridiculous than that they could do so to teach essential skills.
If they can throw out a girl for being fat, they can throw a girl out for being uncouth.
The shouldn’t throw out a girl for being fat. But if they did, that would not touch on the 1st amendemdment. So it might not become a SCOTUS case.
They want to throw her out for expressing an opinion they disagree with and which they disagree with. That’s touches on the first amendment. You or they may not like what she said. But the first amendment doesn’t give us freedom to only say anything our overlords say. It gives us freedom to say things our overloards do not like. A publicly funded state school really shouldn’t allowed to punish her or sanction her because they think what she said is “uncouth”.
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Catholic schools can sanction her. If the Catholic schools could even kick her out of the school. Her parents could then enroll her in the publicly funded school (or another private school that is ok with her being “uncouth”.)
I’ll have to check the Constitution, but I’m pretty sure there is no exception to the 1st Amendment that allows for rights to be suspended for extracurricular activities at a school. Now they are minors and they can get away with some authoritarian policies, but I doubt this is what the case will hinge on. The SC has generally been quite unreceptive lately of vague arm waving reasons to restrict speech.
Lucia,
I watch about 100-150 football games every season and I have never seen a lumpy cheerleader doing cartwheels down the sidelines. I pay close attention when the camera is on the cheerleaders and dance teams. On the occasion when you do see a young lady who appears less than perfect she looks out of place. The coaches pick and mold them to fit an image. They have a bearing about them too [stuck-up!]. No matter the laws, they never field a squad that looks like a bunch of angry feminists. If they did the sport really would be defunded.This girl doesn’t fit the mold. Until she learns to play nice she doesn’t get to play.
Russell,
Sure. Coaches use certain metric to pick them. But if one later gets fat and is booted, there might be a broo-ha-ha.
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Whether or not they do is irrlevant to this case. As I noted
But if they did, that would not touch on the 1st amendemdment. So it might not become a SCOTUS case.
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This girl doesn’t fit the mold. Until she learns to play nice she doesn’t get to play.
You descried the cheerleaders as cute and athletic. She’s cute. She’s athletic. That’s the mold.
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Often, cheer leaders need to do gymnastics, or form pyramids and so on. So physically fit is a qualification just as it is for the gymnastics of swim team. Just because you also find them cute or attractive shouldn’t mean they lose 1A rights.
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Most high school boys on the track or cross-country team are also not fat. That doesn’t mean they ought to lose 1A rights.
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If the coaches wanted her off because she was outspoken they should have drawn the line before letting her on the squad. Then they could have pretended it was because she couldn’t jump high enough or cheer loud enough or wasn’t cute enough. But she clearly is: That’s why she got on the squad.
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The people who kicked her off for speech and did do in a way where they don’t have much in the way of plausible deniability.
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Your standard is probably fine at a Catholic school. Telling girls they aren’t allowed free speech if they want to do extra curriculars is not fine at a school funded by tax payer dollars.
You probably haven’t seen any wide receivers who were 50 pounds overweight either, ha ha. There’s a reason for that too. The additional point being that cheerleading is also a beauty and popularity contest is undoubtedly true. It’s one thing to cut a potential team member for unspecified reasons during a try out, and it’s another thing to tell someone they aren’t even allowed to try out for a specific private act.
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There needs to be boundaries where a public school’s authority ends, mostly anywhere outside where the school is responsible for the student’s safety. As we have seen supporting certain political candidates or ideologies is deemed dangerous to some people.
. https://www.edweek.org/policy-politics/how-a-cheerleaders-snapchat-profanity-could-shape-the-limits-of-students-free-speech/2021/04
“But another Mahanoy High cheerleader, one who wasn’t even part of Levy’s Snapchat friend group, got hold of a screenshot of the snap and showed it to her mother, April Gnall, who was one of the coaches. Gnall shared it with Nicole Luchetta-Rump, the other coach and a mathematics teacher at the high school.”
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She already won the case and was reinstated on the team by court order and is now in college. It seems the SC is taking the case to bring legal clarity to speech outside of public school one way or the other since everyone is uncertain now.
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There are almost no cases before the SC that are simple and easy. It is always more complex than it looks or it wouldn’t have ever got there in the first place. Can schools have higher standards of conduct for voluntary activities? Can this apply to public speech such as open Twitter and Facebook outside of school? Can this apply to intended private speech? Does the student deserve an expectation of privacy for some communication?
Tom Scharf
“But another Mahanoy High cheerleader, one who wasn’t even part of Levy’s Snapchat friend group, got hold of a screenshot of the snap and showed it to her mother, April Gnall, who was one of the coaches. Gnall shared it with Nicole Luchetta-Rump, the other coach and a mathematics teacher at the high school.â€
This other cheerleader sounds like a nasty piece of work. She may have been type who likes to get others in trouble and may have disliked this team mate and wanted someone else on the team. Such uncouth behavior. If we were going to kick someone off the team for being uncouth, it should have been her.
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I suspect there may be others who approve of the nasty little snitch and think she should stay on the team. But that’s where kicking people off for off campus things leads us. Attempt to utterly control everything.
Tom
There are almost no cases before the SC that are simple and easy. It is always more complex than it looks or it wouldn’t have ever got there in the first place.
There seems to be a split on some issue between lower district courts. There was some case in a lower court that found for a school. The district courts found for the cheerleader.
So evidently this is taken to resolve the split.
Was the cheerleader in question white?
Either way, this case will have 6 or more votes at the SC for the potty-mouthed cheerleader. First amendment rights are a bit more important than coaches sensibilities at a publicly funded school. It will be an opportunity for the court to tell the Ivy’s that they can’t take student’s rights away either if they accept public funding (and they all do). Free speech, due process, etc merit the support of the court.
SteveF,
She is white (see photo.)
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My guess is her parents are well off enough that they had funds to start off the whole court case thing! Poor parents would probably have just given into the school board.
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You are correct that fundamental rights are about more than coaches hurt feelings. If they can kick her off a cheer team for this, they can kick kids off for anything interpreted as a “microaggression” posted on Twitter. The potential for suppression of entirely valid speech would become huge.
Here is a micro-non-aggression: get different coaches for the cheer leaders. It was the coaches’ stupidity that got this ball rolling.
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Reports from “Education Week” may be a little tilted in favor teachers and administrators….. that won’t help at the SC. This is an obvious case where the 6 conservatives can make a statement about constitutionally guaranteed rights. The Biden administration supports the teachers, shocking as that may seem.
The link to the cheerleaders first win (summary judgement) is here: https://casetext.com/case/bl-v-mahanoy-area-sch-dist-2
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And I note that the issue of ruling otherwise would “allow school children to serve as Thought Police—reporting every profanity uttered—for the District.” appears here. So, it does appear the courts are concerned about the impact of little snitches on First Amendments rights of students.
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I also like the judge’s reference to the school district claims about potential for chaos
B.L.’s mere off-campus profanity is what upset Coach Luchetta-Rump, not the potential for chaos about which the District’s evidence, at best, raises “metaphysical doubt.”
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The “evidence” for “chaos” and what they mean by chaos is discussed cursoraly. Honestly, I imagine kicking the girl off the team probably resulted in more “chaos” than her post did.
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I’m constantly amazed at home much taxpayer money schools are willing to waste trying to enforce their stupid decisions. The school lost the preliminary injuction and appears to have lost the entire way up the suit chain. The $$ hit to tax payers must be large.
SteveF
Here is a micro-non-aggression: get different coaches for the cheer leaders. It was the coaches’ stupidity that got this ball rolling.
The brainless Mahanoy Area School District also deserves some criticism for not overruling the coaches in the first place and likely deciding to appeal losses.
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I do hope SCOTUS rules for the cheerleader. The tenacles of a public school district should simply not reach to disciplining a kid for something done entirely outside school. Catholic and private high schools may, of course, be allowed to have different rules. They aren’t part of government. If a family is unhappy with their rules, the family can withdraw their kids from that school and go elsewhere.
Lucia,
“The $$ hit to tax payers must be large.”
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Especially since they will pay legal fees for both sides.
Most surprising is that after summary judgement and subsequent loss at the 3rd Circuit Court of Appeals, they continued the suit. Does the school board really think they are going to win at the SC? I suspect the conservative block voted to hear the case simply to issue a smack-down to schools. If the board thinks they will win this case, then they are delusional, and should be replaced by more rational people.
This is the statement of undisputed facts by the school board. I had to laugh at the penultimate sentence, since it’s clear the school board and coaches are sufficiently unaware that they too must follow the rules of society. One of these is that high school students have 1st amendment rights.
The Cheerleading Rules are intended, in part, to teach high school students to follow rules of society, which teaches team-building skills that students will take with them after they graduate from high school. Exh. D-20, 41:10-13; Exh. D-18, 36:11-37:4
Russell Klier (Comment #201806): “This girl doesn’t fit the mold. Until she learns to play nice she doesn’t get to play.”
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You seem to be missing a couple important points. The school was not punishing a cheerleader, they were punishing an ordinary student and justifying that on the grounds that they have the right to punish any student for things said outside of school.
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Also, they were prohibiting her from doing something in the future for something she did in the past. So how are they to know that she has “learned to play nice”? Part of the justification for sports is that they build character; that doesn’t work if the students who need it are prohibited from participating.
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One could justify the cheer squad having a code of conduct for the members of the squad and punishing members for violating that code. But that is not the case here since the student was not on the cheer squad.
MikeM,
She was on the JV cheer squad…. until kicked off for her post.
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Lucia,
“The Cheerleading Rules are intended, in part, to teach high school students to follow rules of society, which teaches team-building skills that students will take with them after they graduate from high school.”
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Rules set by none other than lefty school teachers…. shocking that. Translating: “you must sacrifice your personal liberties and agency for the public good”….. channeling their inner Marx. The SC will have none of it.
SteveF
“you must sacrifice your personal liberties and agency for the public goodâ€â€¦..
In this particular case, if we view both her instagram post she had to sacrifice her personal liberties for criticizing decisions by the cheerleading coaches. (Specific criticizm was ““Love how me and [redacted]1 get told we need a year of jv before we make varsity but that’s doesn’t matter to anyone else?—)
Then the cheerleading coaches punished her (ostensibly because she used the word “fuck”.) Then the schoolboard let the decision of the cheerleading coachs to punish her for criticizing the decisions and possibly arbitrary choices by the cheerleading coaches.
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The criticism was far from eloquent. The f word is coarse and doesn’t convey specifics. But given the two snaps together, it’s clear she communicated the idea that the coaches were making up rules about cheer as they went along. The coaches may not like the manner or content of that speech. But it is speech.
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The coaches are adults. They should learn that sometimes people get angry and use the f-word. If it’s outside their sphere the coaches need to learn to not act like babies and recognize that it’s out of their sphere.
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Or they can go work at a Catholic school. Or find a different job.
One assumes * building * character starts from a foundation that may not be so sturdy as one learns to follow rules. This case seems more like vindictive adults wanting to make an example of a wayward teenager who they didn’t like. This isn’t teaching, this is punishing. Perhaps this was a pattern of behavior from the teenager and she had been previously warned, but it isn’t clear. The adults still need to understand the final straw which results in strict punishment cannot be something illegal. They are the ones who look bad in my view. Other 16 year old’s having mental meltdowns from peer rivals is standard high school dynamics.
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A much more insidious and common form of speech suppression is smarter adults who simply disallow her from the team the following season for other judgment calls. Smart adults play this game much more effectively, who gets hired and tenure at Harvard? Certainly not those conservatives … for other reasons. Who gets into Harvard? Not those Asians … with boring personalities.
Judgment calls on cheerleader tryouts is probably like 1970’s vintage gymnastics and ice skating judges in the Olympics. The Soviet Bloc judges consistently rated their performers higher and vice verse for the Western judges. They ultimately had to change the competition metrics in judging to be much more “non-judgmental”. This turned gymnastics into an athletic competition which in the end probably wasn’t a bad thing. Simone Biles likely wouldn’t have faired too well in the 1970’s.
Tom Scharf
Perhaps this was a pattern of behavior from the teenager and she had been previously warned, but it isn’t clear.
If the behavior was entirely out of school it should remain out of the cheer coaches reach even if it’s a pattern. One of the documents suggest the district is fretting about “blurred lines” separating school and outside especially during things like Covid. But this one isn’t even close to any line, blurry or otherwise. Covid and online school isn’t some unique thing that created “blurr” where previously it did not exist. And this wasn’t even close.
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This this wasn’t in a classroom zoom meeting. It wasn’t in a school publication. It wasn’t at any sort of school event (away game?). It wasn’t in a school bus. She wasn’t wearing a cheer uniform. She wasn’t wearing a t-shirt with a high school emblem. She wasn’t standing in front of any school property showing the school in the background. She didn’t collect together any school logos.
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Even some of those things might not have been enough to make this fall inside a blurred line. But she was no where close to the “in school” line.
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Judgment calls on cheerleader tryouts is probably like 1970’s vintage gymnastics and ice skating judges in the Olympics.
To some extent, yes. Even with that judging, good performance did win out. But it wasn’t everything.
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I suspect to some extent, this sort o judging is part of the problem. It’s not unlikely it can be even worse than 70s olympic judging at some high schools. It’s clear that one of the cheerleader’s gripes was that when she was a Freshman, kids were told that no matter how good you are no Freshman can be on the Varsity team. And this was, supposedly, “a rule”.
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But then, when she was a sophomore, a Freshman was put on the Varsity team. Obviously, if that Freshman has not made the Varsity team one of the non-Freshman on JV would have gotten that place.
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She may have (correctly or incorrectly) thought that would be her place. Or perhaps one on of her friends places. But if the “rules” communicated to students did change in this way, that’s a legitimate gripe. She may have also thought this “change” in “the rule” was simply favoritism. (We don’t know who the Freshman who made varsity was. But favoritism to friends, neighbors, nieces, people you go to church with and so on are not unprecedented in high schools. And this is evidently a small rural school district in PA. Insider/outsider favoritism is not impossible.)
The school board seems remarkably slow on the uptake: an immediate restraining order put the girl back on the cheer leading squad, followed by a summary judgement, and then confirmation of that judgement by a three-judge appeals panel. You would think they would get the message.
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Slow though they are, ultimately they will learn that public schools have to respect the constitutionally guaranteed rights of students… including the right of free speech.
Tail wagging the dog:
CDC Apr 27 2021 – Fully vaccinated people don’t need to wear masks when walking, exercising or dining outside, the CDC said.
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This has been obvious for at least 6 months, this announcement is so late that it will have no effect on the vast majority of people’s behavior. The CDC has a much too large policy inertia bias when the original policy was conceived in a period of great uncertainty. While it is true they get crucified for changing guidance (masks?) they just need to deal with it and change quickly as data gets better.
Not surprisingly, Slate has a better take on the cheerleader case than the very “pro anything school administration might do” edweek.org
“But this one isn’t even close to any line”
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Right, this is a softball case to a SC who has firm views on free speech. The school district is a rather dim group as far as I can tell. I think they also want to set down some guidelines and formal tests for when outside speech can be suppressed by schools. This is something all sides likely want. There are a number of valid gray areas beyond this case. I think/hope that is what is going to happen during the debate.
SteveF,
Well… let’s hope SCOTUS does agree with the lower courts. It would be pretty devastating to free speech if they don’t. It could even affect college speech ultimately.
Lucia,
Apparently cheer leading is not considered a sport at all: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mahanoy_Area_School_District#SAT_scores
The district as a whole does quite badly on proficiency tests at all grade levels as well as SAT tests. They have just over 1000 students in the system, and 1.6% (16) are considered “gifted students”. They have exactly as many administrators as teachers: 93 and 93, or one teacher and one administrator for each 11 students. Good grief.
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Yes, if the SC issues a broad ruling, it will put lots of schools that receive public funding on notice that students’ rights must be respected by teachers and administrators.
My daughter is having all the major side effects from Pfizer’s second shot after 24 hours. Mild fever, headache, body aches, tired, etc. I didn’t have any side effects.
They have exactly as many administrators as teachers: 93 and 93, or one teacher and one administrator for each 11 students. Good grief.
That strikes me as a lot of administrators. I wonder what counts as administrator?
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This article claims the ratio of administrators to teacher employees at the average school is 1% (if you count principals only) or 2.4 i you include vice principles.
However, they then go on to define administrator a number of different ways. Maybe they mean “administrative staff” is equal to number of teachers? Maybe they mean “non-teacher employees?” Because having that many administrators would be amazing.
Tom,
That’s unfortunate. I”m glad I didn’t have any with my J&J!
Hope she’s better soon.
Tom,
A friend texted me that she suffered an anaphylactic shock shack after her first Pfizer injection. She recovered after a short time in hospital.
My daughter, who has some heath concerns + 1 child in day care and another in pre-school, figures her best bet is to accept whichever type of vaccine they will offer her next week. She is becoming very good at hand dyeing, knitting and quilting, but needs to meet some adults besides her husband.
P-E Harvey,
Wow! I wonder what she was allergic too? Glad she recovered.
Lucia,
She is allergic to a lot, even strawberries! She travels with 2 Epipens and an up-to-date prescription for more.
P-E,
I have a friend who I describe as allergic to “everything”. The list includes at least: cats, milk, eggs, cigarette smoke, wool. It goes on, I just can’t remember everything. She did get the vaccine and was fine. But some people really are allergic to lost of stuff. The generally know they are allergic to lots of stuff (though they haven’t tested everything so don’t know the full list.)
Yeah, I have a dog like that. Luna has food allergies like the day is long; pork, beef, chicken, fish, eggs, cheese, so on and so forth. I forget the whole list, and I expect they didn’t test everything. Easier to just remember she’s *not* allergic to potatoes, corn, and her special hypoallergenic dog food.
mark boffill,
“special hypoallergenic dog food”
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Wow.
Lucia,
“But some people really are allergic to lost of stuff.”
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My limited personal experience is that many food allergies are, well, imaginary.
Just sayin’.
I have one allergy, but based on reading it’s not even an allergy. It’s a “food sensitivity”. Allergies lead to things like hives or anaphalactic shock. I’ve just gotten flu-like symptoms every time I eat crustaceans. So i don’t eat them. They are pretty easy to avoid since people don’t sneak shrimp or lobster into food.
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I did once pass a wool swatch around and one woman broke into hives. After she got hives she exclaimed “Was that wool!!” (Evidently while knowing she was alergic to wool, it never occurred to her to ask if a knit swatch might be wool.) I suspect her allergy was real.
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I do think in most cases “gluten intolerance” is self diagnosed and untrue. My sister does have celiac and was diagnosed in infancy.
She’s thrilled it gluten intolerance came “in fashion” because it meant there were tons o prepared mixes and products she can eat.
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But she too thinks that in most cases the self-diagnosis is fake. She also note that tons of people who tell her they have gluten intolerance will the “cheat” and eat a donut or pizza. Sort of like dieters breaking their diet. Well…. no. Gluten intolerance doesn’t work that way. She does she dose matters, but if she were to eat a piece of bread, she gets sick.
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(Mary Beth was diagnosed with a biopsy when she was a baby.)
Poor Luna doesn’t have the brains to imagine anything like food allergies. Took us by surprise; I’ve never had a pet with food allergies. I brought her to the vet because her ears were clearly driving her crazy with itchiness; I figured she just had an ear infection. Cortisol shot put her right for a few months, but the itchies came back with a vengeance. I was afraid the dog would blind herself with the way she was scratching at her eyes and ears.
*shrug*
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[Edit: This should not be construed as disagreement with your claim though Steve – I’ve known at least a few people who claim food allergies that I strongly suspect aren’t real.]
Unless you get violently ill immediately after eating something, it’s difficult to determine food allergies. My son-in-law gets nauseous after eating anything containing balsamic vinegar, even when he didn’t know the food contained it. Shellfish allergies tend to be similar. But for less obvious allergies, you have to use a food avoidance diet plan. Skin tests only suggest sensitivity, they don’t confirm it. I don’t have a lot of faith in allergists who use only blood tests either.
You have to not eat the food for a week then eat the food for a week and see if you have symptoms that you didn’t have when you didn’t eat the food. Then you have to do it again to see if the symptoms go away when you stop and then come back again when you start again. But even then the symptoms could be psychosomatic rather than an actual sensitivity because it’s not really a controlled experiment. As I said, it’s not trivial.
DeWitt,
That is my biggest problem with food allergies….. never any controlled experiments, and never blind. I think the natural tendency to ascribe something to something else explains most of it. Yes, there are real food allergies, but most of what I see people complaining about is not convincing…. at all.
Off topic – I don’t believe the story about John Kerry leaking details of Israeli ops to Iran. At all. I expect the regulars here know without my saying that I think all federal politicians are more or less corrupt scumbags, so it’s not that I think Kerry is any sort of saint. Still. Vietnam veteran, military brat Kerry, rich, ambitious politico ambassador Kerry personally compromises himself with a hostile power in order to further a deal for another politician (Obama)… Nope. Didn’t happen.
This is psyops. Notice the harassment of U.S. vessels by Iran this very day – looks coordinated to me.
Hit the enemy where they are weak, every fool knows that. Where is the United States weaker than in our political division. It’s a no brainer that we should be subject to this sort of thing.
Meh.
SteveF,
That could be the case with me. But after vomitting a few times, I developed an (evidently) natural aversion to what I ated before I vomitted. So it’s actually not remotely difficult to avoid those foods. It may be that I was really reacting to something else, but it’s not like suddenly not being able to eat a staple and risking dying of starvation.
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It’s also not costly. My allergy whether real or not happens to be to relatively expensive foods rather than something cheap like wheat or corn.
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On the other hand: my sisters biopsy really does indicate celiac. But ask other people who’ve self diagnosed and you’ll very rarely find someone who had a biopsy. Gluten intolerance is currently “in fashion”.
Some 30 years ago, I was diagnosed with allergies to dust, cats and pollen. Certainly mild allergies as I still do my own dusting. I bring lots of Scotties when I tend my lawn. My remaining cat is very affectionate, so I sneeze once in a while.
One has to decide at some point what is important.
PE,
They are working on a shot you give cats to reduce human allergies to cats!
The good news is that researchers are on the hunt for new treatments – and developing some promising new options. This article explores the novel therapies under study, including lab-created antibodies that help to halt allergic reactions in their tracks, and even a vaccine for kitty, designed to trim the amount of allergens that cats shed.
Sad time here… My brother-in-law’s family are having to decide about removing him from life support. Covid claims another victim. A harsh reminder that two doses of vaccine do not make you invulnerable. Stay safe.
Russell Klier,
My sympathies. Taking someone off life support is a brutal choice.
P-E Harvey,
WRT cat allergies, Purina has cat food that claims to reduce the amount of allergens cats shed. Before I took a course of allergy shots I was highly allergic to molds, pollen and animal ‘dander’. My allergist didn’t believe me, but my experience was that cats were highly variable in the quantity of allergens that they shed. One cat I encountered caused me to start sneezing violently when it walked into the room. Other cats not so much.
Russel,
Heart wrenching. Sorry or their choice and loss.
SteveF, Lucia
Thank you.
Russell,
My sympathies to you and the family.
Thought for the day, from Cixin Liu’s postscript to his novel “The Three-Body Problem”:
I think it should be precisely the opposite: Let’s turn the kindness we show toward the stars to members of the human race on Earth and build up the trust and understanding between the different peoples and civilizations that make up humanity. But for the universe outside the solar system, we should be ever vigilant, and be ready to attribute the worst of intentions to any Others that might exist in space. For a fragile civilization like ours, this is without a doubt the most responsible path.
HaroldW,
Cixin Liu must not have read very much science fiction. I don’t have actual numbers, but my guess would be that in published books and stories, malevolent invaders from the stars far outweigh benevolent ones. Star Trek’s Prime Directive on non-intervention for inhabited planets that hadn’t developed faster-than-light travel (often violated by Kirk) is the exception rather than the rule.
DeWitt,
I agree. Space invaders are often aggressive killing machines in sci-fi! It’s more the rule than the exception.
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Even Star Trek had lots of aggressive aliens. Kligons were a very aggressive and hostile. Quite a few minor aliens making single appearances were also aggressive and hostile. Star Wars has lots of aggression. Heinlein’s Star Ship Troupers has hostile Bugs.
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Generally, non-aggression is rare. In many stories, there is some excuse for there being no intelligent aliens out there making it not so difficult for humans to take a foothold.
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The more ‘fantasy-magic’ oriented stories that sometimes share library shelf-space with sci-fi will frequently have non-aggressive aliens. But even “A Wrinkle In Time” has aggressive alien entities who want to take over the universe.
Well Cixin Liu is from China so it isn’t surprising his take is a bit different. I liked the The Three Body problem as it was pretty unique but his other stuff hasn’t been so great. The concept of “the dark forest” as an answer to the Fermi Paradox I found pretty interesting. Another book I read (can’t remember the title) used this plot as humans were drawn to a beacon in the galaxy only to find out that it was more a less a roach motel, ha ha. Aliens used it to identify developing species for elimination.
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There is military Sci-Fi which takes up a large chunk of that genre and it is always malevolent alien species. This is pretty much books for the Doom first person shooter generation.
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First contact Sci-Fi tends to be a lot of different, usually meeting species with completely different value systems.
I usually imagine that the kindest (to humankind) scenario we can hope for in the face of advanced extraterrestrials (and it’d seem they would have to be relative to us, if we encountered them at all) is that we are beneath their notice. Humans don’t view squirrels as worth much attention or trouble in general and therefore squirrels are more or less left alone. I have trouble imagining any happy ending where we are not beneath their notice.
In other words, it’s nice to think that building up kindness and trust and so on between nations would make some difference to extraterrestrials, but I don’t think it would. It’d matter about as much as the difference between the societies of chimps and bonobos matter to humans building roads and mines in the chimps or bonobos territory. In other words, none [not at all].
For vaccine optimists, a summary of evidence vaccines are working:
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Vaccines Appear to Be Slowing Spread of Covid-19 Infections
With more than 37% of U.S. adults fully vaccinated, Anthony Fauci expects case numbers to drop significantly https://www.wsj.com/articles/vaccines-appear-to-be-slowing-spread-of-covid-19-infections-11619615436
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“But the U.S. is nearing a nationwide benchmark of having 40% of adults fully vaccinated, which many public-health experts call an important threshold where vaccinations gain an upper hand over the coronavirus, based on the experience from further-along nations such as Israel.
“When you get to somewhere between 40 and 50%, I believe you’re going to start seeing real change, the start of a precipitous drop in cases,†said Anthony Fauci, the top U.S. infectious-disease expert, in an interview.”
“In the U.S., the first clear sign of the vaccines’ impact came in nursing homes, where cases and deaths among residents have plummeted, federal data have shown. Soon after, federal data showed declining hospitalizations and deaths among the elderly, who have represented a significant share of Covid-19 fatalities since the pandemic began.”
“In early March, new cases in Israel began a steep decline—after a short spike at the end of February—around the same time that the fully vaccinated portion of the population passed 40%. On Feb. 27, the seven-day rolling average of new confirmed cases in Israel hit 4,117, according to Our World in Data, an Oxford University project that tracks the pandemic. By April 22, when the fully vaccinated level reached 58%, Israel was averaging just 129 new daily cases.”
““At somewhere between 35% and 50% vaccinated, you will see a plateau and then a decline in new cases†in the U.S., said Eyal Leshem, director of the Center for Travel Medicine and Tropical Diseases at Israel’s Sheba Medical Center.”
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This seems to contradict other statements about herd immunity. I suppose they are talking about the leading and trailing edges of herd immunity.
If we found an earth like planet full of mosquitoes we would be the malevolent invading species, if we found one full of puppy dogs then we would be the benevolent aliens. There are two sides to this equation.
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Assuming most alien species got to the top of their food chain the same way we did then evolution is going to breed in aggression. Once one is comfortably on top for long enough then maybe benevolence can take over, except for mosquitoes of course.
Oh. My eyes glazed over from all the trust and kindness sappiness before I got to the punchline, not to trust extraterrestrials at all. Sorry about that.
Assuming most alien species got to the top of their food chain the same way we did then evolution is going to breed in aggression. Once one is comfortably on top for long enough then maybe benevolence can take over
Emphasis added.
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I find your speculation beneath my notice, much as an advanced extraterrestrial will hopefully find us, therefore I will ignore you and let you live, hopefully much as an advanced extraterrestrial would do.
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😉
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[Uhm, in case the wink wasn’t enough – this is supposed to be humorous and not serious.]
Tom Scharf,
With more than 37% of U.S. adults fully vaccinated, Anthony Fauci expects case numbers to drop significantly
Fauci at his most clueless. Cases have already dropped significantly from the peak of ~260,000/day in mid January to ~57,000 on 4/27/2021 (seven day trailing average).
“In early March, new cases in Israel began a steep decline—after a short spike at the end of February—around the same time that the fully vaccinated portion of the population passed 40%.
Then why did new cases/day peak in Israel in mid-January? And what about the steep decline in early February? The answer, of course, is that total infections, not confirmed cases, had passed the herd immunity threshold, which is not 60% or higher, in January. Confirmed cases (worldometers.info) were ~530,000 on January 14, 2021. The population of Israel is 9.2 million. So confirmed cases were 5.8% of the population. Even with a fairly strict lockdown I don’t believe new cases would have peaked unless the ratio of confirmed to total cases was at least 5. There was only a small bump in new confirmed cases, peaking in early March, when lockdown restrictions were eased in early February.
Experts say serology tests unreliable, as immunity doesn’t require antibodies
Infectious disease chief advising Health Ministry warns against using serology tests in rollout of ‘green passport,’ since body fights reinfection even after antibodies fade
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The experts based their opinion on recent studies showing that while COVID-19 antibodies generally fade within four to eight months, the body still remains immune to reinfection in the vast majority of cases, meaning the level of antibodies doesn’t accurately predict whether or to what extent a person is immune.
But somehow acquired immunity still doesn’t count for Fauci and the CDC.
Unfortunately our trillions of dollars aren’t good enough to know the (vaccinated+previously infected) number with any accuracy. Also given that background infection rates vary crazily over time on their own it is very difficult to know where herd immunity is starting to make a difference. Only when looking at Israel, UK, US regions, and other areas that are isolated enough can they start to estimate where vaccination declines should start elsewhere. Then there is the issue with more transmissive variants likely having different herd immunity thresholds. It’s a gigantic pile of numeric turds as far as I can tell. One can make their favorite milkshake out of it but it isn’t going to taste good no matter what you do.
Tom Scharf,
If there were still a large fraction of susceptible individuals in the US, we would have seen a much larger ‘surge’ in infections when the B.1.1.7 strain became dominant. Instead there was a small bump from 55,425/day on 3/16 to 72,809 (7 day trailing) on 4/14 and was back to 57,024 on 4/27.
The bump in MI was higher likely because the population of susceptibles was a larger fraction of the population than in, say, North Dakota. Here in east TN, B.1.1.7 is now the most common variant and we’ve had something of a surge. But vaccination is clearly working because the average age of those hospitalized is now below 60.
Having had a positive SARS-CoV-2 test in the past should be just as good as having been vaccinated. So much for following the science.
All the people I know who got covid that I asked also got vaccinated.
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I might be too hopeful, but the current US decline might be the big one of herd immunity. We shall see.
NYT:
“The effort by Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo’s office to obscure the pandemic death toll in New York nursing homes was far greater than previously known, with aides repeatedly overruling state health officials over a span of at least five months, according to interviews and newly unearthed documents.
Mr. Cuomo’s most senior aides engaged in a sustained effort to prevent the state’s own health officials, including the commissioner, Howard Zucker, from releasing the true death toll to the public or sharing it with state lawmakers, these interviews and documents showed.
A scientific paper, which incorporated the data, was never published. An audit of the numbers by a top Cuomo aide was finished months before it became publicly known. Two letters, drafted by the Health Department and meant for state legislators, were never sent.
The actions coincided with the period in which Mr. Cuomo was pitching and then writing a book on the pandemic, with the assistance of his top aide, Melissa DeRosa, and others.” https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/28/nyregion/cuomo-aides-nursing-home-deaths.html
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I have a feeling his book revenues are trending down.
DeWitt Payne (Comment #201865): “Fauci at his most clueless.”
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Indeed. But I would go further. Anyone claiming to know why cases are dropping now (albeit slowly) is clueless, unless they can explain all the prior ups and downs. Which nobody can.
If the dark forest hypothesis is true, then we are doomed since we have been indiscriminantly sending out radio signals for over a century. The good news is that we don’t have to worry about the climate crisis! 🙂
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Of course, that implies the existence of one hunter in the forest.
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A less grim possibility is that civilizations realize that they had better shut up, mind their own business, and hope that everyone else classifies them as squirrels.
Who knew the aliens were so much into cancel culture?
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It’s pretty striking how little our radio has actually traveled in the grand scheme. The Milky Way is about 180,000 light years across and we have been sending out radio for 100 years so (0.06% of the way) so it will be a while before it is heard by anyone. They would also have to have some mighty sensitive receivers as well. Of course a little arm waving can get you faster than light communication back to home base with that quantum entanglement CB radio. https://www.planetary.org/articles/3390
Listening to Biden (when my mind does not wander). Lie, lie, lie. Spend, spend , spend. Ignore all the important, unpleasant stuff.
DeWitt,
“So much for following the science.”
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We old technical types tend to imagine that rational analysis will ultimately win out (social justice, climate ‘science’, and a host of of other dubious propositions notweithstanding). Sadly, rational analysis has nothing to do with today’s political calculus. Absolutely crazy bonkers notions of reality are accepted as given truth, with zero supporting evidence. We live in very strange times.
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Only masochists listen to an alzheimer’s patient making a speech, of which he knows nothing and will remember nothing. Good grief, when will people start to note that he is demented?
Yeah. The speech is not actually all that bad. Dull, dishonest, and simple minded, but it’s a politician talking. It has been competently delivered. But I eventually decided I’d rather watch the Rockies lose.
Tim Scott was way better than the baseball game.
If aliens appear, we might have ACLU going to court and getting judge’s to pass injunctions against government operations.
When I saw a liberal heaping praise on District 9, without having seen it I guessed aliens were the good guys, humans are the bad guys, and the movie is an exercise in liberal self-loathing. That said, I liked the movie.
The media will be like Kent Brockman.
Aliens aren’t likely to appear. My first cut analysis of the low chance is that a technological civilization developed on Earth over the last five thousand years, but ‘higher life forms’, like vertebrates have been around for about 500 million years, so the development of a technological civilization represents 0.001% of the period of higher life forms. So even if conditions for higher life forms to develop are relatively common (and I suspect they are not common), the chance of development of a technological civilization is likely very small. Add to that the travel times (and energy requirements) for interstellar travel, and the chance of aliens showing up to say hello (or to wipe out humans) is pretty slim. Finally, it seems to me implausible that alien life forms would share enough of Earth’s biochemistry for Earth to be of much interest as a place to reside.
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Aliens are not going to try to take Earth over. On the other hand, the left never stops trying…. and that is the real danger to civilization.
My guess is that any organization currently claiming to be carbon neutral isn’t.
Steve,
All those things, yes. It is improbable that UFO’s are super secret Chinese tech, or super secret Lockheed Martin or Livermore Laboratories or whatever. Also unlikely that they are U.S. secret tech that the U.S. is deliberately misleading the public about. There are many other possibilities, all highly improbable.
But I personally believe these unlikely possibilities are orders of magnitude more likely than the possibility that the UFO’s reported are extraterrestrial, for the reasons you cite among many others.
This is great! Nobody has to work anymore and we can all just live off rich people. I was born in the wrong age.
I know we all think we are pretty clever but I suspect an actual alien civilization with the means to announce their selves to us would more likely just study us like an ant colony.
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Faster than light travel is the only hope for contact, and is the basis for every SF book ever with various arm waving solutions. If that isn’t possible than the distances involved mean we have a pretty lonely future ahead of us.
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I found this pretty depressing actually:
TIMELAPSE OF THE FUTURE: A Journey to the End of Time (4K) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uD4izuDMUQA&t=208s
I just cannot believe the sycophant media. Is there not a single organization among the swooners that can think of an actual example where careless wonton spending and enormous debt ended up being a problem? A city, a country? Even the WSJ news side has nothing to say. These people have become hopeless. The academic economists must all be on vacation. They aren’t bringing this up only to dismiss it, they aren’t even talking about it all.
Tom Scharf,
“The academic economists must all be on vacation.”
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No, they are just terrified of the woke mob that runs almost every college and university. Say something even mildly critical of Biden administration policies, and they are in real danger of being attacked by the mob, and/or publicly denounced as a racist. And being factually correct is no defense against the mob, since factual analysis is unrelated to the politics of the woke mob. The country needs to re-think overall funding for higher education.
I posit the following…. Vaccinating the adult population and not the children will cause strains of the virus to develop that specifically targets children. Remember polio targeted us kids in the 1950s and it was devastating. I have no scientific backup for my theory.
Standard academic teaching is that deficits lead to higher taxes in the future to pay off that debt. I remember we were arguing with a grad student who insisted the government has to pay off its debts.
DeWitt Payne (Comment #201882): “My guess is that any organization currently claiming to be carbon neutral isn’t.”
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Indeed. They contract with a utility to buy wind and solar. Then the utility builds enough wind and solar to meet that customer’s needs. On average. Of course, most of the time the “carbon neutral” customer is getting power generated by other means and most of the contracted renewable power is going elsewhere. It is just an accounting trick since the only way that one customer can be “carbon neutral” is for there to be a lot of customers who are not.
Tom,
Faster than light travel is the only hope for contact…
We never know which of our assumptions (usually perfectly reasonable assumptions, but based on an example set of one element / ourselves) may be invalid.
Faster than light travel might not be the problem for aliens that it is for us. Radically longer lifespans could influence this. Social influences could be different – could it be not the same problem for them that it is for us that travelling at relativistic speeds everyone we know would be long dead by the time we arrived. Other things I’m not thinking of. Maybe they wouldn’t mind journeys of extremely long duration the same way we would.
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That’s them coming to us. As you say, we may never reach them. But why in the universe would they come to us in the first place. No good reason I can see. Still, this is subject to the same limitation on assumptions as mentioned earlier; who the heck knows.
*shrug*
RUSSELL KLIER (Comment #201888): “I posit the following…. Vaccinating the adult population and not the children will cause strains of the virus to develop that specifically targets children. Remember polio targeted us kids in the 1950s and it was devastating.”
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100 years ago, almost everyone got polio as an infant. A mild gastroenterological infection that usually went all but unnoticed and conferred immunity. If you were not immune and caught polio later in life, it could sometimes turn into a devastating disease. Then improved hygiene meant that kids, especially middle class kids, avoided getting infected as infants. The result was terrifying epidemics that hit children since their parents were already immune.
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Almost all infectious diseases “target children” because children are not yet immune.
Tom Scharf: Hey don’t diss “wonton spending”…I like Chinese food 😉
To your real point — I’m old enough to remember when Obama’s $800 billion plan in 2009 was considered a lot. He was a piker compared to Trump & Biden.
Russell
Vaccinating the adult population and not the children will cause strains of the virus to develop that specifically targets children
I think that could also happen if we did not vaccinate adults and did not vaccinate kids. The mutation could happen in a kid or an adult. If it’s highly contagious to kids, a large number of unvaccinated kids is sufficient for it to get a foothold. It doesn’t need to “specifically” target kids, just be more contagious so they catch it.
Russel and lucia,
Vaccinating the adult population and not the children will cause strains of the virus to develop that specifically targets children
This is a variation on the false meme that acquired immunity doesn’t count, only vaccination. We’re also back to the problem that we don’t actually know what percentage of children (or adults for that matter) have already been infected, recovered and are now immune. We have good reason to believe that the numbers of actual infections are much higher than confirmed cases. What we do know is that very few children are hospitalized and die, that transmission from children to adults is lower than transmission from adults to children and that testing for antibodies in children’s blood won’t help.
Lucia, what do you mean by ‘contagious to children’? More likely to get infected by an adult, or pick up in the air, more likely to spread amongst themselves, something else?
Mike M,
Good summary WRT polio. About the time my mom was growing up, hygiene was improving, especially for richer families….. she told me mostly kids from wealthier families were the ones getting polio as older kids or young adults, and becoming either partially paralyzed or dying.
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Since young kids almost never suffer serious illness from covid-19, I suspect that once it has been around for a couple of generations kids in poorer countries will all acquire immunity when young, and serious disease later in life will be rare. Of course, covid-19 vaccination will likely become another of the standard childhood vaccinations in richer countries.
DeWitt “ What we do know is that very few children are hospitalized and die . That highlights my concern. We seem to be complacent about the risk to young-ins. There have already been several variation of covid take hold. I am concerned that a variation will develop that effects kids like it does us old folks. My proposal is to accelerate vaccine development for children.
MikeN what do you mean by ‘contagious to children’?
I don’t know what’s unclear. I mean “able to spread to children”.
Russell Klier,
“I am concerned that a variation will develop that effects kids like it does us old folks.”
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It kills older people because their immune systems are weak compared to children. The immune system is most capable among young children. After early childhood, the immune system begins a slow decline, and is largely shot by old age. While it is always possible a more virulent strain could develop, there is no data suggesting that has happened (there is some data suggesting more transmissible strains).
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I am not at all concerned that kids are at risk. Testing existing vaccines on kids makes perfect sense (no development is needed, just testing of existing vaccines). Assuming they are effective, it may be prudent to give kids vaccinations against covid-19 if only to avoid infection later (when the illness would b more severe).
Russel Klier,
I am concerned that a variation will develop that effects kids like it does us old folks.
Influenza can be more dangerous to children less than two years of age than it is for adults. So vaccination for influenza is recommended for children older than six months. If that were to happen with a new strain of SARS-CoV-2, then we could vaccinate young children. There’s no point in doing that now because the risks from the vaccine likely outweigh the benefits and we needed to concentrate on those at highest risk. The vaccine manufacturers are starting trials on people younger than 16.
It’s not that kids don’t get covid, they just don’t get very sick from it. To them it is actually like the flu or better. Their immune systems kick its butt. There is no particular reason the disease wants to mutate to kill its hosts, that is a mistake in its design. It wants to survive. Random mutations could become more lethal but there is no particular incentive for that to happen. A virus that is less lethal will be more successful in the long run.
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Vaccinating kids really only makes sense to reduce transmission to people it does make very ill. It’s probably a good idea to mass vaccinate kids at schools ASAP. It is also a good idea * not to * if we aren’t 100% sure the vaccine is safe long term. Judgment call.
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In the grand scheme a big part of the problem isn’t that covid is such a terrible disease, it is that we were 100% vulnerable to it so there are vast numbers of potential victims.
Tom Scharf
here is no particular reason the disease wants to mutate to kill its hosts, that is a mistake in its design. It wants to survive.
That’s right. It doesn’t actually “want” anything. Variants that spread more readily into a population are favored; those that don’t die out Then it needs some non-immune hosts to be around so that it doesn’t die out for lack of hosts.
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In term of “worrying” about a mutating to spread more to kids, well if a mutation that spread more readily to unvaccinated kids happened, then it would spread into unvaccinated kids more rapidly. Parent’s being vaccinated wouldn’t make it spread faster. Them being vaccinated might slow the spread if they could carry it to, but it wouldn’t make it spread any faster in kids than it otherwise would.
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Vaccination of parents also won’t “encourage” the virus to become more deadly in kids. If that happened, it would happen.
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Generally speaking the fewer hosts for the virus, the lower the global rate of mutations.
Lucia, I asked because I am under the impression the vaccine is not highly contagious to kids.
They are less likely to spread it to others due to viral load and less likely to get infected.
Perhaps they are more likely to get infected but just don’t get symptoms or are minimally infected, but I haven’t seen evidence of that.
https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/daily-life-coping/children/symptoms.html
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“While fewer children have been sick with COVID-19 compared to adults, children can be infected with the virus that causes COVID-19, can get sick from COVID-19, and can spread the virus that causes COVID-19 to others. Children, like adults, who have COVID-19 but have no symptoms (“asymptomaticâ€) can still spread the virus to others.
Most children with COVID-19 have mild symptoms or have no symptoms at all. However, some children can get severely ill from COVID-19. They might require hospitalization, intensive care, or a ventilator to help them breathe. In rare cases, they might die.”
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This kind of language drives me crazy. How many “fewer”? How much is “most”. Can’t they just state the relative risk in numbers?
Tom Scharf,
“Can’t they just state the relative risk in numbers?”
I’m betting that they don’t know and are just eyeballing the data like the rest of us.
My guess is that children are infected in similar proportions to adults. That means it’s likely that children in the US have also passed the herd immunity threshold. Children don’t seem to be reservoirs and vectors, AFAICT, so reducing the number of susceptible adults by vaccination should drastically reduce the number of infected children. I haven’t looked, but I suspect that children are not superspreaders so it’s possible that Ro for children could be less than one.
MikeN
Lucia, I asked because I am under the impression the vaccine is not highly contagious to kids.
I think you mean the virus.
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But anyway, I was responding to this:
RUSSELL KLIER (Comment #201888)
April 29th, 2021 at 11:09 am
I posit the following…. Vaccinating the adult population and not the children will cause strains of the virus to develop that specifically targets children.
So Russell is worrying the virus would mutate and change to become more contagious to children.
So nothing in the discussion was suggest this current form is more contagious to kids. i think your correct: the virus in it’s current form doesn’t seem to be highly contagious to kids. OR maybe they get it but they tend to get such mild cases often no one notices.
Dewitt,
I think I agree with you. It seems the two extremes are:
1) Kids have been getting the virus is roughly equal rates as adults but it’s so mild no one notices. In that case, they will nevertheless have developed some immunity.
OR
2) Kids have not been getting the virus because there is something about their systems that repels the virus without getting immunity.
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In either extreme they will no longer be contributing much to circulation of the virus. In case 1, they won’t because they are reaching herd immunity. In case 2, they won’t because they just inherently don’t catch, culture and then spread the virus. In between the extremes, it’s sort of a bit of both.
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Russels worried about a mutation that could change (2) if that’s the case. If (2) is the explanation for kids seeming immunity but the virus mutated to be more infective to them then if the hypothetical mutation happened, we could see increasing symptomatic outbreaks in kids. But this requires a mutation to change just the right sort of something about the virus.
Thanks everyone…. Talking about the covid risk to kids eases my concerns that we were too complacent about it.
Russell,
The US seems to have gotten past the worst of Covid. (Fingers crossed.) The world has not.
I think those past the worst are Israel, UK and US. The US is evidently at 43.8% with at least one dose. That’s (along with some natural immunity in some of the unvaccinated) may be enough provided the vaccine and natural immunity do protect against variants. (With every new variant we initially don’t know because we don’t have data. But so far, once we get data, it seems the vaccine gives at least half way decent protection against variants.)
Other countries might be past the worst, but if so, I don’t know which they are. (I really can’t keep track of all countries. ) The world is definitely not past the worst. It probably will be in 6 months. Preferably most the additional immunity will be from vaccines, but sadly, I suspect much of it will be from infections, some of which will result in death.
Lucia, I got another poser…. What is the marketing strategy of the vaccine manufacturers with respect to kids. Do they want to delay development costs and hold that huge market for 2023? They are running full capacity supplying the world with adult vaccine. Are they worried about their competitors beating them to the market…. are they in cahoots?
Russell Klier,
I generated three graphics last year based on the first 52,000 confirmed cases and all 2,328 related covid deaths in Florida. The images are here: https://postimg.cc/gallery/Tp3gwjf
This was fairly early in the pandemic, when it was still possible for the state health department to record and track the outcome of each case. I am sure there have been some slight changes, especially since the rate of testing increased dramatically. But the trends based on age were very clear early on, and there is no evidence that has materially changed. Key points:
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1) The youngest person to die in Florida among the first 2328 deaths was 26 years old. The rate of death among children was clearly very close to zero.
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2) The number of positive tests in children below age 15 was much lower than older age groups, but rose rapidly with age, with no real difference in the number of positive tests for those over ~25-30 compared to older people. The susceptibility of every age group to infection was comparable…. except for children, where the susceptibility was much lower. The drop in positive tests for people over ~70 reflects mostly a declining population… lots of people die before passing 70, and the rate of death from all causes keeps rising.
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3) If all people over 40 were to be vaccinated, the expected drop in total deaths would be >95%.
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Most European countries did similar analyses based on their own cases and quickly concluded that there was essentially zero risk to children, and so no reason to close schools for kids younger than 16…. that really was “following the science”. Unlike in the States, where schools were immediately closed in a senseless panic…. and the teacher’s unions have made sure many remain that way to this day.
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Kids just are not at any real risk.
I assume the pharma companies hope to get vaccine in kids arms as soon as they can get approval. They will need FDA approval which requires showing it is safe and effective.
Are they worried about their competitors beating them to the market…. are they in cahoots?
Tons of pharma companies are trying to develop vaccine. Some got out of the gate faster than others. But others are still trying to develop their own. (There’s an Indian company working on one that’s delivered as nasal spray instead of as a shot.)
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Obviously getting vaccine out first is helpful to the companies bottom line. But I think most are just trying to get as many different vaccines out as possible.
SteveF
My concern was that a variation will develop that effects kids like it does us old folks. I also perceived a lack of concern for vaccine development for kids.
I don’t know that Big Pharma has a marketing strategy at the moment, they don’t need one with the media in a hyper frenzy, they can also sell everything that they make for at least the next few years so no marketing needed. What they secretly hope is that the vaccine has waning immunity and they can give a shot every year to everyone, or that variants keep popping up that require updates.
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Pfizer is actively testing on kids now.
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mRNA technology holds out hope for a lot of new stuff. One thing it was originally developed for was a possible cancer drug that could possibly target only the broken cancer cells that wouldn’t stop replicating (instead of the bludgeon of chemo). This is a bit difficult as different people’s cancer might be unique, so one would need to read their unique cancer cell and potentially build a custom mRNA product just for them. This was in its infancy when covid came along.
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All the complaining in past years about Big Pharma and their excessive profits, well guess what some of that money was used for. Here is an mRNA article from 2018 before covid came along: https://www.nature.com/articles/nrd.2017.243
Russel wrote: “What is the marketing strategy of the vaccine manufacturers with respect to kids. Do they want to delay development costs and hold that huge market for 2023?”
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What development costs are you thinking about? They don’t need new vaccines for children.
DaveJR,
They have all the clinical trials to do to prove safety and effectiveness.
There are lots of drugs that are not intended for pregnant women, it isn’t that they are known to be unsafe, it’s that the drug company hasn’t gone to the expense of testing that group which is expensive for a small target.
…from Wilfred Reilly: I bet “UFO” pilots lock the space-ship doors when they fly close to Earth.
I see that India had over 400,000 new cases today on worldometers.info. The good news is that the rate of increase has slowed in the last few days. The bad news is that confirmed cases are only 1.4% of the population so there are probably still many susceptible people in the country. Brazil, for example, has had three waves so far and confirmed cases are now about 7% of the population. India is in its second wave.
Also, those 402,110 new cases today represent 289 cases/million. At the peak of new cases in the US, 255,907 on 1/11/2021, the rate was 769 new cases/million. That would be over one million new cases per day for India. France, for example, had a similar rate and the UK’s rate at the peak was 873/million.
Maybe the current slowdown represents the beginning of a peak. We can only hope.
I would be careful comparing US, Brazil and India test results. The availability of testing, the enormous number of patients, the vast remote interior populations, different testing protocols all make the numbers apples and oranges and bananas.
DeWitt,
India evidently is poor at detecting or recording. India itself supposedly says their data are poor and don’t reflect the severity in their country.
I do how the evident slowdown does represent a real slow down.
“That meant for every recorded coronavirus case, almost 30 went undetected.”
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Sure. India has a relatively young population (median 28 years), so an expected relatively low death rate. On average, India is very poor. India has a limited health care system, so of course most cases of covid-19 are going to never be detected. 30:1 seems a bit over the top, but a big ratio between undetected and detected cases doesn’t seem unreasonable.
We might have a better idea of the COVID-19 death rate in India when they publish overall death data and we can see the number of excess deaths. But I don’t expect that data for a year or two and even then it will likely be problematic.
I’ve seen comments at WSJ.com about the apparent low per capita COVID-19 death rate in India. It’s a lot lower than one would expect even with the lower average age. But a lot of people are apparently dying at home and the deaths may not have been reported at all, much less as COVID-19 victims.
Some positive news and some amazing news. My wife’s brother is still in a coma on life support but showing very slight signs of improvement. Amazing news … my wife learned he had been receiving monthly intravenous treatments for autoimmune disease. She said it sounded like a process similar to chemo treatments. The doctor surmises the autoimmune treatments suppressed the covid vaccine shot effectiveness, leading to the infection.
DeWitt Payne (Comment #201926)
“”e might have a better idea of the COVID-19 death rate in India when they publish overall death data and we can see the number of excess deaths. But I don’t expect that data for a year or two and even then it will likely be problematic.”
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Always an issue, over reporting, underreporting, and lack of reporting.
Enables people to make statements like the number of whatever is twice [or more] what is reported.
I guess all we can do is go on that countries actual reporting as being what that country does?
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Lucia, apropos the children not getting many infections, mild or not catching it. Not those hyperactive CD4-8 cells then?
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In Australia the 0-15 YO group is not recognised as being safe to give the vaccine to as it is supposedly not tested on that age group.
Ridiculous decision if wanting to build up herd immunity.
angech (Comment #201929): “Ridiculous decision if wanting to build up herd immunity.”
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No it is not. Children rarely transmit the virus, either to other children or adults. So for the purpose of herd immunity, they are already nearly immune.
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The ridiculous decision has been giving the vaccine to people who already had the virus. That places them at some small risk for no benefit. It wastes half the vaccine and slows down the time to reach herd immunity.
angech
Lucia, apropos the children not getting many infections, mild or not catching it. Not those hyperactive CD4-8 cells then?
I don’t understand your question.
MikeM
The ridiculous decision has been giving the vaccine to people who already had the virus. That places them at some small risk for no benefit. It wastes half the vaccine and slows down the time to reach herd immunity.
Sure. But oddly, many of them want the vaccine anyway. I have a friend who insists she had Covid. (No test though. Didn’t see an MD in person.) You’d risk your life coming between her and a vaccination once it was available.
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None of them are compelled to take the vaccine in the US. Blocking them from access would require paperwork, tracking, invasion of privacy and would slow down vaccination!!
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Restricting vaccinations for people who already had the illness is a perfectly fine idea that will never work. Forgetaboutit, never going to happen.
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We can blame those at the CDC and the FDA, like Anthony Fauci, who are so stupid as to suggest (and continue to suggest!) having had the illness and recovered doesn’t make you effectively immune. With that kind of garbage being fed to the public, it is a certainty that many (if not most) people who have had confirmed cases….. 33 million of them….. are going to demand vaccinations.
Given the lag in deaths India should be in for a tough month ahead, although the numbers seems to be politically managed so I wouldn’t count on anything at this point.
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As usual the media cannot find anything other than politicians to blame. This just in, Modi’s political opponents use a crisis to score points.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi could have prevented India’s devastating Covid-19 crisis, critics say. He didn’t https://www.cnn.com/2021/04/30/india/covid-second-wave-narendra-modi-intl-hnk-dst/index.html
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Obviously all Modi needed to do was call his rallies “BLM protests” and he would have been forgiven and even lauded, silly him.
Interesting factoid: When US states are listed in order of confirmed cases per million population, the fatalities per million population mostly correlate (modestly). But one state is wildly lower than expected: Utah. While Utah has among the greatest number of confirmed cases per million population (12.4% of the population has had confirmed covid), it has one the lowest rates of death per million population (687 per million).
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One likely reason: Utah has by far the youngest population in the USA…. median age of 30.3, and only ~11% of the population is over 65. (versus Florida 20.5% over 65)
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Considering the range of elderly population by state adds some perspective to the relative success of limiting deaths in different states. California has only 70% as many elderly (per million population) as Florida, yet has over 95% as many deaths per million population….. in spite of draconian restrictions. Texas has an even younger population than California (only 61% as many over 65 per million compared to Florida), yet has ~5% more deaths per million population as Florida.
SteveF (Comment #201933): “Restricting vaccinations for people who already had the illness is a perfectly fine idea that will never work.”
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Sure. But so what? You can give people appropriate advice as to the risk and benefits and point out that for people with a confirmed test, either PCR or antibodies, the risks probably outweigh the benefits. And that the responsible thing for such people to do is to let those who are still vulnerable go first.
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Will some of the already infected still try to get in the front of the vaccine line? Of course. But many will act appropriately, and that would increase the efficiency of the vaccination campaign.
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But Fauci and company are doing the exact opposite of what they should be doing. No wonder more and more people don’t trust him.
I haven’t seen any data about the risk of infection against
1. Previous infection
2. Vaccinated
3. Infected + vaccinated
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I’m not sure what to expect from these numbers. They are all likely 90% + but I wouldn’t place any particular bets on infected vs vaccinated yet. #3 is the safest place to be.
Mike M,
“But so what?”
My point was exactly what you later wrote: with people like Fauci telling everyone they may not be immune after recovery from covid-19, there was never any chance many of those who had recovered would “do the right thing” and let others go in front of them for vaccinations. They were never told the truth about immunity after infection and recovery; instead the public was fed 100% hysteria 100% of the time.
MikeM
Will some of the already infected still try to get in the front of the vaccine line?
Some did. At least in the US, we are now vaccinating people who were at the back of the line. Anyone who wants to can sign up.
that would increase the efficiency of the vaccination campaign.
You mean “that would have…”
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Honestly, I don’t know what you are proposing given that you seem to be proposing this now not 3 or 4 months ago.
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The vaccination program went fairly efficiently and moving along quite well at this point. There may be things they want to learn to improve efficiency of future vaccination programs. But we have something like 44% of adults who have received at least 1 vaccine. The rest are all allowed in line now. The recovered getting a vaccine aren’t going to significantly delay anyone from getting a vaccine.
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A public service announcement admitting that vaccines do confer strong immunity quickly and do reduce transmission could possibly, reduce the number of “vaccine hesitant” and so get them to decided to get vaccinated. Admitting the already infected likely already have partial immunity but we don’t know how much would probably be wise. The admission would build trust among the vaccine skeptics.
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But banning those who already had Covid wouldn’t do anything useful. The already don’t need to get it. Some won’t. But banning them has no positive value.
SteveF,
They were never told the truth about immunity after infection and recovery; instead the public was fed 100% hysteria 100% of the time.
Indeed. It goes further. Has anyone seen a report that people who say they aren’t going to get vaccinated are ever asked if it’s because they have already recovered from COVID-19? I haven’t. The question is never asked because the conventional wisdom is that because there hasn’t been a controlled study of people with acquired immunity, we don’t know their immune status. The implication then is that acquired immunity doesn’t count towards herd immunity. It’s totally bogus because we know that reinfections are rare, but if you’re Joe Average and all you know is what you see on NBC Nightly News, you won’t see anything else.
Then there’s the likely fact that many, if not most, people either don’t know they’ve been infected or can’t prove it.
And finally, if you want to do anything that requires proof of immunity, proof of vaccination is the only thing that’s being accepted. There is no option that I know of for using, for example, a past positive COVID-19 test. As a result, I’m planning on getting a J&J shot in the near future now that anybody in my area can get a vaccine shot if they want it.
lucia,
By any rational measure, i.e. reinfection rate, immunity acquired from infection and recovery is a lot better than partial. It may be even better than any of the vaccines.
DeWitt,
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If I didn’t know I’d had it or couldn’t prove it, I would definitely still want the vaccine. I certainly wouldn’t want to be prevented from getting it because someone suspected I might have gotten it!
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i.e. reinfection rate, immunity acquired from infection and recovery is a lot better than partial.
I agree this appears likely. I should have written “at least partial”. We don’t know if it’s full, especially not for people who may have had light nearly undetectable cases. (Though, presumably, they may have been pretty well protected against severe infection in the first place. That’s why they barely got sick!)
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There is no option that I know of for using, for example, a past positive COVID-19 test.
Well, oddly, this might fly because there are those insisting a past positive Covid test doesn’t mean you had Covid! They claim there is something about running cycles so long it amplifies literally nothing into something! If you never had it, you then don’t have immunity!
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On the other hand, the group that insists the positive tests over count covid due to this issue with amplification seems to strongly overlap the group who denies Covid is any sort of problem at all. So perhaps you don’t need to do much to convince them to allow people to use anything at all to prove immunity!
Lucia wrote: “They claim there is something about running cycles so long it amplifies literally nothing into something!”
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This is a problem with PCR in general. Mispriming on a piece of non-specific DNA only needs to happen once (and with millions of sequences, creating specific primers gets increasingly more difficult), but once it does, you now have a specific product to amplify. The more cycles of amplification you run, the greater the chance of mispriming occurring and that the new product will be amplified into a detectable signal. You can increase specificity by separating the DNA on a gel. Non-specific bands will usually have a different molecular weight to your target, but I highly doubt they waste time doing that.
https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.03.06.21253051v1.full-text
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Between March 2020 and January 2021, of 149,000 people covered by one health care provider in Israel who had one positive Covid-19 test result (the total positive test results in Israel by January 2021 was 643,000, so one in four cases was included in the study), almost exactly 0.1% (154 people) was re-infected a second time with a positive test result. Of that 154, half had symptomatic illness. Oddly, most confirmed re-infections were among people 10 to 19 years old, followed in frequency by 20 to 29 years old and 30 to 39 years old. The researches make a SWAG that younger people were not so careful about social distancing.
To put these numbers in perspective, the entire population of Israel is 9,230,000, and as of today (with extensive vaccination), the confirmed case rate is ~70 per day, and death rate ~1 per day.
The study linked by SteveF ran from March 16, 2020 to January 27, 2021. On March 16 there were (worldometers.info) 298 confirmed cases in Israel. On January 27, 2021 there were 621,590 cases for a population of 9,197,590. So total infections during the time period were 621,292 If we scale the 154 reinfection cases in 2.5 million members of the Maccabi Healthcare Services to the total population of Israel of 9.197,590, we get 567 cases, which should be included in the total infections, not that it matters much. 567/621,292 = 0.00096. That makes acquired immunity 99.9% effective if my logic is correct.
Note that the period is long enough that it is very likely that multiple mutants of SARS-CoV-2 were involved. Also, the rate of infection in the MHS patients, 149,735/2,500,000 (6.0%), was similar to the rate of infection in the general population, 621,292/9,197,590 (6.8%), so the sample is probably representative.
sarc But we, Fauci e.g., still don’t know how good infection acquired immunity is because this study wasn’t vetted by the FDA and/or the CDC so it didn’t happen. /sarc
lucia (Comment #201941): “Well, oddly, this might fly because there are those insisting a past positive Covid test doesn’t mean you had Covid! They claim there is something about running cycles so long it amplifies literally nothing into something! If you never had it, you then don’t have immunity!”
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There are at least two issues. One is that the excessive number of cycles means that fragment of non-viable virus can give a positive test. So a person who had the virus a long time ago and is not in any meaningful sense infected can still give a positive test. That can be issue for the patient, via unnecessary isolation. And it can distort hospitalization and death stats via misattribution.
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The other issue is actual false positives via tiny levels of contamination. That could mislead a person into thinking they are immune. But that should be easily solved via an antibody test.
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I don’t understand the mispriming issue that DaveJR (Comment #201942) refers to. Is that just the possibility that some other virus shares the same snippet of DNA?
Mike M.,
The other issue is actual false positives via tiny levels of contamination. That could mislead a person into thinking they are immune. But that should be easily solved via an antibody test.
Antibody tests aren’t a panacea. From what I’ve read, a lot of infected people never show antibodies in their blood. In others, the antibody levels decline to undetectable over time. Or perhaps you believe that if antibodies aren’t detected then there was no infection?
Mike M wrote: “Is that just the possibility that some other virus shares the same snippet of DNA?”
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Primers don’t have to exactly match a sequence of DNA to bind well enough or long enough for the DNA polymerase to initiate extension. This is mispriming. The larger number of “random” sequences in your sample (as well as a few other factors) then the more chance a similar sequence will exist which may cause mispriming.
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Mispriming may be more likely in a DNA sample without the target you’re looking for, simply because, while primer is usually used up over time in the reaction, if the sequence doesn’t exist, a greater concentration of primer is available over time to misprime. Likewise, increasing the number of cycles increases the chances of mispriming occurring. 15-25 is about standard. 30+ is pushing it, but if you’re looking to detect a very small signal, you may have to go there.
DeWitt Payne (Comment #201946): “Antibody tests aren’t a panacea. From what I’ve read, a lot of infected people never show antibodies in their blood. In others, the antibody levels decline to undetectable over time. Or perhaps you believe that if antibodies aren’t detected then there was no infection?”
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Of course not. But if you do have antibodies, then you almost certainly don’t need the vaccine.
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I had something in December. I thought there was a good chance it was the Wuhan virus, but I never got tested. In March, I finally managed to get an antibody test. It came back negative. So maybe I never had it or maybe I did; three months after a mild infection there is a good chance of no antibodies.
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If the test had been positive, non way would I be getting the vaccine in the near future. As it is, I probably will get it once the state decides they don’t need to make people jump through hoops.
DavidJR,
Thanks, that made it clear.
I guess one way to reduce the problem is to test for multiple snippets. I would think that would be best practice, but I don’t know how widely it is done. Most PCR tests for the Wuhan virus use 35-40 cycles. Way too many.
NPR: COVID ‘Doesn’t Discriminate By Age’: Serious Cases On The Rise In Younger Adults https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2021/05/01/992148299/covid-doesnt-discriminate-by-age-serious-cases-on-the-rise-in-younger-adults
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Another in the series of “Young people with covid!!!!”. Alternate headline: Vaccination program working great, here is proof!
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“More than 30% of the U.S. population is now fully vaccinated, but the vast majority are people older than 65 – a group that was prioritized in the initial phase of the vaccine rollout.”
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Interesting word choice, ‘but’?
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Ummm … yes actually covid does discriminate by age. The discrimination by age is blatantly obvious except to fear mongering statistics deprived journalists. In other news cases are down 27% over the last two weeks. FL has now fully vaccinated 68% of its seniors.
DeWitt,
“But we, Fauci e.g., still don’t know how good infection acquired immunity is because this study wasn’t vetted by the FDA and/or the CDC so it didn’t happen. ”
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Fauci has proven himself many times over to be either an idiot or a blatant liar… he can choose which is a better description. But it doesn’t matter which it really is: everybody should ignore what he says….. or just do the opposite.
MikeM
The other issue is actual false positives via tiny levels of contamination. That could mislead a person into thinking they are immune. But that should be easily solved via an antibody test.
I wouldn’t want to go through two tests to prove I could benefit from a vaccine. I’d just want to get a vaccine. So my position still stands: it makes no sense to not allow those who were infected to get a vaccine. They already don’t have to get one if they don’t want to. Their right to make their own decision about the best way of to protect themselves should not be taken away nor should anyone be forced to go through expensive hurdles to prove they did not have Covid before they are given a shot.
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Let people who want a shot get a shot.
Tom scharf,
“COVID ‘Doesn’t Discriminate By Age’
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The only appropriate response is laughter…. NPR is run by clowns, idiots, or a combination of both. Laughter is still the only appropriate response.
Lucia,
“Their right to make their own decision about the best way of to protect themselves should not be taken away nor should anyone be forced to go through expensive hurdles to prove they did not have Covid before they are given a shot.”
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Sure. But I think the Supreme Court would throw out the case as moot. There is nowhere in the States that someone can’t get a covid vaccine now if they want one. So, who cares?
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Unfortunately, plenty of soon-to-be-dead elderly people don’t want one… and their families likely will care. As they say… “you can lead a horse to water…”
I watched in semi-amazement this weeks’s golf tournament in Florida… start of the four day tournament, lots of spectators wearing masks. End of the tournament: almost none. The tournament officials continued to wear them, as probably required by the tournament sponsor. The spectators just said “no”.
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Same thing in baseball: blue states have empty stadiums, red states have loud crowds of unmasked spectators. This masquerade of covid masks can’t go on for much longer. And good riddance when it is gone.
That golf tournament is close to where I live, I noticed the same thing with masks going away day by day. The CDC is obviously losing authority by being too conservative, people are making their own decisions on risk. Stories like the one above from NPR don’t help. It was mass disobedience.
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“All attendees must complete a health screening before entry. CDC-approved masks must be worn by spectators over the age of 2 except when eating or drinking.
There will be concessions, but the buffets and self-serve food stations will not be returning this year. Fans cannot eat or drink within 10 feet of the rope line.”
STeveF,
There is nowhere in the States that someone can’t get a covid vaccine now if they want one. So, who cares?
I agree no State is thinking of making those who had Covid wait. But it seems MikeM is advocating those who had Covid should be made to wait.
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They aren’t being made to wait. And it would be stupid if they were made to wait. OTOH: If someone like MikeM wants to wait, that’s fine. That’s a personal choice. But we don’t need to take away the personal choice of others to give MikeM his choice.
lucia (Comment #201952): “it makes no sense to not allow those who were infected to get a vaccine.”
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I don’t know why you keep harping on that. I don’t think anyone has suggested otherwise. Certainly not me.
Tom Scharf,
The CDC is a bit like the old Soviet Union: they knew they were utterly incompetent at governing, and so did the populace. To paraphrase the old joke about the Soviet Union: The CDC pretends to issue stern health guidance, and we pretend to listen to that guidance. Masks are going away very soon in many states.
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For those already vaccinated, of any age, mask wearing is ridiculous. For children, mask wearing is ridiculous. For healthy young people, mask wearing is ridiculous. Mask wearing outdoors (like walking a golf course) even for the unvaccinated elderly is ridiculous. Some people will accept the ridiculous indefinitely, but most will not.
Mike M,
When you wrote:
“The ridiculous decision has been giving the vaccine to people who already had the virus. That places them at some small risk for no benefit. It wastes half the vaccine and slows down the time to reach herd immunity.”
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it gave me the impression that you believed vaccination should be limited to people who have not had and recovered from the virus.
SteveF (Comment #201960): “it gave me the impression that you believed vaccination should be limited to people who have not had and recovered from the virus.”
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Yes, and “should be” was initially ambiguous. But that was clarified in our subsequent exchange. I never said those who have recovered should be prohibited from getting the vaccine. The authorities should provide accurate information and encourage the recovered to wait rather than encouraging them to get the vaccine.
Mike M.,
The authorities should provide accurate information and encourage the recovered to wait rather than encouraging them to get the vaccine.
And if pigs had wings….
The fundamental problem is that the authorities have never said that having been infected and recovered confers immunity. They say they don’t know if it does or how long it lasts, which is utterly ridiculous. We have known almost from the beginning that reinfection is rare and is still rare, so it lasts at least a year. That is the definition of immunity. But I see recommendations all the time that people who have recovered from COVID-19 should get vaccinated. At best, they say only one shot of a two shot vaccine might be ok. But, of course, there hasn’t been a double blind clinical study so they can’t say that officially.
EPA Proposes Rules to Curb Coolant Emissions From Air Conditioners and Refrigerators
Proposal is first step toward meeting new mandates to cut supply by 85% over 15 years
If your AC is old, you might want to think about getting a new one soon.
DeWitt,
What will happen when your almost-new air conditioner (like mine) leaks refrigerant and there is none available to replace it? Oh yes, you have to throw it away and buy a new one with a more desirable refrigerant. Heck, it will only cost you several thousand dollars for a new one. Same with your car’s AC. Somehow I think there will be some push back on this.
SteveF,
Somehow I think there will be some push back on this.
One can only hope. They also spout the usual misleading fact: “…their heat-trapping capacity can be hundreds or thousands of times that of carbon dioxide.” That’s true because the concentrations are so low that absorption is still in the linear range and a small amount significantly increases the atmospheric concentration while the same amount of CO2 only slightly increases its concentration.
China will build more than enough coal power plants this year alone to more than make up for any future reduction in US HCFC emissions.
Another question I can’t answer… Why did it take India so long to get so bad? They have had outbreaks before but they always fizzled. Also, my brother in law is still showing slight signs of recovery.
DeWitt,
As best I can figure, global emissions of R-22 and R134a are in the range of 400,000 tons and 200,000 tons respectively. With the expected “century warming potential” being 1,760 and 1,300 times that of CO2 respectively, the contribution from these refrigerants is about equal to one gigaton of CO2 emissions. Since current global CO2 emissions are about 40 gigatons per year, the two refrigerants represent about 2.5% of the potential warming from current CO2 emissions.
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Eliminating these refrigerants globally won’t make much difference in overall warming….. maybe 0.03C to 0.05C a century from now. Eliminating these in the USA, with the rest of the world continuing to use them, will make even less difference. But it will clearly make some people happy, no matter the cost or benefit.
“The fundamental problem is that the authorities have never said that having been infected and recovered confers immunity.”
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They still routinely pretend that vaccination counts are the only thing that matters for herd immunity. Then they also keep changing their estimates for what the HIT actually is. It’s not that they get new information and adjust accordingly, they just change it depending on what they hope the effects of their public messaging should be. See Fauci here in December: https://twitter.com/douthatnyt/status/1342178126818893833
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NYT Today: Reaching ‘Herd Immunity’ Is Unlikely in the U.S., Experts Now Believe
Widely circulating coronavirus variants and persistent hesitancy about vaccines will keep the goal out of reach. The virus is here to stay, but vaccinating the most vulnerable may be enough to restore normalcy. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/03/health/covid-herd-immunity-vaccine.html
“Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, the Biden administration’s top adviser on Covid-19, acknowledged the shift in experts’ thinking.
“People were getting confused and thinking you’re never going to get the infections down until you reach this mystical level of herd immunity, whatever that number is,†he said.
“That’s why we stopped using herd immunity in the classic sense,†he added. “I’m saying: Forget that for a second. You vaccinate enough people, the infections are going to go down.—
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What? You can’t really trust people when they are saying things based on what they want the expected response to be instead of just relaying the ‘S’cience, all the while shaming you for not following their ‘S’cience. I guess I’m just too far out on the spectrum to just want the facts, they treat us like we are 5 year olds. It’s disrespectful.
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The new definition of herd immunity is zero infections, or something. Who knows.
“Why did it take India so long to get so bad?”
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Yes. One answer might be a more transmissible variant among many other things. And why won’t India just keep burning until it hits herd immunity? The dynamics of these outbreaks are just not well understood.
India might have been burning for a while, it’s only now people are starting to take notice. They are having elections, so maybe that has something to do with the sudden “interest”.
A liberal journalist does something wildly innovative and actually asks the vaccine hesitant directly why they are hesitant and gets some answers that seem like they come from real people. https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/05/the-people-who-wont-get-the-vaccine/618765/
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“I trust my own mind more than I trust liberal elites‪”
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Ha ha. That probably sums up the problem. The barely contained condescension of the deplorables in fly over country has come home to roost. Now I believe people should get vaccinated of their own free will but for those who have a strong belief in personal liberty the “we liberals need to force vaccinate the moronic cattle” vibe is hard to miss. Every single article I read on vaccine hesitancy brings up Trump, not helpful.
Tom Scharf (Comment #201969): “The dynamics of these outbreaks are just not well understood.”
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An understatement. The dynamics are not understood at all.
After a year of mandatory indoor masks in my county, it is over:
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“Gov. Ron DeSantis said Monday he was issuing an executive order immediately suspending any local pandemic-related restrictions.”
“DeSantis said the executive order he signed Monday applies only to local government-mandated orders, not mask requirements or social distancing policies enforced by businesses.
“In terms of what a supermarket or some of them choose to do, a Disney theme park, this does not deal with that one way or another,†he said. “It’s simply emergency orders and emergency penalties on individual businesses.â€
Mike M.,
The dynamics are not understood at all.
I wouldn’t go quite that far. We are reasonably sure that when there are far more susceptibles than infected and the case curve over time is increasing rapidly, then it is reasonable to infer that on average each infected person infects more than one susceptible, i.e. R > 1. And when cases are declining over time then R < 1. But that doesn’t really tell you much. And yet that doesn’t stop Imperial College, IHME and a raft of others from producing quantitative models and claiming the output of these models is both meaningful and government policy should be strongly influenced by it. In reality, the models are, if anything, worse than climate models and are no better than Joe Average’s SWAG.
From the WSJ:
Media Mistrust Won’t Inoculate You Against Misinformation
The impressions we form about important events will still be driven by their unreliable reporting.
It’s easy to become inured to the daily procession of flagrant falsehoods, tendentious misrepresentations, deceitful exaggerations and narrative-driven editorial distortions from many of the nation’s leading media outlets. As opinion surveys suggest that most of these organizations now rank in public trust a little below emailed pleas from deposed Nigerian princes[my emphasis], it’s easy to think the power they once wielded has been so diminished that they are little more than a mildly diverting source of contemporary color in our lives.
It’s easy but wrong. The ability of major news organizations, television and entertainment companies, and increasingly the big tech firms, to frame the context in which Americans see important issues and make decisions about them is as significant as ever. Discerning conservatives know to discount or dismiss much of what they see and read, but we should remember that the editorial judgments still largely shape the way in which most people—including many of those same discerning conservative—view things.
The comments are, as usual, full of unsupported assertions, like the intelligence community proved that Trump was a tool of Putin, and tu quoque comparisons to Fox News.
MikeM
These are what gave me the impression you thought people who already had the virus should not be given it:
Mike M. (Comment #201930)
May 1st, 2021 at 6:39 am
The ridiculous decision has been giving the vaccine to people who already had the virus. That places them at some small risk for no benefit. It wastes half the vaccine and slows down the time to reach herd immunity.
This sounds like you think allowing those who had the virus get it is “ridiculousâ€.
Later, in conversation you seemed to think it’s “irresponsible†or “inappropriate†for those who had the virus to get itâ€
Mike M. (Comment #201936)
May 1st, 2021 at 11:52 am
Will some of the already infected still try to get in the front of the vaccine line? Of course. But many will act appropriately, and that would increase the efficiency of the vaccination campaign.
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But Fauci and company are doing the exact opposite of what they should be doing. No wonder more and more people don’t trust him.
You later switched to just saying you wouldn’t get it. But early on, you sure as heck sounded like you wanted to put roadblocks in the way of those who had the virus from getting it.
I realize you may not have intended to sound like you were saying that, but it read that way to me.
Tom Scharf,
IMO, an operational definition of the Herd Immunity Threshold would be when new cases are decreasing even after all pandemic induced or mandated behaviors have ended. IMO, we have passed that point in the US. However, I seriously doubt that ‘the’ HIT could be calculated in advance, especially since we don’t know the actual number of infections.
A similar operational definition of Herd Immunity would be that the probability of an infected person passing the infection to a susceptible person would be very close to zero. Obviously we’re not there and, IMO, no other country that has a significant population and isn’t an island is there either. One could argue that it could take a long time to get there. OTOH, we don’t actually have to get there to have the pandemic effectively end.
lucia (Comment #201976): “I realize you may not have intended to sound like you were saying that, but it read that way to me.”
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Sadly, we live in a society where “people should …” is often assumed to mean the same as “the government should make people …”.
People should stop assuming that.
MikeM
The ridiculous decision has been giving the vaccine to people who already had the virus.
This is not a “people should” statement. I know it’s in passive voice. But the entity that “decided” happens to be the government. And the decision was to allow those who already got the virus to have vaccine on the same basis as those who had not been infected.
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The alternate decision would have been for the government to not allow them to get the vaccine.
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Sorry, but I’m not merely “assuming” who entity making the decision about who was elegible to get the vaccine. That entity was the government.
DeWitt
OTOH, we don’t actually have to get there to have the pandemic effectively end.
No. And we don’t have all sort of social distancing or other protocols in place for gajillions of other communicable diseases like TB, Flu, Measles and so on.
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There is evidence the rules are going away at this point. Everyone at the grocery store is still wearing masks. Everyone in the dance party was too. I bet if I went to the near by bar, I’d see major lapses!
Lucia, Mike M,
The Supreme Court would declare the issue moot. Nobody is going to be kept from getting a vaccination based on their history of infection…. at least not in the States.
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Mike M,
I do hope you get vaccinated soon. It would be sad for you to become very sick, or die, with covid. It is inevitable that those around you will gradually stop paying attention to all the rules. Better that you are immunized sooner rather than later.
The lead story on tonight’s NBC Nightly News had the US’s most trusted newsreader, Lester Holt, saying that experts say that the US may never reach herd immunity because infection may only provide some immunity [my emphasis].
*sigh*
And, of course, there had to be a sound bite from Fauci.
I read a lot of fantasy and science fiction. In fantasy the Fae (the Fair Folk, Elves, Tuatha De Danann, etc.) are said to never lie. Yet they are masters of misleading with the absolute truth and a bargain with them can be very risky. The statement above that : “infection may only provide some immunity” is worthy of the Fae.
One calls them Fair Folk regardless of what they actually look like because you don’t want to be on their bad side, or in their debt. Which is why you never say ‘thank you’ to one of them as that could imply you owe them a debt. It’s also dangerous to have a Fae owe you something too. If you should die, they don’t owe you any more.
It’s like they are all reading from the robot script the Ministry of Truth handed out today. Who are the HIT Illuminati? Can we at least know what definition they are using? A falsifiable claim?
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It’s so tiring. So what happened in Israel and the UK is not herd immunity? Two weeks ago the BBC said “For Covid the estimated threshold for herd immunity is at least 65%-70%.”
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Covid: ‘Israel may be reaching herd immunity’ https://www.bbc.com/news/health-56722186
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“That works out as roughly 68% of the (Israeli) population who are likely to have antibodies in their blood which can fight off the virus.
Prof Eyal Leshem, a director at Israel’s largest hospital, the Sheba Medical Center, said herd immunity was the “only explanation” for the fact that cases continued to fall even as more restrictions were lifted.
“There is a continuous decline despite returning to near normalcy,” he said.”
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What is wrong with the US media? Doom and gloom 24/7. A recent study on coverage: https://www.wbur.org/hereandnow/2021/04/05/news-media-negative-coronavirus
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“They found news coverage of the pandemic in the U.S. was “shockingly negative†and bleaker than in international news outlets or scientific journals, Sacerdote says.
The study revealed nearly 90% of articles from major U.S. news organizations were negative compared to just 50% to 60% from major international media sources, he says.”
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They earn their badge of distrust every day it seems.
DeWitt,
Robert Jordan’s Aes Sedai were like that.
Another example of why I have lost faith in the future of the United States of America. The political gap is so wide the the two sides are unable to talk to each other. … Todays example “Herd Immunity”… A simple jargon phrase in epidemiology has become political dynamite. One side refuses to talk about it and the other side wants to talk about nothing else. Some more examples: “Moslem Terrorist”, “Border Crisis”, “Russia”, “The N Word”, Trump’s Wall”. Today’s times will be a chapter in a future book: The Rise and Fall of the American Empire.
2.5M vaccination doses / day.
50K cases (the lowest in about 7 months)
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That’s a 25:1 ratio of full vaccinations to reported cases. The race is still being won handily.
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83% of seniors in the US have had at least one dose.
mark bofill,
Yes. I thought about mentioning them too, but decided that was overkill. One important point was that the Aes Sedai said only what they believed to be true.
Speaking of book series that have gone on longer than anyone expected, I’m still hoping that George R. R. Martin will finish his Song of Ice and Fire series. Maybe book 6, The Winds of Winter, will actually be published this year.
Tom Scharf,
I am so tired of the endless parroting of 65-70% as the HIT. Let’s look at Israel. If we assume that the total number of cases is proportional to the confirmed cases, then the peak case rate corresponds to the HIT. That happened on January 14, 2021 or maybe January 11 since it’s a seven day trailing average, but let’s use January 14.
The number of confirmed cases on that date was 529,814. The number of confirmed cases on May 3, 2021 with the new case rate less than 1% of the January 14 peak was 838,621. The total cases on January 14 are 63% of the total cases. You would have to assume that nearly 100% of the Israeli population had been infected by May 3 and completely discount vaccination, since most vaccinations happened after January 14, to have those numbers be consistent with an HIT of 65-70%. Or at least that’s what it seems to me.
More likely to me is that the HIT is closer to 40% than 70%. IIRC, the 65-70% number comes from a simple SEIR model with an Ro = 3 (HIT = 1-1/Ro). The real world behavior is anything but simple.
DeWitt
I’m still hoping that George R. R. Martin will finish his Song of Ice and Fire series. Maybe book 6, The Winds of Winter, will actually be published this year.
Would that mean we could replace the story in the final season of The Game of Thrones with something remotely satisfying?
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It seemed to me they knew they needed to end it because they were running out of books. But then they wrapped up in a way that was totally incoherent. If you have prophesies from day one running through out the book, and tons of people were motivated and acted on it, and the book had magic, wights and so on, the prophesy should come true. It only needs to come true in some way, the way could be very surprising, but it should come true.
Cases in Israel dropped slightly from Jan 15 to Feb. 6 (using the Financial Times charts). They then dropped by a factor of two over the next two weeks, corresponding roughly to (R-1)=-0.35. Then leveled off until March 8, R = 1. Given a two week lag, that would seem to be minimally affected by vaccination.
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New cases then started to drop exponentially from 40/100K on March 8 to 4.6/100K on March 30; (R-1)=-0.7. Impressive. But before we attribute that to vaccination, note that in October new cases dropped a factor of 8 in 24 days, (R-1)=-0.6. Then the rate of decline slowed, with cases reaching 0.8 on May 1, corresponding to (R-1)=-0.4 in April. R should be increasing, not decreasing.
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Israeli deaths seem to have dropped more steadily, but with more noise, from over 60/day in late January to 4/day on April 23 and now about 2/day. That gives (R-1)=-0.2.
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Frankly, I see no evidence for or against the effect of vaccination in that. Looks to me like the Israeli data defy simple explanation.
DeWitt,
Could be near 40%, or even lower. I think all press coverage (and all declarations by the CDC) simply ignore very strong evidence that some people simply don’t become infected, even if for certain exposed. A low HIT is perfectly consistent with a significant fraction of the population being resistant to infection (or at least very unlikely to spread the virus to others) before the pandemic started.
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The proof is everywhere: Most children under the age of 15 have a low chance of catching the virus, and even if infected, a low chance of spreading the virus to others. Why would the people at the CDC not wonder if the widespread natural resistance so clearly evident in children might also be present in a significant portion of the adult population? I have not a clue. But I am reasonably certain that a significant fraction of the adult population is just not going to catch the covid-19 virus under normal exposure conditions.
Michael Kinsley said a gaffe in politics is when a politician accidentally speaks the truth.
Biden in his state of the union departed from the published speech delivered beforehand to the media and said he rejoined the Paris Accords because the US is only 15% of emissions, so anything the US did wouldn’t matter for global warming.
DeWitt,
Yeah. We’ve probably achieved HIT, at least the value contingent on current personal behavior. But that behavior is still somewhat circumscribed compared to a January 2020. Illinois is approaching 50% with at least 1 dose. There’s strong evidence that’s “enough” at least to avoid having detectable symptoms and certainly to avoid dieing. Cases have dropped precipitously which suggests, but does not prove, we’ve reached HIT. That the big drop happened when vaccines were getting put in arms and it has not happened in places where the have not been distributing vaccines is consistent with vaccines reducing both illness and transmission.
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So honestly, it looks like we have this licked for now. Yeah, we haven’t eradicated it like smallpox, but really, I never expected that to happen in a year. It probably won’t happen in our lifetime because lots of animals can carry this. But this has become controllable with vaccination.
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It would be nice to persuade “everyone” to get the vaccine. It’s not going to happen. No amount of explanations of HIT or Herd Immunity are going to get the truly reluctant to get it. We are going to see the freshly eligible getting it for a month or so. Then it’s going to be a trickle. (There will be a burst when there’s authorization for kids.)
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Some will only get it because their universities or employers require it. (That’s happening now.) Some will get it because they want to travel. Even if the US doesn’t require vaccination, some other countries will. You want to go there, you get vaccinated.
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Still even with some pressure, I doubt we’ll get better than 80% vaccinated. With little illness circulating, the reluctant won’t have much motivation to schedule their vaccine. Some will create fake documents and until we have some sort of method of verifying, that will do. (I don’t see any efforts to come up with unforgeable methods of proving vaccinations. The cards would be trivial to forge.)
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Some of the elderly reluctant will die. (Those entering assisted living or any elderly community will likely be forced to get a vaccine before being admitted. And oddly, children arranging for caretakers of the elderly who refuse to be vaccinated will likely insist caretakers and house keepers getting vaccinated!)
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At this point, and until new cases/week drop to 1% of the peak rate, I wouldn’t mind requiring vaccination for anyone who enters the US and applies for asylum or for anyone applying for and granted a visa of any sort. I’m sure there will be countries that do that (and more). As a practical matter, they can’t immediately because they don’t have enough vaccine. But that’s only a matter of time. (If some countries do this I’m sure someone will figure out a way to prove vaccination status in a way that can’t be easily counterfeited.)
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In the end, I don’t think it matters if we know the HIT threshold or the threshold to get full herd immunity. It’s not a factoid that motivates the skeptics to get vaccinated. In a year or two well know whether the rate was enough to largely eliminate the disease. We know what we’ve done is already enough to open lots of stuff up– though we are creeping along on that opening.
Mike M,
Yes, the case and death trends everywhere are complicated and defy explanation with any single cause: government rules, personal behavior, weather, population density, rising immunity from people who have recovered from infections, and, yes, vaccinations, all can contribute to the case evolution. But the data supporting efficacy of vaccines is overwhelming: multiple double blind controlled studies show a drop in infections of up to 95%. Do you doubt those studies prove the vaccines work? If so, then I doubt there will ever be data which will convince you the vaccines work. That is OK with me, but it sounds a bit like you are trying to justify not getting vaccinated. And unless you are younger than I suspect, I think that is a mistake.
Good news, everyone! “Anyone making less than 400k per year will not pay a single penny in taxes.” – Biden
Lucia,
“We know what we’ve done is already enough to open lots of stuff up– though we are creeping along on that opening.”
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And that creeping has both economic and personal costs. I agree that there will likely be a low background level of infection among those who refuse to get vaccinated, so some level of deaths which could have been easily avoided. The lifting of restrictions and full opening of schools will likely be long delayed due to a significant population of unvaccinated individuals…. the Whitmers, Cuomos, and other idiots in charge of individual states will drag out the social torture almost indefinitely so long as there are some continuing covid deaths….. and that is inevitable.
DaveJR,
He has Alzheimer’s. Accuracy in both language and numbers go first. He is always going to ‘mis-speak’; it will get worse. So we will see ever less of this president until his handlers figure it is time for Harris to take over.
Scott Adams: “Unlike normal viruses, I’m thinking that herd immunity for COVID-19 probably means vaccinating most people over 70 and anyone who is obese. That should get most of the superspreaders. Add more cheap-rapid testing and we’re in good shape.” https://twitter.com/ScottAdamsSays/status/1389554159133757455?s=20
As a vaccine hesitant person, I feel the need to rant.
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These vaccines are experimental. The testing protocols have not been completed. They have not received FDA approval. They use techniques not previously employed. They are for a unique disease that is not well understood. They are for a type of virus for which vaccines in animals have a checkered history. We have no data on long term safety and efficacy. A degree of caution is warranted.
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Our public health authorities, led by the CDC and FDA, have thrown caution to the wind. That is a cause for concern.
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It is entirely fitting that there be an EUA for vaccinating those at high risk. It is reasonable to allow others to make their own decisions, provided they are properly informed. But that is not what is being done.
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It makes no sense for those who have recovered to get an experimental vaccine. But the authorities are not telling people that. Instead, they are encouraging such people to get vaccinated. That is irresponsible.
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It is perfectly reasonable for those at low risk to choose to not get the vaccine. The messaging is contrary to that.
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It is outrageous that employers are coercing employees into getting an experimental medical procedure. That ought to be illegal. But our public health authorities are fine with that. The same goes for colleges requiring the vaccine of their students, who are at near zero risk. That the CDC and FDA are not speaking out against that is totally irresponsible.
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There is even pressure to vaccinate groups, such as children and pregnant women, for whom the vaccine has not been tested. The authorities ought to be speaking out against that. Instead, they make ambiguous statements. Totally irresponsible.
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So to get vaccinated, I must place my trust in people who have proven themselves to be undeserving of trust.
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As a result, I am hesitant.
Mike M – “It is perfectly reasonable for those at low risk to choose to not get the vaccine. The messaging is contrary to that.”
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Yes, but as Cuomo will tell you, if, as a young person, you don’t get vaccinated, you may end up killing Granny, and he certainly has experience to back up that claim, but apparently did nothing wrong, that required a huge coverup to pretend didn’t happen, so I guess killing Granny is both a big deal and no problem. Schrodinger is confused at this point.
“I am hesitant”
Mike M,
That’s slightly understating it, but for what it’s worth, so am I.
Andrew
MikeM,
The urgency of the pandemic did force the FDA to enact emergency authorization (that is, to not follow their normal multi-year approval process). I would argue that to not issue that emergency approval would have been ethically reprehensible, and that their 20+ day delay in issuing the emergency approvals was purely politically motivated, and designed to ensure Trump would not be re-elected. Bureaucrats are very far from morally upstanding, and I would never argue otherwise. But the study data was overwhelmingly positive.
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At this point, there have been well over 100 million people vaccinated in the states, orders of magnitude more than any ‘normal’ approval would involve, and there is zero evidence of significant harm. As Obiwan said: “You have do do what you think is right, of course.” I hope you don’t contract the virus, but that you recognize the risk you are taking.
DeWitt,
I’ll read Winds of Winter when and if it comes out, just because (sort of like watching Disney’s Star Wars), but I’m over it. Brandon Sanderson, Scott Lynch, and Leigh Bardugo are my George R R Martin replacements these days.
mark bofill,
That’s like how I felt about the last seven or eight books in Jordan’s Wheel of Time. My daughter had more sense and quit after book 5. At least Martin doesn’t seem to pad with extended unnecessarily detailed descriptions the way Jordan did.
I highly recommend Glen Cook’s Black Company books. That series is complete. And for something completely different, you could try P.C.Hodgell’s Kencyrath books, starting with God Stalk. That series isn’t complete.
Re: Wheel of Time – same.
Thanks for the recommendations! I’ll check them out.
So .. Is Winter Still Coming? It was when I stopped reading Game of Thrones, ha ha. My feeble old mind just can’t keep up with 11,000 parallel storylines. A cast of thousands just doesn’t work for me anymore.
MikeM
provided they are properly informed. But that is not what is being done.
I don’t know why you think people are not “properly†informed. I think I was properly informed. I received copious information and I read the newspaper. I talk to people.
It makes no sense for those who have recovered to get an experimental vaccine.
It makes no sense to you. But while it is highly probable they have immunity there is a slight chance they don’t. You may judge the cost benefit to high; others judge it’s low enough. That doesn’t mean it makes no sense. It’s just not what you advise.
It is outrageous that employers are coercing employees into getting an experimental medical procedure. That ought to be illegal.
I disagree requiring vaccines should be illegal. I believe in at will employment. I don’t make a special exception for this. There are plenty of costs to employers who might need to shut down, disinfect or track those who get sick. One of the employers who I read was requiring vaccines was a meat processor. Meat processors have lots of costs and employee skills aren’t deep. It makes perfect sense to give those employers the freedom to impose conditions on employment.
Some other employers won’t impose these conditions. But I think this should be up to the employer. Their decision will be based on many things including likelihood of closedowns, difficulty in protecting employees, fungibility of skills and their political preferences. But I think employers should be allowed to decide. Not you or the government. I’m libertarian in this regard.
There is even pressure to vaccinate groups, such as children and pregnant women, for whom the vaccine has not been tested.
There’s no pressure to do vaccinate children until tests are submitted to the FDA and an emergency authorization is complete. (I’m not sure about pregnant women.)
You are free to be hesitant. But many of your statements are too strong. You appear elevating your policy preferences above those of others. That’s fine. But they are merely policy preferences and some things you say strike me as just flat out wrong. (e.g. the notion people aren’t properly informed.)
Tom,
I tried to read one of the books when the show came out. I liked the show better!
But I think someone should just decree the final season was a bad dream and re-write it!
I just read Hobbit / Lord Of The Rings. I was unaware that series was started in the 1930’s. It has aged well. I generally don’t do the fantasy genre as much, I’m much more sci-fi, but there have been some good fantasy books I have stumbled across. I like my mysticism to have at least a hand waving basis in science. I have read a few of Brandon Sanderson as well, that dude has no problem with writer’s block, ha ha. A new book out today by Mike Weir (author of the The Martian). I’d imagine a “May the 4th” release was intentional.
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Amazon paid like 250M for the rights to LOTR, and are spending a huge sum in an upcoming series. 450M for the 1st season. There are some things that probably shouldn’t be remade, this might be one of them.
Lucia,
“I believe in at will employment. I don’t make a special exception for this.”
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The only exception I can think of is employees working under a collective bargaining agreement; employers may not like it, but they can’t impose requirements that are not in the agreement.
If one is more mentally stressed out from putting an experimental and new vaccine based on new biotech in their body, then don’t get vaccinated. If the unknown unknowns of a vaccine are greater than the fear of the virus then do what you think is right. I overestimate the danger of the virus emotionally even when my mind tells me different, so I was first in line for vaccination. My covid anxiety is down by a magnitude since I completed vaccination. I can understand people being on the other end.
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I’d have to agree that nobody should be forced by the government or a private entity to get a vaccine that is only under an EUA. That is a good point. Colleges requiring vaccinations for a low risk population while healthcare workers at old folks homes are not required makes no sense at all.
There needs to be lines for employment. Obese people not allowed, too much insurance costs! Profess the correct political ideology before entering! Show me your voting record at the interview! It’s one thing when you apply for a job at the DNC, it’s another when it’s Coca-Cola. It’s my understanding that HR looks at people’s social media accounts which I find invasive. https://www.businessnewsdaily.com/2377-social-media-hiring.html
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This is equally invasive: “About half of employers – 47% – said they wouldn’t call a person for an interview if they can’t find them online. More than one-quarter of employers say it’s because they like to gather more information before calling a candidate, and 20% say it’s because they expect candidates to have an online presence.”
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I just believe in a pretty hard line for work life / social life separation. It’s really none of their business what I do at home, and the bar needs to be rather high for them to look in there IMO. In my time they were talking about drug screening all employees for marijuana use. I found their justifications for that rather unconvincing.
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The same people who complain about systemic bias also fully support “holistic” hiring processes which is exactly where that bias creeps in.
Tom,
Guess it depends on the line of work. Security folks really dislike engineers having an online presence in my neck of the woods. It’s usually a vulnerability in their eyes.
I went through a rather comprehensive security background check for one of my jobs, it was very invasive. There was justification for that one. Good thing I didn’t have a Twitter account back then.
I’ve been treading water for several years now at contracts that don’t require a security clearance since having been denied clearance some years back. I figure in another two or three years enough time will have passed that it won’t be an issue anymore. Nothing horrific, just that I suck at paperwork and tracking down and reporting the exact details of my life, my neighbors, credit, whereabouts, and so on seven to ten years prior to any given application. But I suspect paperwork errors look like guilty contractors trying to hide their untrustworthiness to the security guys!
https://nypost.com/2021/05/04/coca-cola-pauses-diversity-plan-after-chief-lawyer-resigns/
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Coca-Cola pauses aggressive diversity plan after chief lawyer resigns
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“Some questioned whether Gayton’s policies violated Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which says employers can’t treat people differently based on their race.”
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“Monica is fully committed to the notions of equity and diversity in the legal profession, and we fully expect she will take the time necessary to thoughtfully review any plans going forward.â€
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“Under the plan, any law firm seeking to do business with the company was required to commit that at least 30 percent of billed time would be from “diverse attorneys,†and at least half of that time would be from black attorneys.”
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In February, employees were urged to be “less white†as part of the company’s alleged diversity training. The “Confronting Racism†course in question was offered by LinkedIn Education and allegedly utilized by the soft-drink titan.
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“In the U.S. and other Western nations, white people are socialized to feel that they are inherently superior because they are white,â€
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Another slide suggests “try to be less white†with tips including “be less oppressive,†“listen,†“believe†and “break with white solidarity.â€
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Democrats projecting again.
SteveF,
Yes. If there is a union, that changes things. In which case, the employer would need to negotiate the requirement to get vaccinated with the union. But that’s not the same as making it illegal.
DaveJR,
Here is the best part: even though he resigned as chief corporate lawyer, “He signed a new contract to serve as a consultant to Coca-Cola CEO James Quincey. In that position, he’ll be making a hefty $12 million over the next year. That included a $4 million sign-on fee and a monthly consulting fee of $666,666, according to an April 21 securities filing.”
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Since when do you get a signing bonus of $4 million and $8 million in salary when you have been forced out of your job? Coca Cola has lost its way.
Tom Scharf,
That is a good point. Colleges requiring vaccinations for a low risk population while healthcare workers at old folks homes are not required makes no sense at all
To some extent, this tells you who has power to make rules. At universities it’s faculty and staff many of whom are older. Students have little. Students are unlikely to collectively object, band together and disrupt university over this. So as long as it’s legal, the rule will stick.
I don’t know what’s going to happen at old folks homes. If they have a union, they may not require employees to get vaccinated. But in many old folks homes, the old folks are pretty powerless. So they’ll mostly get vaccinated, but the employees might be allowed to decline.
I was getting ready to tutor so rushed off before adding:
The context of universities imposing vaccines while old folks homes makes sense if you recognize that old folks homes don’t get to decide for universities or vice versa. The University may very well think it’s nuts the old folks home allows unvaccinated employees. But the University doesn’t get to decide for those who run and operate the old folks home. The old folks home likewise doesn’t get to decide for the University.
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It would be nuts if a government made all the rules and imposed them in this particular way. But nothing says person (or company) A isn’t allowed to be overly cautious merely because person or company B throws caution to the wind and may even be reckless.
I think “emergency use authorization” makes things different. This is forcing people to put an “untested” product into their bodies. They can of course refuse and lose their job or their place at a university. I would expect this requirement to get tested legally and the universities to lose the case on EUA grounds, but I’m no legal expert. A public university is basically the government.
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I think once it is formally approved then that changes things, although it should place it in line with other vaccination requirements at public schools. I’m not sure what that status is for public universities.
The mask requirement signs were gone at my golf course today, and employees and patrons were maskless. I was the only one with a mask, just running on covid autopilot.
The pendulum may have started to swing the other way: https://nicholaswade.medium.com/origin-of-covid-following-the-clues-6f03564c038
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A long read about why lab escape of covid-19 is the most plausible explanation of how the pandemic started. The Chinese Comunist Party has block all outside access to lab records at the Wuhan virology lab. A shocking revelation: Three researchers from the same lab were hospitalized with covid-like symptoms in late September 2019…. they were working on “gain of function” experiments, where coronaviruses with enhanced infectivity of human cells were being developed.
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The article’s author is no wild-eyed conspiracy theorist, and carefully lays out multiple lines of evidence supporting escape from a lab.
SteveF,
From your link:
The moratorium specifically barred funding any gain-of-function research that increased the pathogenicity of the flu, MERS or SARS viruses. But then a footnote on p.2 of the moratorium document states that “An exception from the research pause may be obtained if the head of the USG funding agency determines that the research is urgently necessary to protect the public health or national security.â€
This seems to mean that either the director of the NIAID, Dr. Anthony Fauci [my emphasis], or the director of the NIH, Dr. Francis Collins, or maybe both, would have invoked the footnote in order to keep the money flowing to Dr. Shi’s gain-of-function research.
“Unfortunately, the NIAID Director and the NIH Director exploited this loophole to issue exemptions to projects subject to the Pause –preposterously asserting the exempted research was ‘urgently necessary to protect public health or national security’ — thereby nullifying the Pause,†Dr. Richard Ebright said in an interview with Independent Science News.
When the moratorium was ended in 2017 it didn’t just vanish but was replaced by a reporting system, the Potential Pandemic Pathogens Control and Oversight (P3CO) Framework, which required agencies to report for review any dangerous gain-of-function work they wished to fund.
According to Dr. Ebright, both Dr. Collins and Dr. Fauci “have declined to flag and forward proposals for risk-benefit review, thereby nullifying the P3CO Framework.â€
In his view, the two officials, in dealing with the moratorium and the ensuing reporting system, “have systematically thwarted efforts by the White House, the Congress, scientists, and science policy specialists to regulate GoF [gain-of-function] research of concern.â€
Possibly the two officials had to take into account matters not evident in the public record, such as issues of national security. Perhaps funding the Wuhan Institute of Virology, which is believed to have ties with Chinese military virologists, provided a window into Chinese biowarfare research. But whatever other considerations may have been involved, the bottom line is that the National Institutes of Health was supporting gain-of-function research, of a kind that could have generated the SARS2 virus, in an unsupervised foreign lab that was doing work in BSL2 biosafety conditions. The prudence of this decision can be questioned, whether or not SARS2 and the death of 3 million people was the result of it.
So there is reason to believe that if the lab escape hypothesis correct, then Dr. Fauci bears significant responsibility. Maybe we should start referring to the Wuhan Institute of Virology as The Umbrella Corporation of Resident Evil video game and movie fame.
From SteveF’s link:
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“a crossroads of GOF research concerns; the potential to prepare for and mitigate future outbreaks must be weighed against the risk of creating more dangerous pathogens. In developing policies moving forward, it is important to consider the value of the data generated by these studies and whether these types of chimeric virus studies warrant further investigation versus the inherent risks involved.â€
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“That statement was made in 2015. From the hindsight of 2021, one can say that the value of gain-of-function studies in preventing the SARS2 epidemic was zero. The risk was catastrophic, if indeed the SARS2 virus was generated in a gain-of-function experiment.”
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That’s an understatement. The real proof is in tracking the genetic changes in the virus. Just like they can track the genealogy of the new variants, they can also do that backwards so it should be possible to find “the missing link” to either a lab or natural source. That they haven’t found a natural source and China is being rather closed about it is suspicious, but not enough for anything but speculation. The scientific and evidence free overstatements that is wasn’t derived from a lab were always hand waves it seemed, but “science” public pronouncements like that are common today. These are really just groups of activists trying to setup an initial bias.
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Now it’s interesting that this guy who claims he has worked for Nature and the NYT published this on Medium, he no doubt shopped this story and it appears nobody wanted to touch it. I have no idea why the US media seems out to protect China here, it’s either TDS since he put of this theory, or a knee jerk need to protect “science” and academia.
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Suffice it to say that if this was a lab accident then there will be hell to pay in science and academia which is why they may be unwilling to self investigate with much gusto (cops investigating cops). Personally I think the outbreak location is highly suspicious, but SARS viruses have naturally leaped to humans before.
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My guess is China may not even know the answer, but it also may desperately * not want to know the answer * either. If the Chinese authorities even suspect it might be a lab accident, we will probably never know the origin. It’s entirely possible in China to cover this type of thing up, not so easy in the US.
If there is prioritization for getting vaccines, pregnant women are generally able to jump line.
DeWitt,
I suspect Fauci is too far removed from such things to even be aware of them in anything but a very general way. His job is to parrot Democrat talking points. In any case, I think Congress will ultimately get involved and stop all funding of research than makes viruses more capable of infecting humans. (This will probably have to wait for Republican to gain control of at least one house of Congress.)
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It strikes me as about as crazy as virus research could possibly be. If it turns out the source was the Wuhan research lab, then there will be a lot of very bad consequences for those involved, as well as the entire field of virology.
Pre-pandemic story in nature about this lab.
Inside the Chinese lab poised to study world’s most dangerous pathogens https://www.nature.com/news/inside-the-chinese-lab-poised-to-study-world-s-most-dangerous-pathogens-1.21487
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“Editors’ note, January 2020: Many stories have promoted an unverified theory that the Wuhan lab discussed in this article played a role in the coronavirus outbreak that began in December 2019. Nature knows of no evidence that this is true; scientists believe the most likely source of the coronavirus to be an animal market.”
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“But worries surround the Chinese lab, too. The SARS virus has escaped from high-level containment facilities in Beijing multiple times, notes Richard Ebright, a molecular biologist at Rutgers University in Piscataway, New Jersey. Tim Trevan, founder of CHROME Biosafety and Biosecurity Consulting in Damascus, Maryland, says that an open culture is important to keeping BSL-4 labs safe, and he questions how easy this will be in China, where society emphasizes hierarchy. “Diversity of viewpoint, flat structures where everyone feels free to speak up and openness of information are important,†he says.”
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Nature knows of no evidence that this is untrue also.
Tom Scharf,
“My guess is China may not even know the answer, but it also may desperately * not want to know the answer * either.”
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Sure, but that the records of the Wuhan lab are NOT being made available tells me they may already know the answer…. the lab was making a dangerous coronavirus variant using inadequate containment and it got out when people working in the lab got infected. If the research records actually showed the lab research was unrelated to the pandemic, I am sure the CCP would give the records to anyone who asked.
The rapid development of m-RNA vaccines (they were fully developed within 10 weeks of having the virus RNA sequence) means that future pandemics should be more quickly controlled. The manufacturing capacity now exists to turn out many millions of doses of m-RNA vaccine in a very short time. Of course, quickly having a vaccine to control a future pandemic will depend on the numskulls at the FDA not getting in the way.
SpaceX SN15 Flight Test today … in theory. They have supposedly a better landing system on this one. SpaceX won the contract for lunar landing. I guess building spaceships like Wallace and Gromit impresses NASA.
There is no proof that the Wuhan virus escaped from a lab, but there is certainly evidence that it did. It started out well adopted to humans. There were three sick lab workers in September 2019. The virus has a furin cleavage site. That site uses codons that are far more likely to have been inserted in a lab than in a bat. There is no good analog for the virus in nature.
But there is absolutely no evidence to support it having jumped from animals.
More real world data that the vaccines are working as expected.
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Fully Vaccinated Adults 65 and Older Are 94% Less Likely to Be Hospitalized with COVID-19 https://www.cdc.gov/media/releases/2021/p0428-vaccinated-adults-less-hospitalized.html
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“Both mRNA COVID-19 vaccines (Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna) authorized and recommended in the United States protect against COVID-19-related hospitalization among adults 65 years and older, according to a new CDC assessment that finds fully vaccinated adults 65 years and older were 94% less likely to be hospitalized with COVID-19 than people of the same age who were not vaccinated. People 65 and older who were partially vaccinated were 64% less likely to be hospitalized with COVID-19 than people who were not vaccinated. “
SpaceX finally has a Starship prototype still standing after a test flight. It’s a good thing their landing pad wasn’t 10 feet smaller.
Tom Scharf,
“Fully Vaccinated Adults 65 and Older Are 94% Less Likely to Be Hospitalized with COVID-19”
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Shocking, absolutely shocking I say.
Fully Vaccinated Adults 65 and Older [who get infected with SARS-CoV-2] Are 94% Less Likely to Be Hospitalized with COVID-19
And, of course, the fully vaccinated adults should be ~95% less likely to get COVID-19 in the first place. So that should mean that fully vaccinated adults are actually 99+% less likely to be hospitalized than people who haven’t been vaccinated.
DeWitt,
The CDC press release is worded in a way which makes it impossible to determine the true protection offered by the of the vaccine. They provide no link to the actual study data, so you are stuck with their crazy wording. I can’t tell if the effectiveness is actually 94% or 99%. The Israeli study indicated re-infection of those who recover is very rare, so we might hope vaccination is comparable in efficacy.
I’m not sure if this is of interest…. As of last night my wife’s brother is breathing on his own with ox support but without the ventilator. He is slowly coming out of the medically induced coma and allowed one visitor a day. Maybe he will be a Covid survivor, but it is too soon to tell.
That sounds promising, Russell. Is he still intubated? How much oxygen is he on?
Russell,
That is good news. I hope he continues to improve.
BTW, my experience is that older people who have been under anesthesia can take some time to return to normal mental function.
SteveF,DaveJR. Communication is still one-way so we don’t have details but we understand that he went from ventilator to a nose cannula with no tracheotomy. Waking up has been going on for about three days now. Still cannot talk.
Russell,
FWIW, I’m rooting for your brother in law as well. I hope you continue to keep us posted.
They wouldn’t take him off the vent if he wasn’t conscious and obeying instructions. They’d have been waking him up and setting the vent to provide just support to test how he can manage breathing on his own. I guess he passed. That he’s extubated and on a nasal cannula looks very promising. Hope it stays that way.
Andrew Cuomo has declared that at stadiums there will be a vaccinated section with no social distancing required, and an unvaccinated section with social distancing. Her has not yet decided whether infected from nursing homes will be placed in the unvaccinated section.
MikeN,
Cuomo confirms, yet again, that he is an idiot.
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1) The yellow CDC card can be forged with about 10 minutes effort.
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2) Having had covid-19 and recovering is likely at least as protective as vaccination.
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I have a better idea: tell New Yorkers a date when mask wearing will no longer be required anywhere, and suggest those who are not yet vaccinated either 1) get vaccinated or 2) run the risk of infection if they don’t want to get vaccinated.
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Much simpler, and gives people agency instead of mindless nanny-state controls.
Mayor Muriel Bowser of DC has banned dancing at weddings and elsewhere.
MikeN,
No dancing at weddings will certainly be very popular. In fact, it may be so popular that more weddings end up being held outside Washington DC.
Another study from Israel, where hospital workers who were vaccinated were compared to their co-workers who were not vaccinated. All were routinely tested for covid infection, even absent symptomatic illness. The rate of symptomatic illness was reduced 97% for the vaccinated group compared to the unvaccinated group. In addition:
The researchers calculated that people who were fully vaccinated were 86% less likely than their unvaccinated counterparts to develop an asymptomatic infection. Even those who had only one dose of vaccine saw their risk fall by 36%.
Among the vaccinated, the ratio of symptomatic to asymptomatic cases was 1:1 (half of confirmed infections asymptomatic). Among the unvaccinated that ratio was 2.77:1. So being unvaccinated made 73% of the infections symptomatic, versus only 50% among the vaccinated. 15% of all unvacinnated workers became infected.
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The study does not address the question of infectivity of asymptomatic cases.
Mark bofill. Thank you will do.
Off topic but…. For those thase following the 2021 Brood X cicada event…. an app to map the progress. Users take a picture and it posts on a US map. There are already some pictures from numerous locations. https://apps.apple.com/us/app/cicada-safari/id1446471492
SteveF,
Having had covid-19 and recovering is likely at least as protective as vaccination.
Well, yes. Your body has to clear the virus from your system to recover from the infection. But that capability is going to go away quickly or is significantly less effective than a vaccine? Any so-called expert who says this is clearly incompetent or lying and should, in a rational world, be ignored from that time on. And we knew this before we had lots and lots of data on reinfections.
But then we have a lot of virologists that insist that SARS-CoV-2 could not possibly have escaped from the Wuhan Institute of Virology in spite of, unlike SARS and MERS, still having found no evidence that it jumped to humans from a (wild) animal host (other than humanized mice, ferrets or cell cultures at the WIV). In fact, calling it the Wuhan virus is making more and more sense.
SteveF
Even those who had only one dose of vaccine saw their risk fall by 36%.
They all got two, right? It’s hard to untangle the effect of the first vaccine relative to the effect of time.
This is a US one
After crunching all the numbers, biostatistician Li Tang and her St. Jude colleagues determined that people who’d had at least one dose of vaccine were 79% less likely than their unvaccinated coworkers to become infected with the coronavirus. They were also 72% less likely to develop an infection that was asymptomatic.
The 79% rose to 90% for the second dose.
Here’s another one from the latime article
Researchers led by Dr. Yoel Angel calculated that people who were fully vaccinated were 97% less likely than their unvaccinated peers to develop an infection with symptoms. Even among those who were only partially vaccinated, the risk of a symptomatic infection was 89% lower.
It looks like the also have yoru quote on asymptomatic infections.
Whatever is true for vaccinated people should be even more true for people who have recovered from an infection. Of course, there is no mention of that possibility, if they even bothered to look for it.
Lucia,
“They all got two, right?”
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It was a continuing study, with vaccinations happening during the study. I imagine the people who accepted the vaccination ultimately all got two doses, but during the study there was a 3 to 4 week period between doses…. which I guess gives them enough data to estimate the influence of a single dose. BTW, the 36% reduction in risk they were describing was the chance of asymptomatic illness relative to unvaccinated coworkers, not the reduction in overall risk of infection. I did not see an estimate for the reduction in risk of symptomatic illness for one dose.
SteveF
I think this metions reduction of risk of symptomatic infection after 1 shot
Researchers led by Dr. Yoel Angel calculated that people who were fully vaccinated were 97% less likely than their unvaccinated peers to develop an infection with symptoms. Even among those who were only partially vaccinated, the risk of a symptomatic infection was 89% lower.
Partially vaccinated is generally 1 shot of the 2 shot series.
Lucia,
You read more carefully than I did.
So 89% reduction in risk of symptomatic illness with one dose, and 36% reduction in risk of asymptomatic illness with one dose.
Yeah. It looks like if you get 1 shot of the 2 shot vaccines you will be just fine. But you might have an asymptomatic infection which means you may infect someone. It’s still not clear whether the asymptomatic can infect others or if they do, they may be less contagious. But, of course, you’re mostly a risk to the unvaccinated. We are approaching a period where most unvaccinated adults are electing not to be vaccinated. The majority of them is because they don’t want to not because they have any specific physical reason.
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That still leaves babies, kids and young people. But even many of them will likely get vaccinated in the next 6 months.
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In other and similar news, the vaccines seems to control variants fairly well. So with regard to this pandemic: in the US and UK, the fat lady is singing. In many other countries, the fat lady is just arriving. But we know her brilliant aria will be delivered.
Lucia,
The 7-day trailing average of covid deaths is now just above where it was in early July of last year…. I expect in a week or two it will drop to the level it was in early march of last year, at the beginning of the pandemic. It seems very unlikely there could be another significant surge in deaths, because over 75% of the most vulnerable have been fully vaccinated…. and looks like ultimately 80% in that group, and because in most places it looks like the population is well past the applicable HIT. But unfortunately, deaths are not going to approach zero for a long time, if ever… too many, and especially too many of those at risk, have refused the vaccines for that to happen.
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So while most Republican governors will lift restrictions soon, there will be a lot of blue-state governors kicking and screaming to maintain draconian restrictions indefinitely…. even when nearly all of those contracting covid and dying from covid do so because they made a personal choice to put themselves at risk. It is yet another example of utterly opposing views about the proper role and scope of government.
I saw Walmart with a board for walk-in vaccinations in Virginia.
Steve,
In Illinois our 7 day average is below the level this week two years ago. We are near where it was in early April last year.
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All the bad-stars would have to align for deaths to start rising again. I mean, hypothetically a killer mutant strain that totally escapes the vaccine is not impossible. But it looks like the ones we’ve seen aren’t escaping. At worst some vaccines might be slightly less effective but mostly the unvaccinated are getting the disease.
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The Wall Street Journal ran an oped by someone who suggested that Biden should recommend mask mandates be dropped by Memorial Day. Among other things no mask mandates is more likely to motivate the vaccine skeptics than yes mask mandates. I know none of the skeptics would say or admit that the possibility masks worn by others provide then partial protection when unvaccinnated. That’s true for at least some of the skeptics, but I bet it’s not universally true. At least some might suddenly notice other aren’t masked and so, perhaps, their own risk is higher.
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(As a side note, I also saw a graph showing the average new case rate in the 10 states with the highest vaccination rate and the 10 lowest. The biggest % drops was in the vaccinated state. The lowest absolute numbers were in the least vaccinated states. Jim and I discussed it and we both suspect that higher absolute vaccination rates are likely at least partly motivated by knowledge that case rates are high where you hang out. Many people will reason that if “no one” is getting sick in their State, then perhaps the risks of the vaccine outweigh the risk of the disease. I think they are still wrong, but it is true that if ‘no one’ is getting the disease near you, your chance of being exposed is small. )
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In any case, no matter the motivations of the vaccine reluctants or refusniks, there’s really very little point to any government imposed mask mandate at this point. They are a nuisance and the vulnerable who want to be protected now are protected. The young aren’t vaccinated, but at least statistically, their risk is small. They don’t want to wear masks either.
MikeN,
Yesterday I walked past a table set up for giving covid vaccinations at a Publix supermarket (they are offering either J&J or Moderna vaccines; you can choose). You need to schedule an appointment because they have only a few chairs for those waiting. But nobody was waiting and nobody came in during the time I was there (20 minutes?). The lady giving the vaccinations was reading her smartphone.
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The vaccinations are readily available and cost nothing, but lots of people are not getting them.
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My county (155,000 souls) has 20 confirmed cases per day (7 day trailing average). If you estimate there are 10 contagious people walking about in the county for each confirmed case, that means about 200 contagious out of 155,000….. 1 person in 775 (and probably less!) is contagious. The NY Times still rates the risk of infection in Martin county as “extremely high”. The daily number of confirmed cases implies a risk of ~20/155,000 = 1/7,750 per day. Hard to see that risk is “extremely high”, but it is the NY Times, so it is a political evaluation, not a factual one. I suspect lots of people look at that level of risk and are not highly motivated…. especially those under 50 years old.
In New Mexico we still have to got through the state government to get a vaccine.
I agree that from this point on, both new cases and deaths should trend steadily downward. But nothing has gone as expected with this epidemic. So we shall see.
At the golf tournament in NC this week the fans are almost totally maskless. Not wearing masks is a bit of its own contagion, it’s odd how social dynamics work sometimes. A majority change seems to happen pretty quickly one way or the other at a tipping point. My grocery store still requires masks and it was still at 100% compliance.
Even though I think it doesn’t really matter, I find Biden’s waiving of patents rather annoying. Moderna waived their patents from the beginning (although the fine print here probably matters) and nobody took them up on it. I doubt this will have any impact one way or the other for at least a year. It’s mostly political virtue signaling. The EU, of all people, are pushing back.
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Still it annoys me. Does this give China permission to just clone Pfizer/Moderna vaccines and the related technology to mass produce these vaccines? It would seem so.
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This type of behavior also makes me wonder what would have happened over the last year if Biden would have been in charge. Biden and company seem almost obsessed with virtue signaling (Paris Accord, Iran Agreement, Covax, etc.) and I question whether Operation Warp Speed would have ever happened. Instead we might have been part of a “grand international coalition of other virtue signalers who plodded their way to an equitable solution for the global community”. They would still be having meetings today.
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Big Pharma saved the day here and the legacy media just can’t find it in themselves to reward them both verbally and endorse financial rewards. If this was an Ayn Rand novel Big Pharma would just shut down production today and say they will start shipping again for twice the price when the US gets that silly patent waiver idea out of their heads.
Tom Scharf,
Reality, as it usually does, will overrun those who cling to foolish rules…. in this case, insisting on masks at golf tournaments where that can’t be rationally justified.
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WRT supermarkets; the only way masking rules in retail establishments like supermarkets ends is the same way it ended for spectators at golf tournaments: enough people simply refuse to wear a mask that the store managers have no choice but to let it go. I mean, they can confront and tell one person to leave the store, but they can’t do that with 20 at the same time. Besides, loud confrontations with angry customers becomes a losing proposition when the local authorities have no legal way to enforce mask rules (as in Florida). Sure, the supermarkets could put bouncers at the door to keep the unmasked from entering, but are they going to hire 20 bouncers patrolling the store to throw out the maskless? I very much doubt that. It will end as soon as 2% of the people refuse to wear a mask, not before.
“I question whether Operation Warp Speed would have ever happened.”
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Very unlikely. The left wants to stop pandemics the same way China does: lock people up. Technological solutions are at best tolerated, and at worst unwelcome. Social engineering is always embraced.
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And it is not just covid. There are multiple potential and technically feasible ways to mitigate warming from GHGs should that warming become a real problem. But the left is adamantly opposed to even studying those options! They want social engineering, not engineering.
Masklessness is still steasily increasing at my local walmart, but it clearly hasn’t reached critical mass, yet. It’s time I helped out.
Pfizer, BioNTech Ask FDA for Full Approval of Covid-19 Vaccine
Move would ease some restrictions, allow companies to make fuller case to people hesitant to get a shot
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Emergency approval requires compelling evidence from a large clinical trial with two months of patient data, while six months of evidence is needed for full approval.[my emphasis]
Six months of data, not two years. They have six months of data now which shows greater than 90% effectiveness up to six months. Of course, the FDA could take up to 60 days to accept the application and up to ten months to conduct a review before issuing a decision.
That’s
DeWitt,
“Of course, the FDA could take up to 60 days to accept the application and up to ten months to conduct a review before issuing a decision.”
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As soon as possible, bureaucrats will return to their obstructive normal pose. Final approval of a vaccine that hundreds of millions have received will be delayed indefinitely. They are idiots, of course. This is obvious.
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Imagine for a moment that the FDA did not exist. Pfizer and Moderna would have offered their vaccines to people 10 months ago. Hundreds of thousands now dead would not have died. The pandemic would long ago have subsided, at least in places where people have the wealth to purchase the vaccines. The FDA is wholly and completely complicit in causing untold thousands of deaths for no good reason. IMO, the FDA serves no useful purpose in 2021, indeed, has served no useful purpose for decades, and needs to disappear. The FDA is a constant and destructive impediment to good health care.
SteveF ” IMO, the FDA serves no useful purpose in 2021, indeed, has served no useful purpose for decades, and needs to disappear.’-
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A bit harsh.
Regulations are needed to draw a line in the sand over certain actions.
People drawing the lines always want to draw more and people who oppose them rub them out.
I am all for some sort of checking that vaccines and medications will not be snake oil and dangerous.
Your beef is with a over regulated and bloated bureaucracy.
By all means trim it down.
ATTP had a discussion on
“Mike Hulme, Professor Human Geography at the University of Cambridge, has an article called Climates Multiple:Three Baselines, Two Tolerances, One Normal. A discussion of the recent World Meteorological Organisation decision to re-define the present day climate as the period 1991-2020, replacing the period 1961-1990.
Making the baseline period more recent makes the anomaly values actually go down. The change in baseline has caused the world to suddenly become 0.5oC cooler. Changing the baseline does not change how much we’ve warmed, how fast we’ve warmed by emitting GHG into the atmosphere.” [abridged and altered].
This transmitted over into UAH doing the same with their troposphere results meaning we now have the world in temporary negative change. -0.05 C.
I doubt it will last but it is nice for the first time in 5 years to have an argument.
Well done WMO as the temporary change is much more than -0.50 C.
angech,
“Your beef is with a over regulated and bloated bureaucracy.
By all means trim it down.”
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My beef is a structure which kills people by blocking progress. Inspecting meat processing plants is not a substantive issue, nor is making sure snake oil is not offered for sale (which the FDA always fails to do, BTW. Snake oil is constantly advertised and sold in the USAo). The issue is a structure and procedures which slows approval of new treatments to a standstill and this kills people.
… and after 18 months of a pandemic the WHO and CDC now appear to admit that aerosols are a primary vector for virus transmission. Zeynep takes the scientific community to task for taking so long to figure this out at the NYT (long article summarizing the evidence). https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/07/opinion/coronavirus-airborne-transmission.html
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The evidence here is still primarily observational and anecdotal, but the pendulum appears to be swinging towards aerosols. I find the whole situation completely unacceptable as early challenge trials with healthy young volunteers could have definitively established the most likely transmission paths. As I have opined many times, medical ethics seems pretty unethical in the grand scheme if one is concerned about global body counts amid uncertainty for a new virus. That this still is not even up for debate baffles me.
Medical regulation is not a bad thing, half the software on my phone barely works at all. If the same people who wrote the remote start software for my car also did heart bypass machines, then the patients would die 75% of the time because “bypass failed to initiate” or the machine rebooted 3 times mysteriously. We need protection from incompetence.
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What is true is that the structure and culture at the FDA is not well tuned for a global pandemic that required a quick and smart response. They, like innumerable other government organizations, don’t do “unprecedented” very good. The vaccine rollout was the same. Bumbling buffoons that eventually got their act together.
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What I still don’t really know is if the FDA had approved vaccines early whether it would have made any real difference because mass production has ultimately been the bottleneck.
Tom Scharf,
“What I still don’t really know is if the FDA had approved vaccines early whether it would have made any real difference because mass production has ultimately been the bottleneck.”
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I think it would have made a difference in the 2020 election outcome.
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WRT comparing cell phone apps to medications: Just make the pharmacompanies legally liable for misrepresentation of performance.
Tom Scharf (Comment #202075): “As I have opined many times, medical ethics seems pretty unethical in the grand scheme if one is concerned about global body counts amid uncertainty for a new virus.”
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Tom Scharf (Comment #202076): “What is true is that the structure and culture at the FDA is not well tuned for a global pandemic that required a quick and smart response.”
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Two sides of the same coin, I think.
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It seems that there are no protocols for treating Wuhan virus patients. I am not talking about some final, official protocol; I am talking about protocols published by places like Harvard Med School, the Mayo Clinic, etc. saying something like “This is what we see as best practice given the current state of knowledge”. It makes sense that such protocols might be varied, contradictory, and changing. What does not make sense it that there are no such protocols.
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No protocols for how to keep your patient out of the hospital. No protocols for when to admit a patient. No protocols for when to start this or that treatment. No protocols for when to use supplemental oxygen or mechanical ventilation. Nothing. That does not seem reasonable.
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Disclaimer: I am not a doctor and I have not researched this. So it could well be that my limited information is not correct. But I have seen this claim made by a doctor on national TV.
SteveF (Comment #202077): “Just make the pharmacompanies legally liable for misrepresentation of performance.”
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I don’t see how you can do that since the efficacy of medications are typically based on statistical evidence. Make it too hard to sue, and we will be back to the days when nobody could trust most medications, a.k.a snake oil. Make it too easy to sue, and development of new medications will stop and a lot of chemists will be desperately looking for new careers.
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The idea that you could set the balance just right is a fantasy.
MikeM
What does not make sense it that there are no such protocols.
I think it makes perfect sense there are no protocols for a new virus. Protocols or rules can’t be established until we know that there is some particular set of practices that works consistently.
Mike M. and lucia,
It’s my understanding that it’s the CDC and/or NIH’s responsibility to keep track of and publish best clinical practices. I think they dropped the ball on this early on, but they may have somewhat caught up now.
The biggest problem in my experience is not successful companies like Pfizer who can afford to do proper engineering, it is the startups and poorly run companies that are always near failure with one crisis after another (i.e. most small companies). The financial desperation leads to poor decision making and taking chances. When the choice is between a liability risk and bankruptcy then they will take a risk on liability to survive.
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Take Emergent in Baltimore that is sitting on a bunch of potentially tainted vaccine doses, if the FDA wasn’t ordering them to not ship then they probably would ship. This might be a good thing as these vaccines might be perfectly OK and the FDA is being overly cautious. However what my experiences is with some companies is that the desperate CEO’s at these type of companies under financial pressure want the product shipped, period. They absolve themselves of responsibility by deliberately not asking too many hard questions, leaving no paper trail on efficacy questions, making it clear with a wink and a nod that nobody should have any paper trail. “Just tell me everything is OK, la la la la!”.
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What the FDA does for good and bad is legally requires a formal paper trail on everything, and having no paper trail will get you shut down. That system can still be “worked” by experts, but it is almost easier to just do the paperwork.
lucia (Comment #202080): “Protocols or rules can’t be established until we know that there is some particular set of practices that works consistently.”
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I don’t think that is true at all. Protocols are different from rules. A protocol is a “plan for a course of medical treatment”. I don’t think that most doctors can be expected to keep up to date on the medical literature. They rely on intermediaries, like CDC or the Mayo clinic. The should be publishing protocols based on best current knowledge, even if that knowledge is uncertain.
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Probably 90% of medicine lacks a “particular set of practices that works consistently”.
Specific medical product categories have some very specific requirements, here’s how you must test and and validate an EKG, etc. Here’s specific electrical tests that must be performed on all devices attached to a patient.
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However what the FDA is mostly doing is making sure you have “proper” bureaucracy in place. You have product requirements, you do a hazards analysis, you write product specs, you have design reviews, you write test procedures traceable to your requirements. You take customer safety complaints VERY seriously. They almost don’t care about your specific procedures, but they very much care that you follow your own procedures. An FDA audit is basically show me your procedures and prove you are following them.
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It makes medical products more expensive, and creates a large barrier to entry in the market because of the expertise required across the board. Silicon valley doesn’t do medical much, and when they try it their way, Theranos can happen. We would likely have more innovation without this, but society has deemed this product category too important for a wild west approach. Similar to airlines and the FAA.
Mike,
My googleing defines protocol like this
A medical protocol is considered to be a set of predetermined criteria that define appropriate nursing interventions that articulate or describe situations in which the nurse makes judgments relative to a course of action for effective management of common patient care problems.
Guidelines for Use of Medical Protocols – CT.gov
As defined the “protocol” can’t exist before the appropriate nursing interventions are identified. So it’s not surprising if they don’t exist when a disease is brand-spanking new. They can’t.
The should be publishing protocols based on best current knowledge, even if that knowledge is uncertain.
The link Dewitt provided seems to be publishing recommended treatments under a large number of situtaions. (Out patient, in patient, when yada, yada occurs.)
So it seems you are incorrect that “protocols” don’t exist. Perhaps they took longer to exist than you might have liked. But that they may not have spring into existence instantly would hardly be surprising. It’s true that doctors can’t be following the literature as it comes out. It is equally true that the CDC and NIH personnel also need to wait for data to be reported and to have time to read it, sift it and figure out which course of actions make for effective management of patient care problems. Creating a protocol out of thin air is not useful to doctors or patients.
As some expected, Federal civil rights charges have been filed against Chauvin and the other three police involved the the Floyd killing. Civil rights charges are far more severe than the state murder and accessory charges, and carry sentences up to life without possibility of parole as well as the death penalty. It will be interesting to see if the Biden administration asks for the death penalty; my bet: they will. In any case, Chauvin is unlikely to ever leave prison except in a body bag.
Russell,
The study said all those symptoms also can happen with people who have not had covid, just less frequently. One weakness of the study is that the people involved knew if they they had covid before the vaccination, so their self reporting of side effects could be biased by that knowledge. The results are in conflict with the results of the double-blind Moderna study, where patients did not know if they had received the vaccine or not. In that study, people who had covid before vaccination reported fewer side effects.
Not disclosed at the Chauvin trial: in 2017 Chauvin was disciplined for striking a 14 YO black suspect in the head with his flashlight, then pinning the boy with a knee to the neck for 14 minutes, as the boy cried out “I can’t breathe!”. That 2017 episode is now part of the Federal civil rights charges against Chauvin….. which is why I think the Biden administration will ask for the death penalty for Chauvin.
SteveF,
Wow! And that info about Chauvin’s past didn’t seem to circulate around the intertubes before the trial. I’d heard he’d been disciplined, but not for what!
2nd degree murder etc….. 12.5 to 40 years
9 counts of felony tax fraud.. 5 to 15 years
Federal civil rights charges.. 15 years to execution
Chauvin is toast; he is 45 years old and will die in prison.
I suspect Chauvin is mystified by all of this. Others are not.
I googled the story on the 14 year old. That discipline also only occurred because of the video evidence that made it clear Chauvin’s description of the arrest in the official write up was highly misleading. He was brutal with the 14 year old and rightly disciplined.
Lucia,
The mystery is how someone like Chauvin could ever remain on the police force after the 2017 episode. It was only one of 18 complaints of excessive force, and it showed exactly the kind of cruel sociopathic behavior that took place with Floyd.
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I am not at all surprised sociopaths get into police work (the people I knew who became cops were scary, and should clearly never have been cops). But I am surprised that after proving just how sick in the head he is, not to mention utterly dishonest, Chauvin remained on the force. Had he been fired in 2017, the country would have been spared billions of dollars in physical damage, not to mention socially destructive riots. And Floyd would probably still be alive.
I don’t see the other officers being convicted of any crime with heavy penalties here, and if they are then I think it is just trial by public opinion and not justified. I don’t know all the details, but they seem more like bystanders. They may have had a moral duty to stop Chauvin but they can all probably say they didn’t really know he was in fatal distress.
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This type of “part of the crime” law is used routinely against perps though. If you are engaging in a felony with other where a death occurs, everyone involved in the crime gets charged with murder, even the getaway driver. I think most of the reason this exists is to make things simpler for prosecutors when they know somebody in the group shot the clerk, but can’t prove who was the trigger man. This gives them huge leverage for finding out who it was.
The media likes to play all this out as if it is some grand social reckoning, but I think what has really changed is the ubiquitous access to video recording. I’m sure cops are rather weary of every citizen encounter being recorded by a bunch of bystanders. There is no doubt that it is rooting out some bad behavior though, that’s all for the good.
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What we don’t get is a balanced view of citizens and protesters behaving badly (unless it is a Trump riot, ha ha) that would even out the story for what cops have to put up with. It went so far as all the popular cop shows being hounded off the air. Everyone wants a simple 6 second narrative nowadays.
Tom Scharf,
While Minnesota law allows “accessories” to be punished as if the were perpetrators, I agree that in this case that is very unlikely. Heck, one of them was still in training. So I will be very surprised if they get anything like Chauvin’s sentence….. but they will almost certainly be convicted. If they have among them half a brain, they will plea to lesser charges and accept something under 10 years (on probabtion in 6 years). The trainee might even just get probation and move away to obscurity after that is done.
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The wild card is Federal civil rights charges, which will be completely separate from the State charges, and which will mean they are transferred from state to federal prison, not to the street after serving their time. I think Chauvin is at real risk of execution (liberals are always against execution unless it is someone they don’t like), but the others really were relative by-standers, so anything more than a few years in Federal prison seems to me unlikely.
I’ve opened a new thread and am going to close this one. Go to:
It was curious why India was doing so well over the last year, it’s curious no longer. They just set the global record for the most cases in one day, 312K. They have >1B people though, but their uncounted case multiplier is likely higher than the US. Central Africa remains an outlier. Any place with a large unprotected population is a ticking time bomb.
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LA county may have hit herd immunity.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/covid-19-rates-in-los-angeles-have-gone-from-worst-to-among-the-best-11619096400
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Flu season is down 100x and the lowest ever recorded. It seems some experts are learning about their powers of prediction:
“Experts are less certain about what will happen when the flu does return. In the coming months — as millions of people return to public transit, restaurants, schools and offices — influenza outbreaks could be more widespread than normal, they say, or could occur at unusual times of the year. But it’s also possible that the virus that returns is less dangerous, having not had the opportunity to evolve while it was on hiatus.
“We don’t really have a clue,†said Richard Webby, a virologist at the St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital in Memphis. “We’re in uncharted territory. We haven’t had an influenza season this low, I think as long as we’ve been measuring it. So what the potential implications are is a bit unclear.â€
I read about India. It’s so sad that the place where much of the vaccine is manufactured isn’t better protected with vaccines!
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I’m getting a flu vaccine in the fall. Even if they don’t know what strains might be circulating, it will be better than nothing.
lucia,
My daughter, an analytical chemist who works in big Pharma, says that if she has a choice, she would never take any drug manufactured in China or India. Their quality control is questionable to say the least. She told me about one place, I forget whether it was in India or China, where the building where a still operational drug manufacturing facility was located had partially collapsed after a fire.
I read India was reverting to the much maligned “vaccine nationalism” and restricting exports until they had their own situation under control. Vaccine nationalism is quite the expected behavior in my view. They are still on a pretty steep exponential increase. It’s entirely unpredictable where these things peak.
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I don’t really know what it takes to max out manufacturing, but it seems like everyone should be doing whatever it takes. I think we are nearing 1B doses worldwide though which isn’t too bad, but not enough to prevent serious outbreaks for a while. The US should be working harder on vaccine hesitancy instead of the constant tiring political activism. We are just starting to hit the demand threshold now. If we can get to 70% then we should see a serious dent in future outbreaks.
Speaking of India, on worldometers.info, they had more new COVID-19 cases/day/million (227) than the US (196) yesterday. The seven day trailing average of new cases/day in India doubled in about ten days from April 2-11 and from April 11-21, so they’re probably still far from the peak.
In fact, there are a whole lot of countries with a higher new case rates yesterday than the US, including places like Germany (332) and Canada (222). In some cases, a whole lot higher. Turkey, Croatia and Sweden, for example, are all over 700 new cases/day/million.
DeWitt,
The EC bureaucracy delayed vaccine distribution in Europe….. maybe after the pandemic is over some people will look at the UK versus the EC and reconsider how competent the EC is….. IMO, not at all competent.
SteveF,
As I remember, one of the reasons the UK left the EU was to get out from under the EU bureaucracy.
https://www.independent.ie/regionals/braypeople/opinion/vaccine-shortages-show-why-brexit-britain-despised-eu-bureaucracy-40238348.html
It’s also looking like the recent ‘surge’ in cases in the US may have been caused by more contagious variants burning through the remaining susceptible population. Eyeballing the new case rate data, it looks to me like we have seen the peak and we should see a rapid decline in new cases in the next few weeks.
DeWitt,
“…..the recent ‘surge’ in cases in the US may have been caused by more contagious variants burning through the remaining susceptible population.”
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That may be contributing, but I think there are a couple of potential factors:
1) More contagious strains
2) Change in behavior (we won’t kill granny now she’s vaccinated)
3) Loosening of rules/people getting ever more tired of restrictions
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Hard to say which dominates.
Here is the crazy part of covid: I am vaccinated (2nd dose 4 weeks ago), as is my wife. So as far as I am concerned, I have extremely low risk of any symptomatic illness, and almost as low a risk of contracting asymptomatic illness and passing the virus to someone else. Yet every covid rule/restriction still applies to us: masks everywhere, ‘wash your damned infected hands in ethanol’, stay distant from other people, etc, etc. There needs to be a rational adjustment as the vaccines become available to everyone (at least in the States). To those who don’t want the vaccine: OK, but please don’t ask everyone else to change their behavior to reduce your personal risk. To government: get the hell out of the way.
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But I still see no end to the craziness; excepting a few places, nothing has changed. And heaven forbid that you stop wearing a mask. Really, it is all nutty, all silly, and there is no end in sight.
SteveF,
I think that craziness is happening because of the weird interaction between the desires of the vaccine “hesitant” who don’t want anyone to be “encouraged” to get the vaccine by allowing the vaccinated to be allowed to take advantage of their immunity and those of the “ridiculously worried” who think even the tiniest chance that vaccines don’t work the way vaccines are supposed to work.
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I read Illinois “phase 5” will keep capacity limits in place, but the vaccinated won’t count toward the limits. But I haven’t read of any proposed method to allow merchants, bar and restaurant operators to identify who is vaccinated.
Yes SteveF, its insanity. I refuse to wear a mask outdoors and have recently been chided a couple of times. My response is to point out that the cloth masks the chiders are wearing are totally ineffective. The mask thing I think highlights the ideologically driven insanity the Western world seems to have entered. The evidence on their effectiveness is mixed and inconclusive at best. There’s also plenty of documentation of harmful side effects such as facial rashes and even some hypoxia incidents that can be dangerous. The suspension of the Bill or Rights by states is I think unprecedented in American history. I hope someone brings suit and the Supreme Court is eventually forced to rule on it.
For those who want a good laugh there is a post at ATTP explaining why lockdowns really work despite the fact that the evidence indicates they don’t. It’s a good example of vague narratives with no quantification that dominate viral epidemiology.
It’s like arguing that chemotheropy works with lung cancer despite the scientific evidence that it doesn’t help much if at all. You just note that the chemicals differentially kill cancer cells and the reason the trials don’t show much is that the treatment was not applied early enough when there were only a few cancer cells. Of course that’s mostly impossible since lung cancer is usually symptomless until it is advanced.
Lucia,
“But I haven’t read of any proposed method to allow merchants, bar and restaurant operators to identify who is vaccinated.”
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Sure, which is part of why this is all so nutty. The fundamental issue is the “nanny state” versus individual’s with agency (AKA liberty). Those who set the ‘rulz’ (mostly diaper wetting bureaucrats) want nobody to have agency. At some point I have to believe this situation will no longer be tolerable, and the ‘rulz’ will be ignored.
FL never had outdoor mask rules, at least not in my county. 95%+ of everyone I see outside is sans-mask and you see people taking them off within 6 feet of leaving a grocery store. Some states have mandatory outdoor masks even when alone, ha ha. That’s psychotic, but some people really like to be controlled, or more likely like to control others. For their own good of course, the controllers have the very best of intentions.
The 7 day average of new covid cases dropped over the past 10 days. I think it’s quite likely we’ve see the last ‘spike’ and it was a mini-spike. Every adult who wants a vaccine can sign up now. Within a month every adult who wants one will have had at least their first and many will get the one-shot J&J. Plus summer is coming; cases are going to pretty well vanish for a while. (My guess is they’ll never rise much again).
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SCOTUS has shown willingness to not uphold every rule a governor might put in place. At least they are insisting on governors having to justify rules when the burden religion. It’s going to be well nigh impossible to justify why people can’t gather in church if the number of cases is tiny. And once people are gathering in church with no incident it’s going to be really hard to get people to follow lots of other restrictive rules.
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I think politicians will be hard pressed to get people to follow rules pretty soon. I’m willing to wear a mask now because I don’t want to make things difficult for the poor grocery store managers or dance studio operators and so on. But in a month or so, it’s going to be really hard to get everyone to accept these things.
‘You’re never fully dressed without a mask’ ….is the way the song goes I think. I will be wearing my N99 respirator till they pry it from my cold dead face. My style of mask is not designed to protect people around me…. It is designed only to protect me. No flu, no colds and no Asthma for me over a twelve month period…. I credit that to the respirator mask. It is not Covid approved because it has exhaust valves, but I don’t care what the rules say…. I’m wearing it. https://rzmask.com/collections/m2-mesh
Russell Klier,
Whatever floats your boat. I haven’t had much of a cold or flu in about 5 years (one sore throat with slight headache and low fever last year… covid?). I’ll be pleased when I can forget about masks.
I’ve got an appt to get vaccinated tomorrow. I’ll report on any unusual signs of zombieism.
Mark,
Based on experience until now, chances are good that those around you will not have their brains eaten after you go zombie. I hope it is nothing more than a sore shoulder.
mark bofill,
Did you have to go through your state government to get an appointment? Did you have to get permission from the state government? Did you have any choice over which vaccine you get? Did you have a choice over where and when, or did you have to take what the state assigned you?
SteveF,
After my first Covishield injection, I checked for local availability of headcheese.
Russel/SteveF,
I’m not going to constantly wear a mask even if it prevents mild colds. I can’t deal with my glasses constantly getting foggy.
P-E Harvey,
Now that you mention it, I should check for brains in the meat counter at the store. I”m sure there must be delicious brain recipes online. (Just googled. I found “Simple Brains a al Creme”. (Surely, that’s not the real name. It’s just not right to mix English and French that way.) I found “Deep-fried Brains” and “Caramelized Calf-brains”.)
I also found
So, brains taste different from other animals. That’s interesting.
P-E Harvey,
From Wikipedia:
“The parts of the head used in the dish vary, though commonly do not include the brain, eyes and ears of the animal used. ”
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So your hankering for headcheese probably did not really reflect underlying brain-eating desires. 😉
Lucia,
“That’s interesting.”
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Oddly enough, I don’t find it interesting. Must be a lack of inner zombie.
Mike,
~grins~ You’ve got the wrong end here. I’ll have to ask my very special personal manager and assistant who actually set this up for me (my wife) to find the answers to those questions. I know getting vaccinated is reasonably important for somebody my age but it’s extremely difficult sometimes for me to find time outside of my schedule to mess with this type of thing.
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Everyone else,
~bigger grin~ You guys are awesome. I deliberately tried to provoke a response like this by saying ‘unusual signs of zombieism’, and now that people have responded with the headcheese and brains as food discussion I’m completely grossed out. Serves me right.
So we heard a lot about how cases were rising in a lot of states a few weeks ago. Now that cases are declining in most of those states, except Oregon and Washington, crickets.
Oregon has the third fewest cases/million (42,229) and Washington has the fifth fewest (51,731), so even if the multiplier is 6, there are still a whole lot of susceptible people even with about 40% of the population in Oregon and Washington having had at least one shot. There’s also a new mutation of the UK B.1.1.7 strain detected in Oregon, which probably means it’s in Washington as well.
SteveF,
I think I was too subtle. I think it’s “interesting” they distinguish meat from brains from “X from other animals”. Many animals have brains (and kidneys and muscles.) Whatever the animal, I suspect meat from brains taste different from other parts of the same animal.
MikeM,
You didn’t ask me but,
Thank heavens no. It would be horrifying if the government stepped in and interfered almost certainly slowing the process!
Thank heavens no. It would be horrifying if I needed government approval to get an appointment! It was bad enough they made me wait.
Yes. But I would have had to wait for Pfizer or Moderna, so I took the first one available to me. My husband had a choice on the day he signed up. He went J&J because of the one shot aspect.
The state didn’t assign me a vaccine. So it’s not possible to answer this question.
I did have a choice of where and when to take the vaccine. I would have had to wait to make a different choice. But I certainly had a choice. Lucky for me, the government didn’t compel me to wait to create some illusion of “more choice”.
Oh. Yeah, this was certainly voluntary. I had choice over when, in the sense that if my wife had scheduled next week my appt would presumably come later, and if she never scheduled I’d never have gotten one, etc.
I read that vaccinations are open to everybody over 16 in Alabama now, so I don’t believe my wife had to jump through any hoops with the State government, but I’m not 100% sure. I think she scheduled it through CVS pharmacy? At least that’s where I’m going tomorrow.
[Edit: My confirmation email says Moderna, two doses scheduled, first dose tomorrow.]
Lucia, The exhaust valves direct the exhale down away from your glasses…. for workmen and athletes, no fogging. In addition to reducing communicable disease the ultra fine particle filter dramatically reduced my asthma problems.
Russell Klier,
Did your brother in law pull through?
The New Mexico procedure.
https://cvvaccine.nmhealth.org/overview.html
It seems that step 3 allows more flexibility than it used to. But I don’t know if that extends to shopping for which vaccine.
The above seems like a nuisance, but not such a nuisance that it would stop me if I badly wanted to get the vaccine (I don’t). A bigger concern is that it looks like it is setting the stage for making everyone get the vaccine and/or vaccine passports.
In FL they didn’t explicitly tell you which vaccine you were getting in many places, but you could tell easily enough:
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1 appt = J&J
2 appts, 3 weeks apart = Pfizer
2 appts, 4 weeks apart = Moderna
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My area had all kinds of options over time.
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My family went through the county health agency, which went through several different scheduling systems (incompetence…) before they got their sh** together. Now it works pretty well. Sams, Walmart, CVS, Publix each have their own scheduling systems which all work OK and generally speaking only carry one version of the vaccine. Tampa has two large scale federal sites (Bucs stadium and dog track) that are walk/drive up and do J&J (temporarily Pfizer now). There was also a bunch of weird pop-up “secret” sites at churches and so forth that were apparently targeting equity.
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Thankfully all this is now behind us as we hit demand = supply. Whether we learned anything for the next time is TBD. We are one month away from 50% fully vaccinated and my guess is two months away from a sustained decline, hopefully sooner but this has always been too hard to predict and I don’t think Imperial College academic models are going to be helpful.
Russel,
I don’t have asthma. I don’t get many colds and when I do, they aren’t a big deal. So I’m not going to wear a mask. If you or others do: fine! I have no problem with that.
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I similarly have no problems with people who are reluctant to get vaccinated.
MikeM,
We could register with the county while also registering with private pharmacies some university campuses and so on. There is an Indian (Hindu? Sikh? Moslem? Just general Indian?) group whose organize a vaccination site out in Aurora (I think.)
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The county had Walgreens and CVS personels running some large vaccination sites. So I could find instructions similar to yours. They just weren’t the only way to get a vaccine. The sites usually explained that if you wanted the vaccine, it was wise to check around.
I thought I said my impression is you weren’t going to get it and then you said you were going to get it. Sounds like you aren’t going to get it.
MikeM
I’m not seeing how this likes like setting the state for everyone getting the vaccine or passports.
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That might happen, but I’m not seeing how what you showed “sets the stage” for that.
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I suspect we in Illinois may get some sort of vaccine documents that make it easy to prove vaccination. Everyone giving vaccination took ID and recorded who got the vaccine, which type, the date and so on. This was both so they could bill insurance and likely so they could track adverse effects if they occurred. Also: it ensures a vaccinated person who has ill effects can sue the correct manufacturer. 🙂
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All that is sufficient to facilitate vaccination documents if they are needed.
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Honestly, I’d like to have some sort of hard to counterfit app that shows status so I can show it to potential dance partners or to people running dance parties. People running parties are worried about spread, and one of the studio owners has kids. I’m sure it would give her peace of mind to know that my visits to her studio have a negligible chance of passing Covid. I’d love to be able to prove my status. But I can’t because we don’t have documents that aren’t easily counterfited.
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I get you are worried about “passports”. But proof of vaccination would be very nice to have. How they should be used can be debated, but there existence would be nice.
I just don’t see most public places like restaurants wanting to be the vaccine police even if they were tasked to do so.
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It’s way too early for that anyway, the task at hand is to get as much voluntary compliance as possible in the next couple months, and I don’t think you are going to get that by threats of future penalties and treating the unvaccinated like 2nd class citizens. If we can get to herd immunity voluntarily (and through B117 infections on the unvaccinated) then all is good. This first.
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If we aren’t going to force vaccinations on healthcare personnel in old folks homes then I can’t see us doing it anywhere.
Tom,
I think restaurants and bars will not want to be vaccine police. I think some individual social dancers will. I know some social dancers who are vaccinated but only want to dance with the vaccinated for reasons of their own. I know one social dancer who is almost certain to change teachers looking for a vaccinated one.
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Her teacher is definitely dead set against getting a vaccine. Her daughter is special needs. She is, perhaps, unduly cautious. But I don’t think it’s my place to insist that she’s irrational to worry about what might be true because we “don’t know” if vaccines give full immunity in the sense that she can’t transmit to her daughter.
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I would happily show these sorts of people a document if I had one and they wanted to see it. We don’t have them. I’m not pushing for them to exist. But I would definitely find them useful even if some people throw out words like “vaccine passport” to suggest any and all sorts of documentation used for any and all possible reasons must be some horrifying infringement of liberties.
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Heck, if I were looking to be hired to tutor kids in a home with a resident unvaccinated infant, teen or even stubborn grandma, I think it would be reasonable for parents to want to know if I was vaccinated. I am vaccinated. Currently, I could not provide them any unforgeable document to prove my status. So they would have no ability to check if a tutor they hoped to hire had been vaccinated. (Same with cleaning ladies and baby sitters.)
lucia (Comment #201753): “The county had Walgreens and CVS personels running some large vaccination sites. So I could find instructions similar to yours. They just weren’t the only way to get a vaccine. The sites usually explained that if you wanted the vaccine, it was wise to check around.”
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Maybe I have not checked enough, but I am 95% sure that in New Mexico the *only* option is to go through the state.
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lucia: “I thought I said my impression is you weren’t going to get it and then you said you were going to get it. Sounds like you aren’t going to get it.”
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My general position has been that I am happy to be at the end of the line. In no hurry to get it, but not opposed to getting it. That has not changed although my degree of hesitancy has waxed and waned.
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lucia (Comment #201754): “I’m not seeing how this likes like setting the state for everyone getting the vaccine or passports.”
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If the state has a list of *everyone* who has been vaccinated, then they also know who has not been vaccinated and have all the information needed to act on the difference. If only *some* people go through the state, then there is not a big problem unless CVS etc. are required to report all vaccinations to the state.
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lucia: “I get you are worried about “passportsâ€. But proof of vaccination would be very nice to have. How they should be used can be debated, but there existence would be nice.”
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I agree. There are situations where requiring vaccination might make sense and some situations where people might want the ability to prove they have been vaccinated. But I don’t want to have to prove vaccination status to eat at a restaurant or to have my teeth cleaned.
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But don’t you get a card when you get vaccinated. Why is that not sufficient proof? I get that they might be easily counterfeited, but that should not be an issue unless the stakes are high.
Mike M,
“That has not changed although my degree of hesitancy has waxed and waned.”
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Frankly, it is impossible for me to understand this; do you wear a seat belt when you drive? A vaccination is not as intrusive as, say, a colonoscopy, and the risk of death from covid-19 for those over 65 is much higher than colon cancer.
MikeM
I googled “new mexico covid vaccine locations”. You can get vaccines at Pharmacies in New Mexico.
These three places cam up as locations
You seem to need an appointment, but “Walgreens” and “Walmart” are not at a “state” locations.
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So I suspect you are mistaken that the only way you can get it is the path you happened to find. Your impression may have been formed because you aren’t trying to get a vaccine so you haven’t learned all your options. There seems to be no particular reason to suspect that “the state” has collected all the information. Of course, they may have. Perhaps they required Walmart, Walgreens and Smith’s pharmacy to send it all to them.
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It’s easily forged. Many have been. That’s why I would want one that is not easily forged.
My friend who is planning to change ballroom dance teachers thinks the stakes are high for her. She may be mistaken, but she still thinks it. A person with an unvaccinated baby or living with a stubborn unvaccinated granny who might want to hire me as a tutor or someone as a house keeper might think the stakes are high for them. An unemployed housekeeper who wants a job but for some reason doesn’t want to be vaccinated might think the stakes are high for them. So I think it is an issue for those people who might want to prove their status who who might want someone to prove their status. The stakes are high to them.
lucia (Comment #201759): “So I suspect you are mistaken that the only way you can get it is the path you happened to find. Your impression may have been formed because you aren’t trying to get a vaccine so you haven’t learned all your options.”
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I suspected the same, which is why I said I was 95% sure that method I found was the only one. Change that to 100%. I went to the Walgreens site, clicked on the schedule vaccine link and found this:
https://www.walgreens.com/findcare/vaccination/covid-19?ban=covid_vaccine2_landing_schedule
The New Mexico link took me to the state registration site.
Ahh! Interesting. I don’t think that happens in Illinois. Jim got his vaccine at Walgreens. I don’t think it went through the state in anyway (unless Walgreens reported.)
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I don’t think Illinois’s method will make it difficult for them to have a “vaccine app” if they want one though.
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New York seems to have one.
https://covid19vaccine.health.ny.gov/excelsior-pass
They also appear to let you show the card as proof though. For the paper documents, the forgery issue certainly exists. I don’t know how the NY app collects data to present your “Covid-ok” status.
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It doesn’t seem you need the app to shop for groceries. I have no idea what a private dentist might wish or be permitted to do.
SteveF
Thanks for asking. He is in a medically induced coma and still on a ventilator. His condition waxes and wanes. It is really tough on his family. They are not allowed to go to the hospital and rely on hospital staff to transmit periodic reports.
After all the Spring Break falderal my state [Florida] and county [Sarasota] had about a 30% increase in case rates. This past week however the trend seems to be turning back down…. One disturbing bit of data… vaccine administration rates seem to be falling over the last two weeks. We are starting to see pro vax ads from the government. https://business.fau.edu/covidtracker/data/florida-data/index.php
We saw the SpaceX Crew-2 blast off today, viewed from our front yard. It is always an exciting experience…. even from 185 miles away! I have pics if anyone is interested.
Can somebody explain this to me?
https://www.foxnews.com/health/covid-19-hospitalizations-tumble-among-seniors
That sounds very encouraging. And the article clearly implies that the reason is the preferential vaccination of older folks.
But wait a minute: Total cases and deaths are down nearly 80% since early January. Shouldn’t the drop in cases among seniors be much larger than for the population as a whole? And since most deaths are among the elderly, shouldn’t deaths be down by a much bigger factor than cases?
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I don’t have a point, only questions. Am I missing something?
Mike M.,
IMO, the drop in case rates is as much or more due to having passed the herd immunity threshold from uncounted infections as from vaccinations. Since we don’t know how many people have actually been infected, we also don’t know how many of those being vaccinated were already immune.
Deaths are a lagging indicator so a drop in the death rate would be related to an up to 30 days earlier drop in new cases. So it’s not surprising to me that the current drop in the death rate is about the same as the current drop in the new case rate.
Personally, I think the focus on case rates is a distraction from the real issue of greatest importance to the public with regard to risk assessment and to public policy, which is deaths. Noone gives a damn how many cases of rhinovirus there are at any given time. We don’t get warnings every time cases start to increase and suggest people suspend daily living.
Mike M,
As with all things covid-19, I suspect it is far more complicated than the headlines. One big issue is: “at least one shot”. It takes probably two weeks for a reasonable level of immunity to develop after the first shot, and more than three weeks after the first shot to reach maximum immunity (about 83%-85%). A second shot plus a couple more weeks surely helps, of course (95%). But the headline ignores that long delay. It is also on average 2 to 3 weeks from diagnosis to death among those who die, so death rates ought to trail vaccinations by upwards of 5 weeks or even 6. Five or six weeks ago, the number of vaccinated seniors was considerably lower…. only about 20% of the entire population (all ages) had received their first dose, versus over 40% today.
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WRT to total case loads: as we have seen in the past, total confirmed cases per million has changed dramatically, both up and down, even with no vaccinations: behavior, weather, government restrictions, etc all no doubt contribute. Since we are heading into spring, it means less time indoors and more sunshine (and vitamin D)…. so case rates should tend to fall, all else equal.
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To clearly see the influence of vaccinations, we will need to wait another couple of months. Since nearly all deaths are among those over 55, the overall future death rate will depend strongly on how many people in the over-55 population choose to remain unvaccinated. The overall case rate will depend on multiple factors, with vaccination rate among younger people likely having a strong influence.
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Among the vaccinated, I think the pandemic will be over save for the shouting by two months from now. For the rest: hard to know with any certainty. For unvaccinated elderly people, deaths will probably be controlled mainly by how many cases there are in the population as a whole….. and that will depend on multiple factors, including how many younger people get vaccinated.
Mike M,
The USA is about 10 weeks behind Israel in rate of vaccinations. The pandemic in Israel (currently well over 60% vaccinated, reached 40% in mid February) is now just about over: >95% reduction in cases, and 93% reduction in deaths from their respective peaks, with deaths continuing to fall.
Interesting information about vaccinations:
https://ourworldindata.org/covid-vaccinations
It’s easy enough to compare deaths per * fully * vaccinated versus deaths per unvaccinated (and previously uninfected) over the same timeline. I haven’t seen this done yet curiously. Also the death rates by age group normalized would show the vaccine effect. Long term care death rates also dropped relatively.
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There have been a few articles showing clear effects of vaccines but they are all confounded by background changes. Death rates by age shows a very clear decline by age group, but maybe not as dramatic as one imagined yet.
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The delay of the effect is definitely longer than I had anticipated and likely due to a lot of the things SteveF commented on. Also the vaccine effect is also battling the B117 effect which would likely otherwise be sending us into a more pronounced 4th wave. There is conflicting data on whether B117 is more deadly. Obviously everyone can see what they want given all the confounders but if there were a lot of people vaccinated dying I think it would be flagged by our click bait media patrons.
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‘Breakthrough’ COVID Infection Rates as Expected
— Low numbers of breakthrough infections among the fully vaccinated; national count unknown
https://www.medpagetoday.com/special-reports/exclusives/92071
DaveJR
I’m not sure there is a “focus” on case rates– at least not to the exclusion of deaths. I do think, ultimately deaths are more important. But case rates are useful to examine. Right now they do give an indication of whether vaccines are working, whether we are reaching herd immunity and so on.
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Of course we wouldn’t really care if Covid never lead to deaths. But Covid is life threatening to a large enough fraction to worry about and it’s a bit odd to suggest we must narrow our interest to one and only one metric. Both case rates and deaths are worth watching.
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I’m glad to see case rates dropping in Illinois. I’m not going to ignore that and only watch death rates.
The early data I recently saw suggested that if you did get a breakthrough covid infection your chances of a serious illness was about equal to an unvaccinated person (i.e. the IFR was about the same after a positive test). I was hoping this would not be the case, it’s too early to know for sure yet though.
It sounds like I am not misinterpreting the article. The data do not support the conclusions drawn.
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DeWitt Payne (Comment #201766): “Deaths are a lagging indicator so a drop in the death rate would be related to an up to 30 days earlier drop in new cases. So it’s not surprising to me that the current drop in the death rate is about the same as the current drop in the new case rate.”
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True. But cases have been flat or slightly rising for at least a month. Currently 58K/day, about the same as early March, with a range in that time of 54-70K. And deaths have been nearly flat recently at about 700/day. So the recent CFR has been about 1.2%; no big decrease. At least, not yet.
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DaveJR (Comment #201767): “I think the focus on case rates is a distraction from the real issue of greatest importance to the public with regard to risk assessment and to public policy, which is deaths.”
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Absolutely. Cases are of interest because there is much less lag. But deaths do not seem to be down relative to cases.
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SteveF (Comment #201768): “death rates ought to trail vaccinations by upwards of 5 weeks or even 6. Five or six weeks ago, the number of vaccinated seniors was considerably lower…. only about 20% of the entire population (all ages) had received their first dose, versus over 40% today.”
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That may be an explanation for what I did not say, but might be inferred from what I did say.
Case rates are only interesting in that they are an early real time indicator of future death rates in a month. If you were looking at this 10 years from now I would assume one would not even look at case rates and instead estimate them from the more reliable death rates.
Lucia,
“I’m glad to see case rates dropping in Illinois. I’m not going to ignore that and only watch death rates.”
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Sure. Of interest is the lack of rise in deaths in Illinois (at least so far) in spite of the bump/rise in cases. That does seem like the expected effect of vaccinating those most likely to die. We can see the same thing in multiple states.
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Israel still has ‘only’ 63% vaccinated, but they reached >80% of those over 65 by mid February; Israel’s death rate is now minuscule.
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One thing that is a little scary: in Europe, many countries (eg Netherlands) have held down infections with extreme restrictions on personal activities. Unless they get their elderly population vaccinated before the restrictions are lifted they will see a big surge in cases and deaths.
SteveF,
Yes. The lack of rise in death rates meant vaccination of the vulnerable first did what we hoped.
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Let’s hope Europe gets their people, especially elderly vaccinated. Also, hope India can get vaccine out. It’s horrible there.
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Lucia,
RE India: it is all relative. Based on population, their death rate stands at 132 per million population, vs the USA at 1760 per million population. Yes, India will see a huge number of deaths (unfortunately), but compared to the USA and Europe (on a per million basis) they will end up much lower. The median age in India is only 28 years, versus 38 years in the USA,and higher in Europe.
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Could they have done better? Sure, their government could have made purchase and distribution of vaccines the absolute top priority. They didn’t. That is not how huge bureaucracies work.
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Still, compared to many other developing countries (like Brazil, Argentina, and similar), I am sure the Indians will be OK.
I know. It’s still sad right now!
Hey! Weird thing I’ve noticed since my wife had a mastectomy two weeks ago so we’re watching all her tv. She really likes watching the hallmark channel since it ends all happy every time (that kills me, the 15 minute before the end of movie relationship crisis) anyways I’ve been seeing a lot of anti- Asian violence commercials on that channel. How does that work? Middle age white women are the problem? Or solution?
Jerry,
Democrats are looking for votes from middle aged white women, based on a fabricated story of ‘racial hatred’. Asians suffer just about the lowest rate of violent crime in the country…. and what they do suffer is certainly not at the hands of white women.
Jerry (Comment #201780): “I’ve been seeing a lot of anti- Asian violence commercials on that channel. How does that work? Middle age white women are the problem? Or solution?”
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Middle class white women are the target audience for corporate virtue signalling.
Apparently India is vastly undercounting their covid deaths.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/24/world/asia/india-coronavirus-deaths.html
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“It’s a complete massacre of data,†said Bhramar Mukherjee, an epidemiologist at the University of Michigan who has been following India closely. “From all the modeling we’ve done, we believe the true number of deaths is two to five times what is being reported.â€
“Sickness, sickness, sickness,†Mr. Suresh said. “That’s what we write.†When asked why, he said it was what he had been instructed to do by his bosses, who did not respond to requests for comment.
“Over 13 days in mid-April, Bhopal officials reported 41 deaths related to Covid-19. But a survey by The New York Times of the city’s main Covid-19 cremation and burial grounds, where bodies were being handled under strict protocols, revealed a total of more than 1,000 deaths during the same period.”
“Even in a good year, experts say, only about one-fifth of deaths are medically investigated, meaning that the vast number of Indians die without a cause of death being certified.”
Vaccine effect:
“A federal estimate of Covid-19 hospitalizations based on a sample of counties in 14 states, including Michigan, showed more patients between the ages of 18 and 49 hospitalized in mid-April than those over age 65. In early December, it was the other way around, and by a large margin, with more than twice as many patients over 65 than in the younger group.”
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This is from yet another another “young people with covid!!!” article at the NYT. They go on to blame more bad behavior and also lower standards of admission for hospitals when they are less full.
Tom Scharf,
So did they give the total number of hospitalizations now vs early December? My guess would be no, they didn’t. My guess would also be that the number of hospitalizations now is a lot less then in early December, but stating that would cloud the desired message. The line about lower standards for admission with hospitals less full should be a clue.
The editorial guidelines at the NYT are clear: unless you are talking about African-Americans, people should NEVER EVER be allowed to do what they want. Once you keep this rule in mind, every position the NYT advocates, and every dishonest misrepresentation of ‘facts’ in every ‘news’ story, become easy to understand. And who should be in charge of what people are allowed to do? Why the reporters at the NYT, of course, or at least the lefty politicians they support. The NYT is staffed by dishonest worms.
Tom
Young people have been being unfairly slammed with the whole “bad behavior” thing. Yes, some college students partied hearty when they likely should not have last March. But back then, the “reason” was they were supposed to sacrifice all their self interest for their elders. (Never mind that no one seemed to want the elders to sacrifice for others.) So they were all called selfish.
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Now they are being slammed for… well… mostly taking on a small risk to themselves. But ‘the world’ keeps going with the whole “young people these days”.
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Seriously, no one ever expected us younger boomers to sacrifice our interests like this for “others”. There may be other generations who might be able to point to all they did for others. (For example: Jim’s Dad fought in WWII.) But kids my age weren’t even drafted!!
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The majority of young people have been amazing during all this.
Lucia,
Part is that there just are not that many young people.Young people are supplemented with very young Hondurans, Guatemalans, Mexicans, etc, but people born in the USA between 1965 and 1980 are not a political force like baby boomers were (are?). We baby boomers are in our political decline of course, but still of some political import. The group that follows us? I am not so sure. Probably revolted by the lefty ‘woke’ ideology, but unwilling to confront it.
Odd coincidence… People my age [72] were the target age group during the Polio epidemic….now we are the target age group for Covid. Thanks to Dr. Salk we were rescued from Polio. Now if we will see if we will be rescued from Covid by Donald Trump.
SteveF,
The ones who really get slammed for “behavior” are high-school, college and just out of college age now. So born decades surrounding ~2000. But honestly, as a group, they’ve behaved well. Certainly they have been no worse than any other group of 18-30 has ever been.
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I feel sorry for their lot.
Oh, I do agree with your points about political clout.
Potentially a big case on free speech in SC.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-56886687
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“Brandi Levy sent a profanity-laden post to her friends on Snapchat in 2017, venting her frustrations with cheerleading and her school.
But when coaches at the Pennsylvania school discovered the post, she was barred from the squad for a year.
The case will determine whether schools have the right to punish pupils for what they say off-campus.”
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My view is of course predictable here. The moral judgment of all aspects of people’s lives from afar has gotten wildly out of control. This case is only on government restriction, but would be a step in the right direction.
I think I’ve read about this case as it trickled forwrd.
I think schools should not not be allowed to punish students for behavior outside school.
Without speaking to the legality of the sanctions, I prefer cheerleaders who are polite and wholesome. A potty-mouthed cheerleader is counter to the spirit of the thing…… Defund the cheer squad!
This is like trying to enforce dress codes out of school. I do not want to give a bunch of busybodies the power of sanctions for anything that “disrupts the school community”. These things are usually sourced from personal vendettas and over engaged parents and not from altruism.
Russell,
Well, if the defunded the whole cheer squad for any reason that likely wouldn’t be a first amendment cse.
But if they did that, they’d probably have to fund a different girls sport because cheer probably counts as a sport under Title X. Cheer is probably the least expensive sport going. It can also tolerate the least skilled coach also because the cheer team usually doesn’t formally compete (or no one in the school cares if they win as that’s not the main point of cheer.)
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I’d guess the parents, and local community would be upset if there was no cheer squad at otherwise dreary high school football or basketball games.
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I’d also guess if they defund cheer for off-campus potty mouths they would need to do the same for football and basketball. I bet they would give the star quarter back pass if he did the same thing.
Lucia, https://www.centralcatholichs.com/pages/athletics. In my world star quarterbacks are not allowed to be potty mouths either…. and they don’t have tattoos.
Well… Catholic school. This cheerleader was at a public school.
Lucia,
“I’d guess the parents, and local community would be upset if there was no cheer squad at otherwise dreary high school football or basketball games.”
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Maybe. When I was in High school, the cheer squad seemed to me always to be composed of just about the cutest (and also most fit!) girls at the school. (I often went to dreary games as much to watch the cheer squad as the game.) That may have changed in these very PC times, of course.
Bad behavior out of school is usually reflected in school as well. If you have a bad apple then usually you can just wait for them to do something “officially” bad and take action. Searching social media and cancelling them for any disruptive comments is a bridge too far. Our society has become completely unforgiving (Catholics, ha ha) and I am glad I didn’t grow up where every utterance of mine was recorded for future criminal social prosecution.
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Teenagers can’t make mistakes? What a crappy society to live under, this is just a cultural revolution, bring out the struggle sessions. Perhaps this power is usually only used wisely in extreme cases by sane people, but the chilling of speech is obvious when auto-deleted private posts are saved by our little legions of red guards to be used against their peers and enforced by disgruntled helicopter parents. No thanks, I’ll take speech chaos any day.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-56886687
Mostly this argument strikes me as beside the point: Either the school is are violating rights or not.
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That the district often violates students 1A rights is not a good argument for violating them. If they aren’t violating rights. the get to do it. Frequency is beside the point.
The did this before Covid. The lines weren’t blurred when they did it. That they might be blurred in some other circumstances would be a fact specific issue. But they weren’t blurred here.
This doesn’t strike me as something that would significantly disrupt the “school community”. If I recall correctly I think some teachers (who pick cheerleaders) were miffed. And some cheerleaders who got picked were annoyed at the implication choice were unfair. Well. Sorry snowflakes. That’s not “disrupting the community”
So freakin’ what? It’s not the districts job to police bullying, racism or harassment that occurs outside school. Even if it were, that doesn’t mean they can go overturning the first amendement rights of students to do it.
They also don’t have a right to take over everyone’s life just because they are teaching them reading, ‘riting and ‘rithmetic!
Lucia, ” teaching them reading, ‘riting and ‘rithmetic!”
This ain’t reading, ‘riting or‘rithmetic, this is an extra curricular activity. It is voluntary. A lot of young ladies want to be on the cheer squad and only a limited number make the team. If they can throw out a girl for being fat, they can throw a girl out for being uncouth.
Virginia’s eliminating tracking and advanced math made national news, and now the department is backtracking under pressure.
They are claiming this was all hysteria, school districts can feel free to put in multiple levels of classes and have kids advance forward. The sources on their website are still there that have language like
Therefore, the goal of detracking will not be realized without working to dismantle the various social, political, and cultural reasons tracking persists. Those that have been privileged by the current system must be willing to
give up that privilege for more equitable schooling.”
They are still going forward with revising classes to eliminate algebra/ geometry/ algebra 2, and replacing them with blended classes in grades 8-10. I don’t see how this is practical given that they are now taking the weakest kids and putting them in a harder class, as algebra is typical a grade 9 class, but they are making them more applied math as they are combining in math modeling and data analysis.
Russel,
I know it’s cheer is not reading,riting or rithmethic. Schools also don’t gain the right to take over kids lives because the schools runs elective extracurricular activities. In fact, the idea that running extra curricular activities some how grants the school the right to take over kids lives is even more ridiculous than that they could do so to teach essential skills.
The shouldn’t throw out a girl for being fat. But if they did, that would not touch on the 1st amendemdment. So it might not become a SCOTUS case.
They want to throw her out for expressing an opinion they disagree with and which they disagree with. That’s touches on the first amendment. You or they may not like what she said. But the first amendment doesn’t give us freedom to only say anything our overlords say. It gives us freedom to say things our overloards do not like. A publicly funded state school really shouldn’t allowed to punish her or sanction her because they think what she said is “uncouth”.
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Catholic schools can sanction her. If the Catholic schools could even kick her out of the school. Her parents could then enroll her in the publicly funded school (or another private school that is ok with her being “uncouth”.)
I’ll have to check the Constitution, but I’m pretty sure there is no exception to the 1st Amendment that allows for rights to be suspended for extracurricular activities at a school. Now they are minors and they can get away with some authoritarian policies, but I doubt this is what the case will hinge on. The SC has generally been quite unreceptive lately of vague arm waving reasons to restrict speech.
Lucia,
I watch about 100-150 football games every season and I have never seen a lumpy cheerleader doing cartwheels down the sidelines. I pay close attention when the camera is on the cheerleaders and dance teams. On the occasion when you do see a young lady who appears less than perfect she looks out of place. The coaches pick and mold them to fit an image. They have a bearing about them too [stuck-up!]. No matter the laws, they never field a squad that looks like a bunch of angry feminists. If they did the sport really would be defunded.This girl doesn’t fit the mold. Until she learns to play nice she doesn’t get to play.
Russell,
Sure. Coaches use certain metric to pick them. But if one later gets fat and is booted, there might be a broo-ha-ha.
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Whether or not they do is irrlevant to this case. As I noted
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You descried the cheerleaders as cute and athletic. She’s cute. She’s athletic. That’s the mold.
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Often, cheer leaders need to do gymnastics, or form pyramids and so on. So physically fit is a qualification just as it is for the gymnastics of swim team. Just because you also find them cute or attractive shouldn’t mean they lose 1A rights.
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Most high school boys on the track or cross-country team are also not fat. That doesn’t mean they ought to lose 1A rights.
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If the coaches wanted her off because she was outspoken they should have drawn the line before letting her on the squad. Then they could have pretended it was because she couldn’t jump high enough or cheer loud enough or wasn’t cute enough. But she clearly is: That’s why she got on the squad.
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The people who kicked her off for speech and did do in a way where they don’t have much in the way of plausible deniability.
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Your standard is probably fine at a Catholic school. Telling girls they aren’t allowed free speech if they want to do extra curriculars is not fine at a school funded by tax payer dollars.
You probably haven’t seen any wide receivers who were 50 pounds overweight either, ha ha. There’s a reason for that too. The additional point being that cheerleading is also a beauty and popularity contest is undoubtedly true. It’s one thing to cut a potential team member for unspecified reasons during a try out, and it’s another thing to tell someone they aren’t even allowed to try out for a specific private act.
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There needs to be boundaries where a public school’s authority ends, mostly anywhere outside where the school is responsible for the student’s safety. As we have seen supporting certain political candidates or ideologies is deemed dangerous to some people.
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https://www.edweek.org/policy-politics/how-a-cheerleaders-snapchat-profanity-could-shape-the-limits-of-students-free-speech/2021/04
“But another Mahanoy High cheerleader, one who wasn’t even part of Levy’s Snapchat friend group, got hold of a screenshot of the snap and showed it to her mother, April Gnall, who was one of the coaches. Gnall shared it with Nicole Luchetta-Rump, the other coach and a mathematics teacher at the high school.”
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She already won the case and was reinstated on the team by court order and is now in college. It seems the SC is taking the case to bring legal clarity to speech outside of public school one way or the other since everyone is uncertain now.
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There are almost no cases before the SC that are simple and easy. It is always more complex than it looks or it wouldn’t have ever got there in the first place. Can schools have higher standards of conduct for voluntary activities? Can this apply to public speech such as open Twitter and Facebook outside of school? Can this apply to intended private speech? Does the student deserve an expectation of privacy for some communication?
Tom Scharf
This other cheerleader sounds like a nasty piece of work. She may have been type who likes to get others in trouble and may have disliked this team mate and wanted someone else on the team. Such uncouth behavior. If we were going to kick someone off the team for being uncouth, it should have been her.
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I suspect there may be others who approve of the nasty little snitch and think she should stay on the team. But that’s where kicking people off for off campus things leads us. Attempt to utterly control everything.
Tom
There seems to be a split on some issue between lower district courts. There was some case in a lower court that found for a school. The district courts found for the cheerleader.
So evidently this is taken to resolve the split.
Was the cheerleader in question white?
Either way, this case will have 6 or more votes at the SC for the potty-mouthed cheerleader. First amendment rights are a bit more important than coaches sensibilities at a publicly funded school. It will be an opportunity for the court to tell the Ivy’s that they can’t take student’s rights away either if they accept public funding (and they all do). Free speech, due process, etc merit the support of the court.
A photo of the snapchat post is here
https://www.spokesman.com/photos/2021/apr/26/710722/
SteveF,
She is white (see photo.)
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My guess is her parents are well off enough that they had funds to start off the whole court case thing! Poor parents would probably have just given into the school board.
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You are correct that fundamental rights are about more than coaches hurt feelings. If they can kick her off a cheer team for this, they can kick kids off for anything interpreted as a “microaggression” posted on Twitter. The potential for suppression of entirely valid speech would become huge.
Here is a micro-non-aggression: get different coaches for the cheer leaders. It was the coaches’ stupidity that got this ball rolling.
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Reports from “Education Week” may be a little tilted in favor teachers and administrators….. that won’t help at the SC. This is an obvious case where the 6 conservatives can make a statement about constitutionally guaranteed rights. The Biden administration supports the teachers, shocking as that may seem.
The link to the cheerleaders first win (summary judgement) is here:
https://casetext.com/case/bl-v-mahanoy-area-sch-dist-2
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And I note that the issue of ruling otherwise would “allow school children to serve as Thought Police—reporting every profanity uttered—for the District.” appears here. So, it does appear the courts are concerned about the impact of little snitches on First Amendments rights of students.
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I also like the judge’s reference to the school district claims about potential for chaos
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The “evidence” for “chaos” and what they mean by chaos is discussed cursoraly. Honestly, I imagine kicking the girl off the team probably resulted in more “chaos” than her post did.
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I’m constantly amazed at home much taxpayer money schools are willing to waste trying to enforce their stupid decisions. The school lost the preliminary injuction and appears to have lost the entire way up the suit chain. The $$ hit to tax payers must be large.
SteveF
The brainless Mahanoy Area School District also deserves some criticism for not overruling the coaches in the first place and likely deciding to appeal losses.
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I do hope SCOTUS rules for the cheerleader. The tenacles of a public school district should simply not reach to disciplining a kid for something done entirely outside school. Catholic and private high schools may, of course, be allowed to have different rules. They aren’t part of government. If a family is unhappy with their rules, the family can withdraw their kids from that school and go elsewhere.
Lucia,
“The $$ hit to tax payers must be large.”
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Especially since they will pay legal fees for both sides.
Most surprising is that after summary judgement and subsequent loss at the 3rd Circuit Court of Appeals, they continued the suit. Does the school board really think they are going to win at the SC? I suspect the conservative block voted to hear the case simply to issue a smack-down to schools. If the board thinks they will win this case, then they are delusional, and should be replaced by more rational people.
This is the statement of undisputed facts by the school board. I had to laugh at the penultimate sentence, since it’s clear the school board and coaches are sufficiently unaware that they too must follow the rules of society. One of these is that high school students have 1st amendment rights.
https://www.aclupa.org/sites/default/files/field_documents/defendants_statement_of_facts_-_122018_.pdf
Russell Klier (Comment #201806): “This girl doesn’t fit the mold. Until she learns to play nice she doesn’t get to play.”
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You seem to be missing a couple important points. The school was not punishing a cheerleader, they were punishing an ordinary student and justifying that on the grounds that they have the right to punish any student for things said outside of school.
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Also, they were prohibiting her from doing something in the future for something she did in the past. So how are they to know that she has “learned to play nice”? Part of the justification for sports is that they build character; that doesn’t work if the students who need it are prohibited from participating.
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One could justify the cheer squad having a code of conduct for the members of the squad and punishing members for violating that code. But that is not the case here since the student was not on the cheer squad.
MikeM,
She was on the JV cheer squad…. until kicked off for her post.
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Lucia,
“The Cheerleading Rules are intended, in part, to teach high school students to follow rules of society, which teaches team-building skills that students will take with them after they graduate from high school.”
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Rules set by none other than lefty school teachers…. shocking that. Translating: “you must sacrifice your personal liberties and agency for the public good”….. channeling their inner Marx. The SC will have none of it.
SteveF
In this particular case, if we view both her instagram post she had to sacrifice her personal liberties for criticizing decisions by the cheerleading coaches. (Specific criticizm was ““Love how me and [redacted]1 get told we need a year of jv before we make varsity but that’s doesn’t matter to anyone else?—)
Then the cheerleading coaches punished her (ostensibly because she used the word “fuck”.) Then the schoolboard let the decision of the cheerleading coachs to punish her for criticizing the decisions and possibly arbitrary choices by the cheerleading coaches.
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The criticism was far from eloquent. The f word is coarse and doesn’t convey specifics. But given the two snaps together, it’s clear she communicated the idea that the coaches were making up rules about cheer as they went along. The coaches may not like the manner or content of that speech. But it is speech.
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The coaches are adults. They should learn that sometimes people get angry and use the f-word. If it’s outside their sphere the coaches need to learn to not act like babies and recognize that it’s out of their sphere.
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Or they can go work at a Catholic school. Or find a different job.
One assumes * building * character starts from a foundation that may not be so sturdy as one learns to follow rules. This case seems more like vindictive adults wanting to make an example of a wayward teenager who they didn’t like. This isn’t teaching, this is punishing. Perhaps this was a pattern of behavior from the teenager and she had been previously warned, but it isn’t clear. The adults still need to understand the final straw which results in strict punishment cannot be something illegal. They are the ones who look bad in my view. Other 16 year old’s having mental meltdowns from peer rivals is standard high school dynamics.
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A much more insidious and common form of speech suppression is smarter adults who simply disallow her from the team the following season for other judgment calls. Smart adults play this game much more effectively, who gets hired and tenure at Harvard? Certainly not those conservatives … for other reasons. Who gets into Harvard? Not those Asians … with boring personalities.
Judgment calls on cheerleader tryouts is probably like 1970’s vintage gymnastics and ice skating judges in the Olympics. The Soviet Bloc judges consistently rated their performers higher and vice verse for the Western judges. They ultimately had to change the competition metrics in judging to be much more “non-judgmental”. This turned gymnastics into an athletic competition which in the end probably wasn’t a bad thing. Simone Biles likely wouldn’t have faired too well in the 1970’s.
Tom Scharf
If the behavior was entirely out of school it should remain out of the cheer coaches reach even if it’s a pattern. One of the documents suggest the district is fretting about “blurred lines” separating school and outside especially during things like Covid. But this one isn’t even close to any line, blurry or otherwise. Covid and online school isn’t some unique thing that created “blurr” where previously it did not exist. And this wasn’t even close.
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This this wasn’t in a classroom zoom meeting. It wasn’t in a school publication. It wasn’t at any sort of school event (away game?). It wasn’t in a school bus. She wasn’t wearing a cheer uniform. She wasn’t wearing a t-shirt with a high school emblem. She wasn’t standing in front of any school property showing the school in the background. She didn’t collect together any school logos.
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Even some of those things might not have been enough to make this fall inside a blurred line. But she was no where close to the “in school” line.
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To some extent, yes. Even with that judging, good performance did win out. But it wasn’t everything.
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I suspect to some extent, this sort o judging is part of the problem. It’s not unlikely it can be even worse than 70s olympic judging at some high schools. It’s clear that one of the cheerleader’s gripes was that when she was a Freshman, kids were told that no matter how good you are no Freshman can be on the Varsity team. And this was, supposedly, “a rule”.
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But then, when she was a sophomore, a Freshman was put on the Varsity team. Obviously, if that Freshman has not made the Varsity team one of the non-Freshman on JV would have gotten that place.
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She may have (correctly or incorrectly) thought that would be her place. Or perhaps one on of her friends places. But if the “rules” communicated to students did change in this way, that’s a legitimate gripe. She may have also thought this “change” in “the rule” was simply favoritism. (We don’t know who the Freshman who made varsity was. But favoritism to friends, neighbors, nieces, people you go to church with and so on are not unprecedented in high schools. And this is evidently a small rural school district in PA. Insider/outsider favoritism is not impossible.)
The school board seems remarkably slow on the uptake: an immediate restraining order put the girl back on the cheer leading squad, followed by a summary judgement, and then confirmation of that judgement by a three-judge appeals panel. You would think they would get the message.
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Slow though they are, ultimately they will learn that public schools have to respect the constitutionally guaranteed rights of students… including the right of free speech.
Tail wagging the dog:
CDC Apr 27 2021 – Fully vaccinated people don’t need to wear masks when walking, exercising or dining outside, the CDC said.
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This has been obvious for at least 6 months, this announcement is so late that it will have no effect on the vast majority of people’s behavior. The CDC has a much too large policy inertia bias when the original policy was conceived in a period of great uncertainty. While it is true they get crucified for changing guidance (masks?) they just need to deal with it and change quickly as data gets better.
Not surprisingly, Slate has a better take on the cheerleader case than the very “pro anything school administration might do” edweek.org
https://slate.com/technology/2021/03/mahanoy-area-school-district-supreme-court-snapchat-cheerleader.html
“But this one isn’t even close to any line”
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Right, this is a softball case to a SC who has firm views on free speech. The school district is a rather dim group as far as I can tell. I think they also want to set down some guidelines and formal tests for when outside speech can be suppressed by schools. This is something all sides likely want. There are a number of valid gray areas beyond this case. I think/hope that is what is going to happen during the debate.
SteveF,
Well… let’s hope SCOTUS does agree with the lower courts. It would be pretty devastating to free speech if they don’t. It could even affect college speech ultimately.
Lucia,
Apparently cheer leading is not considered a sport at all: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mahanoy_Area_School_District#SAT_scores
The district as a whole does quite badly on proficiency tests at all grade levels as well as SAT tests. They have just over 1000 students in the system, and 1.6% (16) are considered “gifted students”. They have exactly as many administrators as teachers: 93 and 93, or one teacher and one administrator for each 11 students. Good grief.
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Yes, if the SC issues a broad ruling, it will put lots of schools that receive public funding on notice that students’ rights must be respected by teachers and administrators.
My daughter is having all the major side effects from Pfizer’s second shot after 24 hours. Mild fever, headache, body aches, tired, etc. I didn’t have any side effects.
That strikes me as a lot of administrators. I wonder what counts as administrator?
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This article claims the ratio of administrators to teacher employees at the average school is 1% (if you count principals only) or 2.4 i you include vice principles.
https://www.aasa.org/schooladministratorarticle.aspx?id=10206
However, they then go on to define administrator a number of different ways. Maybe they mean “administrative staff” is equal to number of teachers? Maybe they mean “non-teacher employees?” Because having that many administrators would be amazing.
Tom,
That’s unfortunate. I”m glad I didn’t have any with my J&J!
Hope she’s better soon.
Tom,
A friend texted me that she suffered an anaphylactic shock shack after her first Pfizer injection. She recovered after a short time in hospital.
My daughter, who has some heath concerns + 1 child in day care and another in pre-school, figures her best bet is to accept whichever type of vaccine they will offer her next week. She is becoming very good at hand dyeing, knitting and quilting, but needs to meet some adults besides her husband.
P-E Harvey,
Wow! I wonder what she was allergic too? Glad she recovered.
Lucia,
She is allergic to a lot, even strawberries! She travels with 2 Epipens and an up-to-date prescription for more.
P-E,
I have a friend who I describe as allergic to “everything”. The list includes at least: cats, milk, eggs, cigarette smoke, wool. It goes on, I just can’t remember everything. She did get the vaccine and was fine. But some people really are allergic to lost of stuff. The generally know they are allergic to lots of stuff (though they haven’t tested everything so don’t know the full list.)
Yeah, I have a dog like that. Luna has food allergies like the day is long; pork, beef, chicken, fish, eggs, cheese, so on and so forth. I forget the whole list, and I expect they didn’t test everything. Easier to just remember she’s *not* allergic to potatoes, corn, and her special hypoallergenic dog food.
mark boffill,
“special hypoallergenic dog food”
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Wow.
Lucia,
“But some people really are allergic to lost of stuff.”
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My limited personal experience is that many food allergies are, well, imaginary.
Just sayin’.
I have one allergy, but based on reading it’s not even an allergy. It’s a “food sensitivity”. Allergies lead to things like hives or anaphalactic shock. I’ve just gotten flu-like symptoms every time I eat crustaceans. So i don’t eat them. They are pretty easy to avoid since people don’t sneak shrimp or lobster into food.
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I did once pass a wool swatch around and one woman broke into hives. After she got hives she exclaimed “Was that wool!!” (Evidently while knowing she was alergic to wool, it never occurred to her to ask if a knit swatch might be wool.) I suspect her allergy was real.
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I do think in most cases “gluten intolerance” is self diagnosed and untrue. My sister does have celiac and was diagnosed in infancy.
She’s thrilled it gluten intolerance came “in fashion” because it meant there were tons o prepared mixes and products she can eat.
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But she too thinks that in most cases the self-diagnosis is fake. She also note that tons of people who tell her they have gluten intolerance will the “cheat” and eat a donut or pizza. Sort of like dieters breaking their diet. Well…. no. Gluten intolerance doesn’t work that way. She does she dose matters, but if she were to eat a piece of bread, she gets sick.
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(Mary Beth was diagnosed with a biopsy when she was a baby.)
Poor Luna doesn’t have the brains to imagine anything like food allergies. Took us by surprise; I’ve never had a pet with food allergies. I brought her to the vet because her ears were clearly driving her crazy with itchiness; I figured she just had an ear infection. Cortisol shot put her right for a few months, but the itchies came back with a vengeance. I was afraid the dog would blind herself with the way she was scratching at her eyes and ears.
*shrug*
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[Edit: This should not be construed as disagreement with your claim though Steve – I’ve known at least a few people who claim food allergies that I strongly suspect aren’t real.]
Unless you get violently ill immediately after eating something, it’s difficult to determine food allergies. My son-in-law gets nauseous after eating anything containing balsamic vinegar, even when he didn’t know the food contained it. Shellfish allergies tend to be similar. But for less obvious allergies, you have to use a food avoidance diet plan. Skin tests only suggest sensitivity, they don’t confirm it. I don’t have a lot of faith in allergists who use only blood tests either.
You have to not eat the food for a week then eat the food for a week and see if you have symptoms that you didn’t have when you didn’t eat the food. Then you have to do it again to see if the symptoms go away when you stop and then come back again when you start again. But even then the symptoms could be psychosomatic rather than an actual sensitivity because it’s not really a controlled experiment. As I said, it’s not trivial.
DeWitt,
That is my biggest problem with food allergies….. never any controlled experiments, and never blind. I think the natural tendency to ascribe something to something else explains most of it. Yes, there are real food allergies, but most of what I see people complaining about is not convincing…. at all.
Off topic – I don’t believe the story about John Kerry leaking details of Israeli ops to Iran. At all. I expect the regulars here know without my saying that I think all federal politicians are more or less corrupt scumbags, so it’s not that I think Kerry is any sort of saint. Still. Vietnam veteran, military brat Kerry, rich, ambitious politico ambassador Kerry personally compromises himself with a hostile power in order to further a deal for another politician (Obama)… Nope. Didn’t happen.
This is psyops. Notice the harassment of U.S. vessels by Iran this very day – looks coordinated to me.
Hit the enemy where they are weak, every fool knows that. Where is the United States weaker than in our political division. It’s a no brainer that we should be subject to this sort of thing.
Meh.
SteveF,
That could be the case with me. But after vomitting a few times, I developed an (evidently) natural aversion to what I ated before I vomitted. So it’s actually not remotely difficult to avoid those foods. It may be that I was really reacting to something else, but it’s not like suddenly not being able to eat a staple and risking dying of starvation.
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It’s also not costly. My allergy whether real or not happens to be to relatively expensive foods rather than something cheap like wheat or corn.
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On the other hand: my sisters biopsy really does indicate celiac. But ask other people who’ve self diagnosed and you’ll very rarely find someone who had a biopsy. Gluten intolerance is currently “in fashion”.
Some 30 years ago, I was diagnosed with allergies to dust, cats and pollen. Certainly mild allergies as I still do my own dusting. I bring lots of Scotties when I tend my lawn. My remaining cat is very affectionate, so I sneeze once in a while.
One has to decide at some point what is important.
PE,
They are working on a shot you give cats to reduce human allergies to cats!
https://www.allergicliving.com/2020/10/13/nothing-to-sneeze-at-new-strategies-for-controlling-cat-allergy/
Sad time here… My brother-in-law’s family are having to decide about removing him from life support. Covid claims another victim. A harsh reminder that two doses of vaccine do not make you invulnerable. Stay safe.
Russell Klier,
My sympathies. Taking someone off life support is a brutal choice.
P-E Harvey,
WRT cat allergies, Purina has cat food that claims to reduce the amount of allergens cats shed. Before I took a course of allergy shots I was highly allergic to molds, pollen and animal ‘dander’. My allergist didn’t believe me, but my experience was that cats were highly variable in the quantity of allergens that they shed. One cat I encountered caused me to start sneezing violently when it walked into the room. Other cats not so much.
Russel,
Heart wrenching. Sorry or their choice and loss.
SteveF, Lucia
Thank you.
Russell,
My sympathies to you and the family.
Thought for the day, from Cixin Liu’s postscript to his novel “The Three-Body Problem”:
HaroldW,
Cixin Liu must not have read very much science fiction. I don’t have actual numbers, but my guess would be that in published books and stories, malevolent invaders from the stars far outweigh benevolent ones. Star Trek’s Prime Directive on non-intervention for inhabited planets that hadn’t developed faster-than-light travel (often violated by Kirk) is the exception rather than the rule.
DeWitt,
I agree. Space invaders are often aggressive killing machines in sci-fi! It’s more the rule than the exception.
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Even Star Trek had lots of aggressive aliens. Kligons were a very aggressive and hostile. Quite a few minor aliens making single appearances were also aggressive and hostile. Star Wars has lots of aggression. Heinlein’s Star Ship Troupers has hostile Bugs.
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Generally, non-aggression is rare. In many stories, there is some excuse for there being no intelligent aliens out there making it not so difficult for humans to take a foothold.
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The more ‘fantasy-magic’ oriented stories that sometimes share library shelf-space with sci-fi will frequently have non-aggressive aliens. But even “A Wrinkle In Time” has aggressive alien entities who want to take over the universe.
Well Cixin Liu is from China so it isn’t surprising his take is a bit different. I liked the The Three Body problem as it was pretty unique but his other stuff hasn’t been so great. The concept of “the dark forest” as an answer to the Fermi Paradox I found pretty interesting. Another book I read (can’t remember the title) used this plot as humans were drawn to a beacon in the galaxy only to find out that it was more a less a roach motel, ha ha. Aliens used it to identify developing species for elimination.
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There is military Sci-Fi which takes up a large chunk of that genre and it is always malevolent alien species. This is pretty much books for the Doom first person shooter generation.
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First contact Sci-Fi tends to be a lot of different, usually meeting species with completely different value systems.
I usually imagine that the kindest (to humankind) scenario we can hope for in the face of advanced extraterrestrials (and it’d seem they would have to be relative to us, if we encountered them at all) is that we are beneath their notice. Humans don’t view squirrels as worth much attention or trouble in general and therefore squirrels are more or less left alone. I have trouble imagining any happy ending where we are not beneath their notice.
In other words, it’s nice to think that building up kindness and trust and so on between nations would make some difference to extraterrestrials, but I don’t think it would. It’d matter about as much as the difference between the societies of chimps and bonobos matter to humans building roads and mines in the chimps or bonobos territory. In other words, none [not at all].
For vaccine optimists, a summary of evidence vaccines are working:
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Vaccines Appear to Be Slowing Spread of Covid-19 Infections
With more than 37% of U.S. adults fully vaccinated, Anthony Fauci expects case numbers to drop significantly
https://www.wsj.com/articles/vaccines-appear-to-be-slowing-spread-of-covid-19-infections-11619615436
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“But the U.S. is nearing a nationwide benchmark of having 40% of adults fully vaccinated, which many public-health experts call an important threshold where vaccinations gain an upper hand over the coronavirus, based on the experience from further-along nations such as Israel.
“When you get to somewhere between 40 and 50%, I believe you’re going to start seeing real change, the start of a precipitous drop in cases,†said Anthony Fauci, the top U.S. infectious-disease expert, in an interview.”
“In the U.S., the first clear sign of the vaccines’ impact came in nursing homes, where cases and deaths among residents have plummeted, federal data have shown. Soon after, federal data showed declining hospitalizations and deaths among the elderly, who have represented a significant share of Covid-19 fatalities since the pandemic began.”
“In early March, new cases in Israel began a steep decline—after a short spike at the end of February—around the same time that the fully vaccinated portion of the population passed 40%. On Feb. 27, the seven-day rolling average of new confirmed cases in Israel hit 4,117, according to Our World in Data, an Oxford University project that tracks the pandemic. By April 22, when the fully vaccinated level reached 58%, Israel was averaging just 129 new daily cases.”
““At somewhere between 35% and 50% vaccinated, you will see a plateau and then a decline in new cases†in the U.S., said Eyal Leshem, director of the Center for Travel Medicine and Tropical Diseases at Israel’s Sheba Medical Center.”
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This seems to contradict other statements about herd immunity. I suppose they are talking about the leading and trailing edges of herd immunity.
If we found an earth like planet full of mosquitoes we would be the malevolent invading species, if we found one full of puppy dogs then we would be the benevolent aliens. There are two sides to this equation.
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Assuming most alien species got to the top of their food chain the same way we did then evolution is going to breed in aggression. Once one is comfortably on top for long enough then maybe benevolence can take over, except for mosquitoes of course.
Oh. My eyes glazed over from all the trust and kindness sappiness before I got to the punchline, not to trust extraterrestrials at all. Sorry about that.
When the NYT’s can find a few rare moments to stray from culture wars, they can do really good work.
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How Pfizer Makes Its Covid-19 Vaccine
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/health/pfizer-coronavirus-vaccine.html
Tom,
Emphasis added.
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I find your speculation beneath my notice, much as an advanced extraterrestrial will hopefully find us, therefore I will ignore you and let you live, hopefully much as an advanced extraterrestrial would do.
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😉
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[Uhm, in case the wink wasn’t enough – this is supposed to be humorous and not serious.]
Tom Scharf,
Fauci at his most clueless. Cases have already dropped significantly from the peak of ~260,000/day in mid January to ~57,000 on 4/27/2021 (seven day trailing average).
Then why did new cases/day peak in Israel in mid-January? And what about the steep decline in early February? The answer, of course, is that total infections, not confirmed cases, had passed the herd immunity threshold, which is not 60% or higher, in January. Confirmed cases (worldometers.info) were ~530,000 on January 14, 2021. The population of Israel is 9.2 million. So confirmed cases were 5.8% of the population. Even with a fairly strict lockdown I don’t believe new cases would have peaked unless the ratio of confirmed to total cases was at least 5. There was only a small bump in new confirmed cases, peaking in early March, when lockdown restrictions were eased in early February.
Note that serology testing to determine immunity both for individuals and populations is not considered reliable by Israeli authorities:
But somehow acquired immunity still doesn’t count for Fauci and the CDC.
Unfortunately our trillions of dollars aren’t good enough to know the (vaccinated+previously infected) number with any accuracy. Also given that background infection rates vary crazily over time on their own it is very difficult to know where herd immunity is starting to make a difference. Only when looking at Israel, UK, US regions, and other areas that are isolated enough can they start to estimate where vaccination declines should start elsewhere. Then there is the issue with more transmissive variants likely having different herd immunity thresholds. It’s a gigantic pile of numeric turds as far as I can tell. One can make their favorite milkshake out of it but it isn’t going to taste good no matter what you do.
Tom Scharf,
If there were still a large fraction of susceptible individuals in the US, we would have seen a much larger ‘surge’ in infections when the B.1.1.7 strain became dominant. Instead there was a small bump from 55,425/day on 3/16 to 72,809 (7 day trailing) on 4/14 and was back to 57,024 on 4/27.
The bump in MI was higher likely because the population of susceptibles was a larger fraction of the population than in, say, North Dakota. Here in east TN, B.1.1.7 is now the most common variant and we’ve had something of a surge. But vaccination is clearly working because the average age of those hospitalized is now below 60.
Having had a positive SARS-CoV-2 test in the past should be just as good as having been vaccinated. So much for following the science.
All the people I know who got covid that I asked also got vaccinated.
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I might be too hopeful, but the current US decline might be the big one of herd immunity. We shall see.
NYT:
“The effort by Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo’s office to obscure the pandemic death toll in New York nursing homes was far greater than previously known, with aides repeatedly overruling state health officials over a span of at least five months, according to interviews and newly unearthed documents.
Mr. Cuomo’s most senior aides engaged in a sustained effort to prevent the state’s own health officials, including the commissioner, Howard Zucker, from releasing the true death toll to the public or sharing it with state lawmakers, these interviews and documents showed.
A scientific paper, which incorporated the data, was never published. An audit of the numbers by a top Cuomo aide was finished months before it became publicly known. Two letters, drafted by the Health Department and meant for state legislators, were never sent.
The actions coincided with the period in which Mr. Cuomo was pitching and then writing a book on the pandemic, with the assistance of his top aide, Melissa DeRosa, and others.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/28/nyregion/cuomo-aides-nursing-home-deaths.html
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I have a feeling his book revenues are trending down.
DeWitt Payne (Comment #201865): “Fauci at his most clueless.”
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Indeed. But I would go further. Anyone claiming to know why cases are dropping now (albeit slowly) is clueless, unless they can explain all the prior ups and downs. Which nobody can.
If the dark forest hypothesis is true, then we are doomed since we have been indiscriminantly sending out radio signals for over a century. The good news is that we don’t have to worry about the climate crisis! 🙂
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Of course, that implies the existence of one hunter in the forest.
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A less grim possibility is that civilizations realize that they had better shut up, mind their own business, and hope that everyone else classifies them as squirrels.
Recording of oral arguments in the cheerleading free speech case today:
https://www.c-span.org/video/?510036-1/mahanoy-area-schools-district-v-bl-oral-argument&live
Who knew the aliens were so much into cancel culture?
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It’s pretty striking how little our radio has actually traveled in the grand scheme. The Milky Way is about 180,000 light years across and we have been sending out radio for 100 years so (0.06% of the way) so it will be a while before it is heard by anyone. They would also have to have some mighty sensitive receivers as well. Of course a little arm waving can get you faster than light communication back to home base with that quantum entanglement CB radio.
https://www.planetary.org/articles/3390
Listening to Biden (when my mind does not wander). Lie, lie, lie. Spend, spend , spend. Ignore all the important, unpleasant stuff.
DeWitt,
“So much for following the science.”
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We old technical types tend to imagine that rational analysis will ultimately win out (social justice, climate ‘science’, and a host of of other dubious propositions notweithstanding). Sadly, rational analysis has nothing to do with today’s political calculus. Absolutely crazy bonkers notions of reality are accepted as given truth, with zero supporting evidence. We live in very strange times.
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Only masochists listen to an alzheimer’s patient making a speech, of which he knows nothing and will remember nothing. Good grief, when will people start to note that he is demented?
Yeah. The speech is not actually all that bad. Dull, dishonest, and simple minded, but it’s a politician talking. It has been competently delivered. But I eventually decided I’d rather watch the Rockies lose.
Tim Scott was way better than the baseball game.
If aliens appear, we might have ACLU going to court and getting judge’s to pass injunctions against government operations.
When I saw a liberal heaping praise on District 9, without having seen it I guessed aliens were the good guys, humans are the bad guys, and the movie is an exercise in liberal self-loathing. That said, I liked the movie.
The media will be like Kent Brockman.
Aliens aren’t likely to appear. My first cut analysis of the low chance is that a technological civilization developed on Earth over the last five thousand years, but ‘higher life forms’, like vertebrates have been around for about 500 million years, so the development of a technological civilization represents 0.001% of the period of higher life forms. So even if conditions for higher life forms to develop are relatively common (and I suspect they are not common), the chance of development of a technological civilization is likely very small. Add to that the travel times (and energy requirements) for interstellar travel, and the chance of aliens showing up to say hello (or to wipe out humans) is pretty slim. Finally, it seems to me implausible that alien life forms would share enough of Earth’s biochemistry for Earth to be of much interest as a place to reside.
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Aliens are not going to try to take Earth over. On the other hand, the left never stops trying…. and that is the real danger to civilization.
I see one way that Biden’s climate plan can be implemented: accounting tricks!
That decision [by California’s Air Resources Board] has generated tens of millions of carbon credits with dubious climate value…Those ghost credits represent nearly one in three credits issued through California’s primary forest offset program, highlighting systemic flaws in the rules and suggesting widespread gaming of the market.”
A bureaucracy messing up? Say it isn’t so!
HaroldW,
Carbon credits. *sigh*
My guess is that any organization currently claiming to be carbon neutral isn’t.
Steve,
All those things, yes. It is improbable that UFO’s are super secret Chinese tech, or super secret Lockheed Martin or Livermore Laboratories or whatever. Also unlikely that they are U.S. secret tech that the U.S. is deliberately misleading the public about. There are many other possibilities, all highly improbable.
But I personally believe these unlikely possibilities are orders of magnitude more likely than the possibility that the UFO’s reported are extraterrestrial, for the reasons you cite among many others.
This is great! Nobody has to work anymore and we can all just live off rich people. I was born in the wrong age.
I know we all think we are pretty clever but I suspect an actual alien civilization with the means to announce their selves to us would more likely just study us like an ant colony.
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Faster than light travel is the only hope for contact, and is the basis for every SF book ever with various arm waving solutions. If that isn’t possible than the distances involved mean we have a pretty lonely future ahead of us.
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I found this pretty depressing actually:
TIMELAPSE OF THE FUTURE: A Journey to the End of Time (4K)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uD4izuDMUQA&t=208s
I just cannot believe the sycophant media. Is there not a single organization among the swooners that can think of an actual example where careless wonton spending and enormous debt ended up being a problem? A city, a country? Even the WSJ news side has nothing to say. These people have become hopeless. The academic economists must all be on vacation. They aren’t bringing this up only to dismiss it, they aren’t even talking about it all.
Tom Scharf,
“The academic economists must all be on vacation.”
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No, they are just terrified of the woke mob that runs almost every college and university. Say something even mildly critical of Biden administration policies, and they are in real danger of being attacked by the mob, and/or publicly denounced as a racist. And being factually correct is no defense against the mob, since factual analysis is unrelated to the politics of the woke mob. The country needs to re-think overall funding for higher education.
I posit the following…. Vaccinating the adult population and not the children will cause strains of the virus to develop that specifically targets children. Remember polio targeted us kids in the 1950s and it was devastating. I have no scientific backup for my theory.
Standard academic teaching is that deficits lead to higher taxes in the future to pay off that debt. I remember we were arguing with a grad student who insisted the government has to pay off its debts.
DeWitt Payne (Comment #201882): “My guess is that any organization currently claiming to be carbon neutral isn’t.”
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Indeed. They contract with a utility to buy wind and solar. Then the utility builds enough wind and solar to meet that customer’s needs. On average. Of course, most of the time the “carbon neutral” customer is getting power generated by other means and most of the contracted renewable power is going elsewhere. It is just an accounting trick since the only way that one customer can be “carbon neutral” is for there to be a lot of customers who are not.
Tom,
We never know which of our assumptions (usually perfectly reasonable assumptions, but based on an example set of one element / ourselves) may be invalid.
Faster than light travel might not be the problem for aliens that it is for us. Radically longer lifespans could influence this. Social influences could be different – could it be not the same problem for them that it is for us that travelling at relativistic speeds everyone we know would be long dead by the time we arrived. Other things I’m not thinking of. Maybe they wouldn’t mind journeys of extremely long duration the same way we would.
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That’s them coming to us. As you say, we may never reach them. But why in the universe would they come to us in the first place. No good reason I can see. Still, this is subject to the same limitation on assumptions as mentioned earlier; who the heck knows.
*shrug*
RUSSELL KLIER (Comment #201888): “I posit the following…. Vaccinating the adult population and not the children will cause strains of the virus to develop that specifically targets children. Remember polio targeted us kids in the 1950s and it was devastating.”
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100 years ago, almost everyone got polio as an infant. A mild gastroenterological infection that usually went all but unnoticed and conferred immunity. If you were not immune and caught polio later in life, it could sometimes turn into a devastating disease. Then improved hygiene meant that kids, especially middle class kids, avoided getting infected as infants. The result was terrifying epidemics that hit children since their parents were already immune.
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Almost all infectious diseases “target children” because children are not yet immune.
Tom Scharf: Hey don’t diss “wonton spending”…I like Chinese food 😉
To your real point — I’m old enough to remember when Obama’s $800 billion plan in 2009 was considered a lot. He was a piker compared to Trump & Biden.
Russell
I think that could also happen if we did not vaccinate adults and did not vaccinate kids. The mutation could happen in a kid or an adult. If it’s highly contagious to kids, a large number of unvaccinated kids is sufficient for it to get a foothold. It doesn’t need to “specifically” target kids, just be more contagious so they catch it.
Russel and lucia,
This is a variation on the false meme that acquired immunity doesn’t count, only vaccination. We’re also back to the problem that we don’t actually know what percentage of children (or adults for that matter) have already been infected, recovered and are now immune. We have good reason to believe that the numbers of actual infections are much higher than confirmed cases. What we do know is that very few children are hospitalized and die, that transmission from children to adults is lower than transmission from adults to children and that testing for antibodies in children’s blood won’t help.
Lucia, what do you mean by ‘contagious to children’? More likely to get infected by an adult, or pick up in the air, more likely to spread amongst themselves, something else?
Mike M,
Good summary WRT polio. About the time my mom was growing up, hygiene was improving, especially for richer families….. she told me mostly kids from wealthier families were the ones getting polio as older kids or young adults, and becoming either partially paralyzed or dying.
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Since young kids almost never suffer serious illness from covid-19, I suspect that once it has been around for a couple of generations kids in poorer countries will all acquire immunity when young, and serious disease later in life will be rare. Of course, covid-19 vaccination will likely become another of the standard childhood vaccinations in richer countries.
DeWitt “ What we do know is that very few children are hospitalized and die . That highlights my concern. We seem to be complacent about the risk to young-ins. There have already been several variation of covid take hold. I am concerned that a variation will develop that effects kids like it does us old folks. My proposal is to accelerate vaccine development for children.
MikeN
what do you mean by ‘contagious to children’?
I don’t know what’s unclear. I mean “able to spread to children”.
Russell Klier,
“I am concerned that a variation will develop that effects kids like it does us old folks.”
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It kills older people because their immune systems are weak compared to children. The immune system is most capable among young children. After early childhood, the immune system begins a slow decline, and is largely shot by old age. While it is always possible a more virulent strain could develop, there is no data suggesting that has happened (there is some data suggesting more transmissible strains).
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I am not at all concerned that kids are at risk. Testing existing vaccines on kids makes perfect sense (no development is needed, just testing of existing vaccines). Assuming they are effective, it may be prudent to give kids vaccinations against covid-19 if only to avoid infection later (when the illness would b more severe).
Russel Klier,
Influenza can be more dangerous to children less than two years of age than it is for adults. So vaccination for influenza is recommended for children older than six months. If that were to happen with a new strain of SARS-CoV-2, then we could vaccinate young children. There’s no point in doing that now because the risks from the vaccine likely outweigh the benefits and we needed to concentrate on those at highest risk. The vaccine manufacturers are starting trials on people younger than 16.
It’s not that kids don’t get covid, they just don’t get very sick from it. To them it is actually like the flu or better. Their immune systems kick its butt. There is no particular reason the disease wants to mutate to kill its hosts, that is a mistake in its design. It wants to survive. Random mutations could become more lethal but there is no particular incentive for that to happen. A virus that is less lethal will be more successful in the long run.
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Vaccinating kids really only makes sense to reduce transmission to people it does make very ill. It’s probably a good idea to mass vaccinate kids at schools ASAP. It is also a good idea * not to * if we aren’t 100% sure the vaccine is safe long term. Judgment call.
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In the grand scheme a big part of the problem isn’t that covid is such a terrible disease, it is that we were 100% vulnerable to it so there are vast numbers of potential victims.
Tom Scharf
That’s right. It doesn’t actually “want” anything. Variants that spread more readily into a population are favored; those that don’t die out Then it needs some non-immune hosts to be around so that it doesn’t die out for lack of hosts.
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In term of “worrying” about a mutating to spread more to kids, well if a mutation that spread more readily to unvaccinated kids happened, then it would spread into unvaccinated kids more rapidly. Parent’s being vaccinated wouldn’t make it spread faster. Them being vaccinated might slow the spread if they could carry it to, but it wouldn’t make it spread any faster in kids than it otherwise would.
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Vaccination of parents also won’t “encourage” the virus to become more deadly in kids. If that happened, it would happen.
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Generally speaking the fewer hosts for the virus, the lower the global rate of mutations.
Lucia, I asked because I am under the impression the vaccine is not highly contagious to kids.
They are less likely to spread it to others due to viral load and less likely to get infected.
Perhaps they are more likely to get infected but just don’t get symptoms or are minimally infected, but I haven’t seen evidence of that.
https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/daily-life-coping/children/symptoms.html
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“While fewer children have been sick with COVID-19 compared to adults, children can be infected with the virus that causes COVID-19, can get sick from COVID-19, and can spread the virus that causes COVID-19 to others. Children, like adults, who have COVID-19 but have no symptoms (“asymptomaticâ€) can still spread the virus to others.
Most children with COVID-19 have mild symptoms or have no symptoms at all. However, some children can get severely ill from COVID-19. They might require hospitalization, intensive care, or a ventilator to help them breathe. In rare cases, they might die.”
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This kind of language drives me crazy. How many “fewer”? How much is “most”. Can’t they just state the relative risk in numbers?
Tom Scharf,
“Can’t they just state the relative risk in numbers?”
I’m betting that they don’t know and are just eyeballing the data like the rest of us.
My guess is that children are infected in similar proportions to adults. That means it’s likely that children in the US have also passed the herd immunity threshold. Children don’t seem to be reservoirs and vectors, AFAICT, so reducing the number of susceptible adults by vaccination should drastically reduce the number of infected children. I haven’t looked, but I suspect that children are not superspreaders so it’s possible that Ro for children could be less than one.
MikeN
I think you mean the virus.
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But anyway, I was responding to this:
RUSSELL KLIER (Comment #201888)
April 29th, 2021 at 11:09 am
So Russell is worrying the virus would mutate and change to become more contagious to children.
So nothing in the discussion was suggest this current form is more contagious to kids. i think your correct: the virus in it’s current form doesn’t seem to be highly contagious to kids. OR maybe they get it but they tend to get such mild cases often no one notices.
Dewitt,
I think I agree with you. It seems the two extremes are:
1) Kids have been getting the virus is roughly equal rates as adults but it’s so mild no one notices. In that case, they will nevertheless have developed some immunity.
OR
2) Kids have not been getting the virus because there is something about their systems that repels the virus without getting immunity.
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In either extreme they will no longer be contributing much to circulation of the virus. In case 1, they won’t because they are reaching herd immunity. In case 2, they won’t because they just inherently don’t catch, culture and then spread the virus. In between the extremes, it’s sort of a bit of both.
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Russels worried about a mutation that could change (2) if that’s the case. If (2) is the explanation for kids seeming immunity but the virus mutated to be more infective to them then if the hypothetical mutation happened, we could see increasing symptomatic outbreaks in kids. But this requires a mutation to change just the right sort of something about the virus.
Thanks everyone…. Talking about the covid risk to kids eases my concerns that we were too complacent about it.
Russell,
The US seems to have gotten past the worst of Covid. (Fingers crossed.) The world has not.
I think those past the worst are Israel, UK and US. The US is evidently at 43.8% with at least one dose. That’s (along with some natural immunity in some of the unvaccinated) may be enough provided the vaccine and natural immunity do protect against variants. (With every new variant we initially don’t know because we don’t have data. But so far, once we get data, it seems the vaccine gives at least half way decent protection against variants.)
Other countries might be past the worst, but if so, I don’t know which they are. (I really can’t keep track of all countries. ) The world is definitely not past the worst. It probably will be in 6 months. Preferably most the additional immunity will be from vaccines, but sadly, I suspect much of it will be from infections, some of which will result in death.
Lucia, I got another poser…. What is the marketing strategy of the vaccine manufacturers with respect to kids. Do they want to delay development costs and hold that huge market for 2023? They are running full capacity supplying the world with adult vaccine. Are they worried about their competitors beating them to the market…. are they in cahoots?
Russell Klier,
I generated three graphics last year based on the first 52,000 confirmed cases and all 2,328 related covid deaths in Florida. The images are here: https://postimg.cc/gallery/Tp3gwjf
This was fairly early in the pandemic, when it was still possible for the state health department to record and track the outcome of each case. I am sure there have been some slight changes, especially since the rate of testing increased dramatically. But the trends based on age were very clear early on, and there is no evidence that has materially changed. Key points:
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1) The youngest person to die in Florida among the first 2328 deaths was 26 years old. The rate of death among children was clearly very close to zero.
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2) The number of positive tests in children below age 15 was much lower than older age groups, but rose rapidly with age, with no real difference in the number of positive tests for those over ~25-30 compared to older people. The susceptibility of every age group to infection was comparable…. except for children, where the susceptibility was much lower. The drop in positive tests for people over ~70 reflects mostly a declining population… lots of people die before passing 70, and the rate of death from all causes keeps rising.
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3) If all people over 40 were to be vaccinated, the expected drop in total deaths would be >95%.
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Most European countries did similar analyses based on their own cases and quickly concluded that there was essentially zero risk to children, and so no reason to close schools for kids younger than 16…. that really was “following the science”. Unlike in the States, where schools were immediately closed in a senseless panic…. and the teacher’s unions have made sure many remain that way to this day.
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Kids just are not at any real risk.
Russel,
I don’t know their marketing strategy. They are running some trials for 12-15 yo and now 6 months-11 years: https://cen.acs.org/pharmaceuticals/vaccines/COVID-19-vaccine-trials-kids/99/i10
I assume the pharma companies hope to get vaccine in kids arms as soon as they can get approval. They will need FDA approval which requires showing it is safe and effective.
Tons of pharma companies are trying to develop vaccine. Some got out of the gate faster than others. But others are still trying to develop their own. (There’s an Indian company working on one that’s delivered as nasal spray instead of as a shot.)
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Obviously getting vaccine out first is helpful to the companies bottom line. But I think most are just trying to get as many different vaccines out as possible.
SteveF
My concern was that a variation will develop that effects kids like it does us old folks. I also perceived a lack of concern for vaccine development for kids.
I don’t know that Big Pharma has a marketing strategy at the moment, they don’t need one with the media in a hyper frenzy, they can also sell everything that they make for at least the next few years so no marketing needed. What they secretly hope is that the vaccine has waning immunity and they can give a shot every year to everyone, or that variants keep popping up that require updates.
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Pfizer is actively testing on kids now.
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mRNA technology holds out hope for a lot of new stuff. One thing it was originally developed for was a possible cancer drug that could possibly target only the broken cancer cells that wouldn’t stop replicating (instead of the bludgeon of chemo). This is a bit difficult as different people’s cancer might be unique, so one would need to read their unique cancer cell and potentially build a custom mRNA product just for them. This was in its infancy when covid came along.
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All the complaining in past years about Big Pharma and their excessive profits, well guess what some of that money was used for. Here is an mRNA article from 2018 before covid came along:
https://www.nature.com/articles/nrd.2017.243
Russel wrote: “What is the marketing strategy of the vaccine manufacturers with respect to kids. Do they want to delay development costs and hold that huge market for 2023?”
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What development costs are you thinking about? They don’t need new vaccines for children.
DaveJR,
They have all the clinical trials to do to prove safety and effectiveness.
We can just be thankful that we didn’t get a W-shaped death rate like the 1918 flu pandemic. If we had a bunch of kids dying you can bet the FDA would have had their butts on fire.
https://www.virology.ws/2014/05/01/unusual-mortality-pattern-of-1918-influenza-a-virus/
There are lots of drugs that are not intended for pregnant women, it isn’t that they are known to be unsafe, it’s that the drug company hasn’t gone to the expense of testing that group which is expensive for a small target.
…from Wilfred Reilly: I bet “UFO” pilots lock the space-ship doors when they fly close to Earth.
I see that India had over 400,000 new cases today on worldometers.info. The good news is that the rate of increase has slowed in the last few days. The bad news is that confirmed cases are only 1.4% of the population so there are probably still many susceptible people in the country. Brazil, for example, has had three waves so far and confirmed cases are now about 7% of the population. India is in its second wave.
Also, those 402,110 new cases today represent 289 cases/million. At the peak of new cases in the US, 255,907 on 1/11/2021, the rate was 769 new cases/million. That would be over one million new cases per day for India. France, for example, had a similar rate and the UK’s rate at the peak was 873/million.
Maybe the current slowdown represents the beginning of a peak. We can only hope.
I would be careful comparing US, Brazil and India test results. The availability of testing, the enormous number of patients, the vast remote interior populations, different testing protocols all make the numbers apples and oranges and bananas.
DeWitt,
India evidently is poor at detecting or recording. India itself supposedly says their data are poor and don’t reflect the severity in their country.
I do how the evident slowdown does represent a real slow down.
I very much doubt India’s numbers.
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https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2021/04/30/992451165/india-is-counting-thousands-of-daily-covid-deaths-how-many-is-it-missing
“Results of a third national serological survey conducted in * December and January * showed that roughly a fifth of India’s population had been exposed to the virus. That meant for every recorded coronavirus case, almost 30 went undetected.”
Tom Scharf,
“That meant for every recorded coronavirus case, almost 30 went undetected.”
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Sure. India has a relatively young population (median 28 years), so an expected relatively low death rate. On average, India is very poor. India has a limited health care system, so of course most cases of covid-19 are going to never be detected. 30:1 seems a bit over the top, but a big ratio between undetected and detected cases doesn’t seem unreasonable.
We might have a better idea of the COVID-19 death rate in India when they publish overall death data and we can see the number of excess deaths. But I don’t expect that data for a year or two and even then it will likely be problematic.
I’ve seen comments at WSJ.com about the apparent low per capita COVID-19 death rate in India. It’s a lot lower than one would expect even with the lower average age. But a lot of people are apparently dying at home and the deaths may not have been reported at all, much less as COVID-19 victims.
Some positive news and some amazing news. My wife’s brother is still in a coma on life support but showing very slight signs of improvement. Amazing news … my wife learned he had been receiving monthly intravenous treatments for autoimmune disease. She said it sounded like a process similar to chemo treatments. The doctor surmises the autoimmune treatments suppressed the covid vaccine shot effectiveness, leading to the infection.
DeWitt Payne (Comment #201926)
“”e might have a better idea of the COVID-19 death rate in India when they publish overall death data and we can see the number of excess deaths. But I don’t expect that data for a year or two and even then it will likely be problematic.”
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Always an issue, over reporting, underreporting, and lack of reporting.
Enables people to make statements like the number of whatever is twice [or more] what is reported.
I guess all we can do is go on that countries actual reporting as being what that country does?
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Lucia, apropos the children not getting many infections, mild or not catching it. Not those hyperactive CD4-8 cells then?
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In Australia the 0-15 YO group is not recognised as being safe to give the vaccine to as it is supposedly not tested on that age group.
Ridiculous decision if wanting to build up herd immunity.
angech (Comment #201929): “Ridiculous decision if wanting to build up herd immunity.”
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No it is not. Children rarely transmit the virus, either to other children or adults. So for the purpose of herd immunity, they are already nearly immune.
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The ridiculous decision has been giving the vaccine to people who already had the virus. That places them at some small risk for no benefit. It wastes half the vaccine and slows down the time to reach herd immunity.
angech
I don’t understand your question.
MikeM
Sure. But oddly, many of them want the vaccine anyway. I have a friend who insists she had Covid. (No test though. Didn’t see an MD in person.) You’d risk your life coming between her and a vaccination once it was available.
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None of them are compelled to take the vaccine in the US. Blocking them from access would require paperwork, tracking, invasion of privacy and would slow down vaccination!!
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Restricting vaccinations for people who already had the illness is a perfectly fine idea that will never work. Forgetaboutit, never going to happen.
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We can blame those at the CDC and the FDA, like Anthony Fauci, who are so stupid as to suggest (and continue to suggest!) having had the illness and recovered doesn’t make you effectively immune. With that kind of garbage being fed to the public, it is a certainty that many (if not most) people who have had confirmed cases….. 33 million of them….. are going to demand vaccinations.
Given the lag in deaths India should be in for a tough month ahead, although the numbers seems to be politically managed so I wouldn’t count on anything at this point.
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As usual the media cannot find anything other than politicians to blame. This just in, Modi’s political opponents use a crisis to score points.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi could have prevented India’s devastating Covid-19 crisis, critics say. He didn’t
https://www.cnn.com/2021/04/30/india/covid-second-wave-narendra-modi-intl-hnk-dst/index.html
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Obviously all Modi needed to do was call his rallies “BLM protests” and he would have been forgiven and even lauded, silly him.
Interesting factoid: When US states are listed in order of confirmed cases per million population, the fatalities per million population mostly correlate (modestly). But one state is wildly lower than expected: Utah. While Utah has among the greatest number of confirmed cases per million population (12.4% of the population has had confirmed covid), it has one the lowest rates of death per million population (687 per million).
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One likely reason: Utah has by far the youngest population in the USA…. median age of 30.3, and only ~11% of the population is over 65. (versus Florida 20.5% over 65)
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Considering the range of elderly population by state adds some perspective to the relative success of limiting deaths in different states. California has only 70% as many elderly (per million population) as Florida, yet has over 95% as many deaths per million population….. in spite of draconian restrictions. Texas has an even younger population than California (only 61% as many over 65 per million compared to Florida), yet has ~5% more deaths per million population as Florida.
SteveF (Comment #201933): “Restricting vaccinations for people who already had the illness is a perfectly fine idea that will never work.”
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Sure. But so what? You can give people appropriate advice as to the risk and benefits and point out that for people with a confirmed test, either PCR or antibodies, the risks probably outweigh the benefits. And that the responsible thing for such people to do is to let those who are still vulnerable go first.
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Will some of the already infected still try to get in the front of the vaccine line? Of course. But many will act appropriately, and that would increase the efficiency of the vaccination campaign.
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But Fauci and company are doing the exact opposite of what they should be doing. No wonder more and more people don’t trust him.
I haven’t seen any data about the risk of infection against
1. Previous infection
2. Vaccinated
3. Infected + vaccinated
,
I’m not sure what to expect from these numbers. They are all likely 90% + but I wouldn’t place any particular bets on infected vs vaccinated yet. #3 is the safest place to be.
Mike M,
“But so what?”
My point was exactly what you later wrote: with people like Fauci telling everyone they may not be immune after recovery from covid-19, there was never any chance many of those who had recovered would “do the right thing” and let others go in front of them for vaccinations. They were never told the truth about immunity after infection and recovery; instead the public was fed 100% hysteria 100% of the time.
MikeM
Some did. At least in the US, we are now vaccinating people who were at the back of the line. Anyone who wants to can sign up.
You mean “that would have…”
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Honestly, I don’t know what you are proposing given that you seem to be proposing this now not 3 or 4 months ago.
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The vaccination program went fairly efficiently and moving along quite well at this point. There may be things they want to learn to improve efficiency of future vaccination programs. But we have something like 44% of adults who have received at least 1 vaccine. The rest are all allowed in line now. The recovered getting a vaccine aren’t going to significantly delay anyone from getting a vaccine.
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A public service announcement admitting that vaccines do confer strong immunity quickly and do reduce transmission could possibly, reduce the number of “vaccine hesitant” and so get them to decided to get vaccinated. Admitting the already infected likely already have partial immunity but we don’t know how much would probably be wise. The admission would build trust among the vaccine skeptics.
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But banning those who already had Covid wouldn’t do anything useful. The already don’t need to get it. Some won’t. But banning them has no positive value.
SteveF,
Indeed. It goes further. Has anyone seen a report that people who say they aren’t going to get vaccinated are ever asked if it’s because they have already recovered from COVID-19? I haven’t. The question is never asked because the conventional wisdom is that because there hasn’t been a controlled study of people with acquired immunity, we don’t know their immune status. The implication then is that acquired immunity doesn’t count towards herd immunity. It’s totally bogus because we know that reinfections are rare, but if you’re Joe Average and all you know is what you see on NBC Nightly News, you won’t see anything else.
Then there’s the likely fact that many, if not most, people either don’t know they’ve been infected or can’t prove it.
And finally, if you want to do anything that requires proof of immunity, proof of vaccination is the only thing that’s being accepted. There is no option that I know of for using, for example, a past positive COVID-19 test. As a result, I’m planning on getting a J&J shot in the near future now that anybody in my area can get a vaccine shot if they want it.
lucia,
By any rational measure, i.e. reinfection rate, immunity acquired from infection and recovery is a lot better than partial. It may be even better than any of the vaccines.
DeWitt,
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If I didn’t know I’d had it or couldn’t prove it, I would definitely still want the vaccine. I certainly wouldn’t want to be prevented from getting it because someone suspected I might have gotten it!
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I agree this appears likely. I should have written “at least partial”. We don’t know if it’s full, especially not for people who may have had light nearly undetectable cases. (Though, presumably, they may have been pretty well protected against severe infection in the first place. That’s why they barely got sick!)
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Well, oddly, this might fly because there are those insisting a past positive Covid test doesn’t mean you had Covid! They claim there is something about running cycles so long it amplifies literally nothing into something! If you never had it, you then don’t have immunity!
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On the other hand, the group that insists the positive tests over count covid due to this issue with amplification seems to strongly overlap the group who denies Covid is any sort of problem at all. So perhaps you don’t need to do much to convince them to allow people to use anything at all to prove immunity!
Lucia wrote: “They claim there is something about running cycles so long it amplifies literally nothing into something!”
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This is a problem with PCR in general. Mispriming on a piece of non-specific DNA only needs to happen once (and with millions of sequences, creating specific primers gets increasingly more difficult), but once it does, you now have a specific product to amplify. The more cycles of amplification you run, the greater the chance of mispriming occurring and that the new product will be amplified into a detectable signal. You can increase specificity by separating the DNA on a gel. Non-specific bands will usually have a different molecular weight to your target, but I highly doubt they waste time doing that.
https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.03.06.21253051v1.full-text
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Between March 2020 and January 2021, of 149,000 people covered by one health care provider in Israel who had one positive Covid-19 test result (the total positive test results in Israel by January 2021 was 643,000, so one in four cases was included in the study), almost exactly 0.1% (154 people) was re-infected a second time with a positive test result. Of that 154, half had symptomatic illness. Oddly, most confirmed re-infections were among people 10 to 19 years old, followed in frequency by 20 to 29 years old and 30 to 39 years old. The researches make a SWAG that younger people were not so careful about social distancing.
To put these numbers in perspective, the entire population of Israel is 9,230,000, and as of today (with extensive vaccination), the confirmed case rate is ~70 per day, and death rate ~1 per day.
The study linked by SteveF ran from March 16, 2020 to January 27, 2021. On March 16 there were (worldometers.info) 298 confirmed cases in Israel. On January 27, 2021 there were 621,590 cases for a population of 9,197,590. So total infections during the time period were 621,292 If we scale the 154 reinfection cases in 2.5 million members of the Maccabi Healthcare Services to the total population of Israel of 9.197,590, we get 567 cases, which should be included in the total infections, not that it matters much. 567/621,292 = 0.00096. That makes acquired immunity 99.9% effective if my logic is correct.
Note that the period is long enough that it is very likely that multiple mutants of SARS-CoV-2 were involved. Also, the rate of infection in the MHS patients, 149,735/2,500,000 (6.0%), was similar to the rate of infection in the general population, 621,292/9,197,590 (6.8%), so the sample is probably representative.
sarc But we, Fauci e.g., still don’t know how good infection acquired immunity is because this study wasn’t vetted by the FDA and/or the CDC so it didn’t happen. /sarc
lucia (Comment #201941): “Well, oddly, this might fly because there are those insisting a past positive Covid test doesn’t mean you had Covid! They claim there is something about running cycles so long it amplifies literally nothing into something! If you never had it, you then don’t have immunity!”
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There are at least two issues. One is that the excessive number of cycles means that fragment of non-viable virus can give a positive test. So a person who had the virus a long time ago and is not in any meaningful sense infected can still give a positive test. That can be issue for the patient, via unnecessary isolation. And it can distort hospitalization and death stats via misattribution.
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The other issue is actual false positives via tiny levels of contamination. That could mislead a person into thinking they are immune. But that should be easily solved via an antibody test.
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I don’t understand the mispriming issue that DaveJR (Comment #201942) refers to. Is that just the possibility that some other virus shares the same snippet of DNA?
Mike M.,
Antibody tests aren’t a panacea. From what I’ve read, a lot of infected people never show antibodies in their blood. In others, the antibody levels decline to undetectable over time. Or perhaps you believe that if antibodies aren’t detected then there was no infection?
Mike M wrote: “Is that just the possibility that some other virus shares the same snippet of DNA?”
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Primers don’t have to exactly match a sequence of DNA to bind well enough or long enough for the DNA polymerase to initiate extension. This is mispriming. The larger number of “random” sequences in your sample (as well as a few other factors) then the more chance a similar sequence will exist which may cause mispriming.
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Mispriming may be more likely in a DNA sample without the target you’re looking for, simply because, while primer is usually used up over time in the reaction, if the sequence doesn’t exist, a greater concentration of primer is available over time to misprime. Likewise, increasing the number of cycles increases the chances of mispriming occurring. 15-25 is about standard. 30+ is pushing it, but if you’re looking to detect a very small signal, you may have to go there.
DeWitt Payne (Comment #201946): “Antibody tests aren’t a panacea. From what I’ve read, a lot of infected people never show antibodies in their blood. In others, the antibody levels decline to undetectable over time. Or perhaps you believe that if antibodies aren’t detected then there was no infection?”
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Of course not. But if you do have antibodies, then you almost certainly don’t need the vaccine.
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I had something in December. I thought there was a good chance it was the Wuhan virus, but I never got tested. In March, I finally managed to get an antibody test. It came back negative. So maybe I never had it or maybe I did; three months after a mild infection there is a good chance of no antibodies.
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If the test had been positive, non way would I be getting the vaccine in the near future. As it is, I probably will get it once the state decides they don’t need to make people jump through hoops.
DavidJR,
Thanks, that made it clear.
I guess one way to reduce the problem is to test for multiple snippets. I would think that would be best practice, but I don’t know how widely it is done. Most PCR tests for the Wuhan virus use 35-40 cycles. Way too many.
NPR: COVID ‘Doesn’t Discriminate By Age’: Serious Cases On The Rise In Younger Adults
https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2021/05/01/992148299/covid-doesnt-discriminate-by-age-serious-cases-on-the-rise-in-younger-adults
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Another in the series of “Young people with covid!!!!”. Alternate headline: Vaccination program working great, here is proof!
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“More than 30% of the U.S. population is now fully vaccinated, but the vast majority are people older than 65 – a group that was prioritized in the initial phase of the vaccine rollout.”
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Interesting word choice, ‘but’?
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Ummm … yes actually covid does discriminate by age. The discrimination by age is blatantly obvious except to fear mongering statistics deprived journalists. In other news cases are down 27% over the last two weeks. FL has now fully vaccinated 68% of its seniors.
DeWitt,
“But we, Fauci e.g., still don’t know how good infection acquired immunity is because this study wasn’t vetted by the FDA and/or the CDC so it didn’t happen. ”
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Fauci has proven himself many times over to be either an idiot or a blatant liar… he can choose which is a better description. But it doesn’t matter which it really is: everybody should ignore what he says….. or just do the opposite.
MikeM
I wouldn’t want to go through two tests to prove I could benefit from a vaccine. I’d just want to get a vaccine. So my position still stands: it makes no sense to not allow those who were infected to get a vaccine. They already don’t have to get one if they don’t want to. Their right to make their own decision about the best way of to protect themselves should not be taken away nor should anyone be forced to go through expensive hurdles to prove they did not have Covid before they are given a shot.
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Let people who want a shot get a shot.
Tom scharf,
“COVID ‘Doesn’t Discriminate By Age’
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The only appropriate response is laughter…. NPR is run by clowns, idiots, or a combination of both. Laughter is still the only appropriate response.
Lucia,
“Their right to make their own decision about the best way of to protect themselves should not be taken away nor should anyone be forced to go through expensive hurdles to prove they did not have Covid before they are given a shot.”
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Sure. But I think the Supreme Court would throw out the case as moot. There is nowhere in the States that someone can’t get a covid vaccine now if they want one. So, who cares?
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Unfortunately, plenty of soon-to-be-dead elderly people don’t want one… and their families likely will care. As they say… “you can lead a horse to water…”
I watched in semi-amazement this weeks’s golf tournament in Florida… start of the four day tournament, lots of spectators wearing masks. End of the tournament: almost none. The tournament officials continued to wear them, as probably required by the tournament sponsor. The spectators just said “no”.
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Same thing in baseball: blue states have empty stadiums, red states have loud crowds of unmasked spectators. This masquerade of covid masks can’t go on for much longer. And good riddance when it is gone.
That golf tournament is close to where I live, I noticed the same thing with masks going away day by day. The CDC is obviously losing authority by being too conservative, people are making their own decisions on risk. Stories like the one above from NPR don’t help. It was mass disobedience.
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“All attendees must complete a health screening before entry. CDC-approved masks must be worn by spectators over the age of 2 except when eating or drinking.
There will be concessions, but the buffets and self-serve food stations will not be returning this year. Fans cannot eat or drink within 10 feet of the rope line.”
STeveF,
I agree no State is thinking of making those who had Covid wait. But it seems MikeM is advocating those who had Covid should be made to wait.
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They aren’t being made to wait. And it would be stupid if they were made to wait. OTOH: If someone like MikeM wants to wait, that’s fine. That’s a personal choice. But we don’t need to take away the personal choice of others to give MikeM his choice.
lucia (Comment #201952): “it makes no sense to not allow those who were infected to get a vaccine.”
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I don’t know why you keep harping on that. I don’t think anyone has suggested otherwise. Certainly not me.
Tom Scharf,
The CDC is a bit like the old Soviet Union: they knew they were utterly incompetent at governing, and so did the populace. To paraphrase the old joke about the Soviet Union: The CDC pretends to issue stern health guidance, and we pretend to listen to that guidance. Masks are going away very soon in many states.
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For those already vaccinated, of any age, mask wearing is ridiculous. For children, mask wearing is ridiculous. For healthy young people, mask wearing is ridiculous. Mask wearing outdoors (like walking a golf course) even for the unvaccinated elderly is ridiculous. Some people will accept the ridiculous indefinitely, but most will not.
Mike M,
When you wrote:
“The ridiculous decision has been giving the vaccine to people who already had the virus. That places them at some small risk for no benefit. It wastes half the vaccine and slows down the time to reach herd immunity.”
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it gave me the impression that you believed vaccination should be limited to people who have not had and recovered from the virus.
SteveF (Comment #201960): “it gave me the impression that you believed vaccination should be limited to people who have not had and recovered from the virus.”
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Yes, and “should be” was initially ambiguous. But that was clarified in our subsequent exchange. I never said those who have recovered should be prohibited from getting the vaccine. The authorities should provide accurate information and encourage the recovered to wait rather than encouraging them to get the vaccine.
Mike M.,
And if pigs had wings….
The fundamental problem is that the authorities have never said that having been infected and recovered confers immunity. They say they don’t know if it does or how long it lasts, which is utterly ridiculous. We have known almost from the beginning that reinfection is rare and is still rare, so it lasts at least a year. That is the definition of immunity. But I see recommendations all the time that people who have recovered from COVID-19 should get vaccinated. At best, they say only one shot of a two shot vaccine might be ok. But, of course, there hasn’t been a double blind clinical study so they can’t say that officially.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/epa-proposes-rules-to-curb-coolant-emissions-from-air-conditioners-and-refrigerators-11620046000?mod=hp_lead_pos11
If your AC is old, you might want to think about getting a new one soon.
DeWitt,
What will happen when your almost-new air conditioner (like mine) leaks refrigerant and there is none available to replace it? Oh yes, you have to throw it away and buy a new one with a more desirable refrigerant. Heck, it will only cost you several thousand dollars for a new one. Same with your car’s AC. Somehow I think there will be some push back on this.
SteveF,
One can only hope. They also spout the usual misleading fact: “…their heat-trapping capacity can be hundreds or thousands of times that of carbon dioxide.” That’s true because the concentrations are so low that absorption is still in the linear range and a small amount significantly increases the atmospheric concentration while the same amount of CO2 only slightly increases its concentration.
China will build more than enough coal power plants this year alone to more than make up for any future reduction in US HCFC emissions.
Another question I can’t answer… Why did it take India so long to get so bad? They have had outbreaks before but they always fizzled. Also, my brother in law is still showing slight signs of recovery.
DeWitt,
As best I can figure, global emissions of R-22 and R134a are in the range of 400,000 tons and 200,000 tons respectively. With the expected “century warming potential” being 1,760 and 1,300 times that of CO2 respectively, the contribution from these refrigerants is about equal to one gigaton of CO2 emissions. Since current global CO2 emissions are about 40 gigatons per year, the two refrigerants represent about 2.5% of the potential warming from current CO2 emissions.
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Eliminating these refrigerants globally won’t make much difference in overall warming….. maybe 0.03C to 0.05C a century from now. Eliminating these in the USA, with the rest of the world continuing to use them, will make even less difference. But it will clearly make some people happy, no matter the cost or benefit.
“The fundamental problem is that the authorities have never said that having been infected and recovered confers immunity.”
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They still routinely pretend that vaccination counts are the only thing that matters for herd immunity. Then they also keep changing their estimates for what the HIT actually is. It’s not that they get new information and adjust accordingly, they just change it depending on what they hope the effects of their public messaging should be. See Fauci here in December:
https://twitter.com/douthatnyt/status/1342178126818893833
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NYT Today: Reaching ‘Herd Immunity’ Is Unlikely in the U.S., Experts Now Believe
Widely circulating coronavirus variants and persistent hesitancy about vaccines will keep the goal out of reach. The virus is here to stay, but vaccinating the most vulnerable may be enough to restore normalcy.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/03/health/covid-herd-immunity-vaccine.html
“Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, the Biden administration’s top adviser on Covid-19, acknowledged the shift in experts’ thinking.
“People were getting confused and thinking you’re never going to get the infections down until you reach this mystical level of herd immunity, whatever that number is,†he said.
“That’s why we stopped using herd immunity in the classic sense,†he added. “I’m saying: Forget that for a second. You vaccinate enough people, the infections are going to go down.—
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What? You can’t really trust people when they are saying things based on what they want the expected response to be instead of just relaying the ‘S’cience, all the while shaming you for not following their ‘S’cience. I guess I’m just too far out on the spectrum to just want the facts, they treat us like we are 5 year olds. It’s disrespectful.
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The new definition of herd immunity is zero infections, or something. Who knows.
“Why did it take India so long to get so bad?”
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Yes. One answer might be a more transmissible variant among many other things. And why won’t India just keep burning until it hits herd immunity? The dynamics of these outbreaks are just not well understood.
India might have been burning for a while, it’s only now people are starting to take notice. They are having elections, so maybe that has something to do with the sudden “interest”.
A liberal journalist does something wildly innovative and actually asks the vaccine hesitant directly why they are hesitant and gets some answers that seem like they come from real people.
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/05/the-people-who-wont-get-the-vaccine/618765/
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“I trust my own mind more than I trust liberal elites‪”
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Ha ha. That probably sums up the problem. The barely contained condescension of the deplorables in fly over country has come home to roost. Now I believe people should get vaccinated of their own free will but for those who have a strong belief in personal liberty the “we liberals need to force vaccinate the moronic cattle” vibe is hard to miss. Every single article I read on vaccine hesitancy brings up Trump, not helpful.
Tom Scharf (Comment #201969): “The dynamics of these outbreaks are just not well understood.”
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An understatement. The dynamics are not understood at all.
After a year of mandatory indoor masks in my county, it is over:
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“Gov. Ron DeSantis said Monday he was issuing an executive order immediately suspending any local pandemic-related restrictions.”
“DeSantis said the executive order he signed Monday applies only to local government-mandated orders, not mask requirements or social distancing policies enforced by businesses.
“In terms of what a supermarket or some of them choose to do, a Disney theme park, this does not deal with that one way or another,†he said. “It’s simply emergency orders and emergency penalties on individual businesses.â€
Mike M.,
I wouldn’t go quite that far. We are reasonably sure that when there are far more susceptibles than infected and the case curve over time is increasing rapidly, then it is reasonable to infer that on average each infected person infects more than one susceptible, i.e. R > 1. And when cases are declining over time then R < 1. But that doesn’t really tell you much. And yet that doesn’t stop Imperial College, IHME and a raft of others from producing quantitative models and claiming the output of these models is both meaningful and government policy should be strongly influenced by it. In reality, the models are, if anything, worse than climate models and are no better than Joe Average’s SWAG.
From the WSJ:
https://www.wsj.com/articles/media-mistrust-wont-inoculate-you-against-misinformation-11620061429?mod=hp_opin_pos_1
The comments are, as usual, full of unsupported assertions, like the intelligence community proved that Trump was a tool of Putin, and tu quoque comparisons to Fox News.
MikeM
These are what gave me the impression you thought people who already had the virus should not be given it:
Mike M. (Comment #201930)
May 1st, 2021 at 6:39 am
This sounds like you think allowing those who had the virus get it is “ridiculousâ€.
Later, in conversation you seemed to think it’s “irresponsible†or “inappropriate†for those who had the virus to get itâ€
Mike M. (Comment #201936)
May 1st, 2021 at 11:52 am
You later switched to just saying you wouldn’t get it. But early on, you sure as heck sounded like you wanted to put roadblocks in the way of those who had the virus from getting it.
I realize you may not have intended to sound like you were saying that, but it read that way to me.
Tom Scharf,
IMO, an operational definition of the Herd Immunity Threshold would be when new cases are decreasing even after all pandemic induced or mandated behaviors have ended. IMO, we have passed that point in the US. However, I seriously doubt that ‘the’ HIT could be calculated in advance, especially since we don’t know the actual number of infections.
A similar operational definition of Herd Immunity would be that the probability of an infected person passing the infection to a susceptible person would be very close to zero. Obviously we’re not there and, IMO, no other country that has a significant population and isn’t an island is there either. One could argue that it could take a long time to get there. OTOH, we don’t actually have to get there to have the pandemic effectively end.
lucia (Comment #201976): “I realize you may not have intended to sound like you were saying that, but it read that way to me.”
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Sadly, we live in a society where “people should …” is often assumed to mean the same as “the government should make people …”.
People should stop assuming that.
MikeM
This is not a “people should” statement. I know it’s in passive voice. But the entity that “decided” happens to be the government. And the decision was to allow those who already got the virus to have vaccine on the same basis as those who had not been infected.
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The alternate decision would have been for the government to not allow them to get the vaccine.
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Sorry, but I’m not merely “assuming” who entity making the decision about who was elegible to get the vaccine. That entity was the government.
DeWitt
No. And we don’t have all sort of social distancing or other protocols in place for gajillions of other communicable diseases like TB, Flu, Measles and so on.
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There is evidence the rules are going away at this point. Everyone at the grocery store is still wearing masks. Everyone in the dance party was too. I bet if I went to the near by bar, I’d see major lapses!
Lucia, Mike M,
The Supreme Court would declare the issue moot. Nobody is going to be kept from getting a vaccination based on their history of infection…. at least not in the States.
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Mike M,
I do hope you get vaccinated soon. It would be sad for you to become very sick, or die, with covid. It is inevitable that those around you will gradually stop paying attention to all the rules. Better that you are immunized sooner rather than later.
Wrt my post above:
The lead story on tonight’s NBC Nightly News had the US’s most trusted newsreader, Lester Holt, saying that experts say that the US may never reach herd immunity because infection may only provide some immunity [my emphasis].
*sigh*
And, of course, there had to be a sound bite from Fauci.
I read a lot of fantasy and science fiction. In fantasy the Fae (the Fair Folk, Elves, Tuatha De Danann, etc.) are said to never lie. Yet they are masters of misleading with the absolute truth and a bargain with them can be very risky. The statement above that : “infection may only provide some immunity” is worthy of the Fae.
One calls them Fair Folk regardless of what they actually look like because you don’t want to be on their bad side, or in their debt. Which is why you never say ‘thank you’ to one of them as that could imply you owe them a debt. It’s also dangerous to have a Fae owe you something too. If you should die, they don’t owe you any more.
It’s like they are all reading from the robot script the Ministry of Truth handed out today. Who are the HIT Illuminati? Can we at least know what definition they are using? A falsifiable claim?
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It’s so tiring. So what happened in Israel and the UK is not herd immunity? Two weeks ago the BBC said “For Covid the estimated threshold for herd immunity is at least 65%-70%.”
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Covid: ‘Israel may be reaching herd immunity’
https://www.bbc.com/news/health-56722186
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“That works out as roughly 68% of the (Israeli) population who are likely to have antibodies in their blood which can fight off the virus.
Prof Eyal Leshem, a director at Israel’s largest hospital, the Sheba Medical Center, said herd immunity was the “only explanation” for the fact that cases continued to fall even as more restrictions were lifted.
“There is a continuous decline despite returning to near normalcy,” he said.”
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What is wrong with the US media? Doom and gloom 24/7. A recent study on coverage:
https://www.wbur.org/hereandnow/2021/04/05/news-media-negative-coronavirus
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“They found news coverage of the pandemic in the U.S. was “shockingly negative†and bleaker than in international news outlets or scientific journals, Sacerdote says.
The study revealed nearly 90% of articles from major U.S. news organizations were negative compared to just 50% to 60% from major international media sources, he says.”
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They earn their badge of distrust every day it seems.
DeWitt,
Robert Jordan’s Aes Sedai were like that.
Another example of why I have lost faith in the future of the United States of America. The political gap is so wide the the two sides are unable to talk to each other. … Todays example “Herd Immunity”… A simple jargon phrase in epidemiology has become political dynamite. One side refuses to talk about it and the other side wants to talk about nothing else. Some more examples: “Moslem Terrorist”, “Border Crisis”, “Russia”, “The N Word”, Trump’s Wall”. Today’s times will be a chapter in a future book: The Rise and Fall of the American Empire.
2.5M vaccination doses / day.
50K cases (the lowest in about 7 months)
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That’s a 25:1 ratio of full vaccinations to reported cases. The race is still being won handily.
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83% of seniors in the US have had at least one dose.
mark bofill,
Yes. I thought about mentioning them too, but decided that was overkill. One important point was that the Aes Sedai said only what they believed to be true.
Speaking of book series that have gone on longer than anyone expected, I’m still hoping that George R. R. Martin will finish his Song of Ice and Fire series. Maybe book 6, The Winds of Winter, will actually be published this year.
Tom Scharf,
I am so tired of the endless parroting of 65-70% as the HIT. Let’s look at Israel. If we assume that the total number of cases is proportional to the confirmed cases, then the peak case rate corresponds to the HIT. That happened on January 14, 2021 or maybe January 11 since it’s a seven day trailing average, but let’s use January 14.
The number of confirmed cases on that date was 529,814. The number of confirmed cases on May 3, 2021 with the new case rate less than 1% of the January 14 peak was 838,621. The total cases on January 14 are 63% of the total cases. You would have to assume that nearly 100% of the Israeli population had been infected by May 3 and completely discount vaccination, since most vaccinations happened after January 14, to have those numbers be consistent with an HIT of 65-70%. Or at least that’s what it seems to me.
More likely to me is that the HIT is closer to 40% than 70%. IIRC, the 65-70% number comes from a simple SEIR model with an Ro = 3 (HIT = 1-1/Ro). The real world behavior is anything but simple.
DeWitt
Would that mean we could replace the story in the final season of The Game of Thrones with something remotely satisfying?
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It seemed to me they knew they needed to end it because they were running out of books. But then they wrapped up in a way that was totally incoherent. If you have prophesies from day one running through out the book, and tons of people were motivated and acted on it, and the book had magic, wights and so on, the prophesy should come true. It only needs to come true in some way, the way could be very surprising, but it should come true.
Cases in Israel dropped slightly from Jan 15 to Feb. 6 (using the Financial Times charts). They then dropped by a factor of two over the next two weeks, corresponding roughly to (R-1)=-0.35. Then leveled off until March 8, R = 1. Given a two week lag, that would seem to be minimally affected by vaccination.
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New cases then started to drop exponentially from 40/100K on March 8 to 4.6/100K on March 30; (R-1)=-0.7. Impressive. But before we attribute that to vaccination, note that in October new cases dropped a factor of 8 in 24 days, (R-1)=-0.6. Then the rate of decline slowed, with cases reaching 0.8 on May 1, corresponding to (R-1)=-0.4 in April. R should be increasing, not decreasing.
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Israeli deaths seem to have dropped more steadily, but with more noise, from over 60/day in late January to 4/day on April 23 and now about 2/day. That gives (R-1)=-0.2.
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Frankly, I see no evidence for or against the effect of vaccination in that. Looks to me like the Israeli data defy simple explanation.
DeWitt,
Could be near 40%, or even lower. I think all press coverage (and all declarations by the CDC) simply ignore very strong evidence that some people simply don’t become infected, even if for certain exposed. A low HIT is perfectly consistent with a significant fraction of the population being resistant to infection (or at least very unlikely to spread the virus to others) before the pandemic started.
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The proof is everywhere: Most children under the age of 15 have a low chance of catching the virus, and even if infected, a low chance of spreading the virus to others. Why would the people at the CDC not wonder if the widespread natural resistance so clearly evident in children might also be present in a significant portion of the adult population? I have not a clue. But I am reasonably certain that a significant fraction of the adult population is just not going to catch the covid-19 virus under normal exposure conditions.
Michael Kinsley said a gaffe in politics is when a politician accidentally speaks the truth.
Biden in his state of the union departed from the published speech delivered beforehand to the media and said he rejoined the Paris Accords because the US is only 15% of emissions, so anything the US did wouldn’t matter for global warming.
DeWitt,
Yeah. We’ve probably achieved HIT, at least the value contingent on current personal behavior. But that behavior is still somewhat circumscribed compared to a January 2020. Illinois is approaching 50% with at least 1 dose. There’s strong evidence that’s “enough” at least to avoid having detectable symptoms and certainly to avoid dieing. Cases have dropped precipitously which suggests, but does not prove, we’ve reached HIT. That the big drop happened when vaccines were getting put in arms and it has not happened in places where the have not been distributing vaccines is consistent with vaccines reducing both illness and transmission.
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So honestly, it looks like we have this licked for now. Yeah, we haven’t eradicated it like smallpox, but really, I never expected that to happen in a year. It probably won’t happen in our lifetime because lots of animals can carry this. But this has become controllable with vaccination.
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It would be nice to persuade “everyone” to get the vaccine. It’s not going to happen. No amount of explanations of HIT or Herd Immunity are going to get the truly reluctant to get it. We are going to see the freshly eligible getting it for a month or so. Then it’s going to be a trickle. (There will be a burst when there’s authorization for kids.)
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Some will only get it because their universities or employers require it. (That’s happening now.) Some will get it because they want to travel. Even if the US doesn’t require vaccination, some other countries will. You want to go there, you get vaccinated.
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Still even with some pressure, I doubt we’ll get better than 80% vaccinated. With little illness circulating, the reluctant won’t have much motivation to schedule their vaccine. Some will create fake documents and until we have some sort of method of verifying, that will do. (I don’t see any efforts to come up with unforgeable methods of proving vaccinations. The cards would be trivial to forge.)
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Some of the elderly reluctant will die. (Those entering assisted living or any elderly community will likely be forced to get a vaccine before being admitted. And oddly, children arranging for caretakers of the elderly who refuse to be vaccinated will likely insist caretakers and house keepers getting vaccinated!)
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At this point, and until new cases/week drop to 1% of the peak rate, I wouldn’t mind requiring vaccination for anyone who enters the US and applies for asylum or for anyone applying for and granted a visa of any sort. I’m sure there will be countries that do that (and more). As a practical matter, they can’t immediately because they don’t have enough vaccine. But that’s only a matter of time. (If some countries do this I’m sure someone will figure out a way to prove vaccination status in a way that can’t be easily counterfeited.)
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In the end, I don’t think it matters if we know the HIT threshold or the threshold to get full herd immunity. It’s not a factoid that motivates the skeptics to get vaccinated. In a year or two well know whether the rate was enough to largely eliminate the disease. We know what we’ve done is already enough to open lots of stuff up– though we are creeping along on that opening.
Mike M,
Yes, the case and death trends everywhere are complicated and defy explanation with any single cause: government rules, personal behavior, weather, population density, rising immunity from people who have recovered from infections, and, yes, vaccinations, all can contribute to the case evolution. But the data supporting efficacy of vaccines is overwhelming: multiple double blind controlled studies show a drop in infections of up to 95%. Do you doubt those studies prove the vaccines work? If so, then I doubt there will ever be data which will convince you the vaccines work. That is OK with me, but it sounds a bit like you are trying to justify not getting vaccinated. And unless you are younger than I suspect, I think that is a mistake.
Good news, everyone! “Anyone making less than 400k per year will not pay a single penny in taxes.” – Biden
Lucia,
“We know what we’ve done is already enough to open lots of stuff up– though we are creeping along on that opening.”
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And that creeping has both economic and personal costs. I agree that there will likely be a low background level of infection among those who refuse to get vaccinated, so some level of deaths which could have been easily avoided. The lifting of restrictions and full opening of schools will likely be long delayed due to a significant population of unvaccinated individuals…. the Whitmers, Cuomos, and other idiots in charge of individual states will drag out the social torture almost indefinitely so long as there are some continuing covid deaths….. and that is inevitable.
DaveJR,
He has Alzheimer’s. Accuracy in both language and numbers go first. He is always going to ‘mis-speak’; it will get worse. So we will see ever less of this president until his handlers figure it is time for Harris to take over.
Scott Adams: “Unlike normal viruses, I’m thinking that herd immunity for COVID-19 probably means vaccinating most people over 70 and anyone who is obese. That should get most of the superspreaders. Add more cheap-rapid testing and we’re in good shape.” https://twitter.com/ScottAdamsSays/status/1389554159133757455?s=20
As a vaccine hesitant person, I feel the need to rant.
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These vaccines are experimental. The testing protocols have not been completed. They have not received FDA approval. They use techniques not previously employed. They are for a unique disease that is not well understood. They are for a type of virus for which vaccines in animals have a checkered history. We have no data on long term safety and efficacy. A degree of caution is warranted.
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Our public health authorities, led by the CDC and FDA, have thrown caution to the wind. That is a cause for concern.
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It is entirely fitting that there be an EUA for vaccinating those at high risk. It is reasonable to allow others to make their own decisions, provided they are properly informed. But that is not what is being done.
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It makes no sense for those who have recovered to get an experimental vaccine. But the authorities are not telling people that. Instead, they are encouraging such people to get vaccinated. That is irresponsible.
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It is perfectly reasonable for those at low risk to choose to not get the vaccine. The messaging is contrary to that.
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It is outrageous that employers are coercing employees into getting an experimental medical procedure. That ought to be illegal. But our public health authorities are fine with that. The same goes for colleges requiring the vaccine of their students, who are at near zero risk. That the CDC and FDA are not speaking out against that is totally irresponsible.
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There is even pressure to vaccinate groups, such as children and pregnant women, for whom the vaccine has not been tested. The authorities ought to be speaking out against that. Instead, they make ambiguous statements. Totally irresponsible.
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So to get vaccinated, I must place my trust in people who have proven themselves to be undeserving of trust.
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As a result, I am hesitant.
Mike M – “It is perfectly reasonable for those at low risk to choose to not get the vaccine. The messaging is contrary to that.”
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Yes, but as Cuomo will tell you, if, as a young person, you don’t get vaccinated, you may end up killing Granny, and he certainly has experience to back up that claim, but apparently did nothing wrong, that required a huge coverup to pretend didn’t happen, so I guess killing Granny is both a big deal and no problem. Schrodinger is confused at this point.
“I am hesitant”
Mike M,
That’s slightly understating it, but for what it’s worth, so am I.
Andrew
MikeM,
The urgency of the pandemic did force the FDA to enact emergency authorization (that is, to not follow their normal multi-year approval process). I would argue that to not issue that emergency approval would have been ethically reprehensible, and that their 20+ day delay in issuing the emergency approvals was purely politically motivated, and designed to ensure Trump would not be re-elected. Bureaucrats are very far from morally upstanding, and I would never argue otherwise. But the study data was overwhelmingly positive.
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At this point, there have been well over 100 million people vaccinated in the states, orders of magnitude more than any ‘normal’ approval would involve, and there is zero evidence of significant harm. As Obiwan said: “You have do do what you think is right, of course.” I hope you don’t contract the virus, but that you recognize the risk you are taking.
DeWitt,
I’ll read Winds of Winter when and if it comes out, just because (sort of like watching Disney’s Star Wars), but I’m over it. Brandon Sanderson, Scott Lynch, and Leigh Bardugo are my George R R Martin replacements these days.
mark bofill,
That’s like how I felt about the last seven or eight books in Jordan’s Wheel of Time. My daughter had more sense and quit after book 5. At least Martin doesn’t seem to pad with extended unnecessarily detailed descriptions the way Jordan did.
I highly recommend Glen Cook’s Black Company books. That series is complete. And for something completely different, you could try P.C.Hodgell’s Kencyrath books, starting with God Stalk. That series isn’t complete.
Re: Wheel of Time – same.
Thanks for the recommendations! I’ll check them out.
So .. Is Winter Still Coming? It was when I stopped reading Game of Thrones, ha ha. My feeble old mind just can’t keep up with 11,000 parallel storylines. A cast of thousands just doesn’t work for me anymore.
MikeM
I don’t know why you think people are not “properly†informed. I think I was properly informed. I received copious information and I read the newspaper. I talk to people.
It makes no sense to you. But while it is highly probable they have immunity there is a slight chance they don’t. You may judge the cost benefit to high; others judge it’s low enough. That doesn’t mean it makes no sense. It’s just not what you advise.
I disagree requiring vaccines should be illegal. I believe in at will employment. I don’t make a special exception for this. There are plenty of costs to employers who might need to shut down, disinfect or track those who get sick. One of the employers who I read was requiring vaccines was a meat processor. Meat processors have lots of costs and employee skills aren’t deep. It makes perfect sense to give those employers the freedom to impose conditions on employment.
Some other employers won’t impose these conditions. But I think this should be up to the employer. Their decision will be based on many things including likelihood of closedowns, difficulty in protecting employees, fungibility of skills and their political preferences. But I think employers should be allowed to decide. Not you or the government. I’m libertarian in this regard.
There’s no pressure to do vaccinate children until tests are submitted to the FDA and an emergency authorization is complete. (I’m not sure about pregnant women.)
You are free to be hesitant. But many of your statements are too strong. You appear elevating your policy preferences above those of others. That’s fine. But they are merely policy preferences and some things you say strike me as just flat out wrong. (e.g. the notion people aren’t properly informed.)
Tom,
I tried to read one of the books when the show came out. I liked the show better!
But I think someone should just decree the final season was a bad dream and re-write it!
I just read Hobbit / Lord Of The Rings. I was unaware that series was started in the 1930’s. It has aged well. I generally don’t do the fantasy genre as much, I’m much more sci-fi, but there have been some good fantasy books I have stumbled across. I like my mysticism to have at least a hand waving basis in science. I have read a few of Brandon Sanderson as well, that dude has no problem with writer’s block, ha ha. A new book out today by Mike Weir (author of the The Martian). I’d imagine a “May the 4th” release was intentional.
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Amazon paid like 250M for the rights to LOTR, and are spending a huge sum in an upcoming series. 450M for the 1st season. There are some things that probably shouldn’t be remade, this might be one of them.
Lucia,
“I believe in at will employment. I don’t make a special exception for this.”
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The only exception I can think of is employees working under a collective bargaining agreement; employers may not like it, but they can’t impose requirements that are not in the agreement.
If one is more mentally stressed out from putting an experimental and new vaccine based on new biotech in their body, then don’t get vaccinated. If the unknown unknowns of a vaccine are greater than the fear of the virus then do what you think is right. I overestimate the danger of the virus emotionally even when my mind tells me different, so I was first in line for vaccination. My covid anxiety is down by a magnitude since I completed vaccination. I can understand people being on the other end.
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I’d have to agree that nobody should be forced by the government or a private entity to get a vaccine that is only under an EUA. That is a good point. Colleges requiring vaccinations for a low risk population while healthcare workers at old folks homes are not required makes no sense at all.
There needs to be lines for employment. Obese people not allowed, too much insurance costs! Profess the correct political ideology before entering! Show me your voting record at the interview! It’s one thing when you apply for a job at the DNC, it’s another when it’s Coca-Cola. It’s my understanding that HR looks at people’s social media accounts which I find invasive.
https://www.businessnewsdaily.com/2377-social-media-hiring.html
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This is equally invasive: “About half of employers – 47% – said they wouldn’t call a person for an interview if they can’t find them online. More than one-quarter of employers say it’s because they like to gather more information before calling a candidate, and 20% say it’s because they expect candidates to have an online presence.”
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I just believe in a pretty hard line for work life / social life separation. It’s really none of their business what I do at home, and the bar needs to be rather high for them to look in there IMO. In my time they were talking about drug screening all employees for marijuana use. I found their justifications for that rather unconvincing.
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The same people who complain about systemic bias also fully support “holistic” hiring processes which is exactly where that bias creeps in.
Tom,
Guess it depends on the line of work. Security folks really dislike engineers having an online presence in my neck of the woods. It’s usually a vulnerability in their eyes.
I went through a rather comprehensive security background check for one of my jobs, it was very invasive. There was justification for that one. Good thing I didn’t have a Twitter account back then.
I’ve been treading water for several years now at contracts that don’t require a security clearance since having been denied clearance some years back. I figure in another two or three years enough time will have passed that it won’t be an issue anymore. Nothing horrific, just that I suck at paperwork and tracking down and reporting the exact details of my life, my neighbors, credit, whereabouts, and so on seven to ten years prior to any given application. But I suspect paperwork errors look like guilty contractors trying to hide their untrustworthiness to the security guys!
https://nypost.com/2021/05/04/coca-cola-pauses-diversity-plan-after-chief-lawyer-resigns/
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Coca-Cola pauses aggressive diversity plan after chief lawyer resigns
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“Some questioned whether Gayton’s policies violated Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which says employers can’t treat people differently based on their race.”
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“Monica is fully committed to the notions of equity and diversity in the legal profession, and we fully expect she will take the time necessary to thoughtfully review any plans going forward.â€
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“Under the plan, any law firm seeking to do business with the company was required to commit that at least 30 percent of billed time would be from “diverse attorneys,†and at least half of that time would be from black attorneys.”
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In February, employees were urged to be “less white†as part of the company’s alleged diversity training. The “Confronting Racism†course in question was offered by LinkedIn Education and allegedly utilized by the soft-drink titan.
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“In the U.S. and other Western nations, white people are socialized to feel that they are inherently superior because they are white,â€
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Another slide suggests “try to be less white†with tips including “be less oppressive,†“listen,†“believe†and “break with white solidarity.â€
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Democrats projecting again.
SteveF,
Yes. If there is a union, that changes things. In which case, the employer would need to negotiate the requirement to get vaccinated with the union. But that’s not the same as making it illegal.
DaveJR,
Here is the best part: even though he resigned as chief corporate lawyer, “He signed a new contract to serve as a consultant to Coca-Cola CEO James Quincey. In that position, he’ll be making a hefty $12 million over the next year. That included a $4 million sign-on fee and a monthly consulting fee of $666,666, according to an April 21 securities filing.”
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Since when do you get a signing bonus of $4 million and $8 million in salary when you have been forced out of your job? Coca Cola has lost its way.
Tom Scharf,
To some extent, this tells you who has power to make rules. At universities it’s faculty and staff many of whom are older. Students have little. Students are unlikely to collectively object, band together and disrupt university over this. So as long as it’s legal, the rule will stick.
I don’t know what’s going to happen at old folks homes. If they have a union, they may not require employees to get vaccinated. But in many old folks homes, the old folks are pretty powerless. So they’ll mostly get vaccinated, but the employees might be allowed to decline.
I was getting ready to tutor so rushed off before adding:
The context of universities imposing vaccines while old folks homes makes sense if you recognize that old folks homes don’t get to decide for universities or vice versa. The University may very well think it’s nuts the old folks home allows unvaccinated employees. But the University doesn’t get to decide for those who run and operate the old folks home. The old folks home likewise doesn’t get to decide for the University.
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It would be nuts if a government made all the rules and imposed them in this particular way. But nothing says person (or company) A isn’t allowed to be overly cautious merely because person or company B throws caution to the wind and may even be reckless.
I think “emergency use authorization” makes things different. This is forcing people to put an “untested” product into their bodies. They can of course refuse and lose their job or their place at a university. I would expect this requirement to get tested legally and the universities to lose the case on EUA grounds, but I’m no legal expert. A public university is basically the government.
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I think once it is formally approved then that changes things, although it should place it in line with other vaccination requirements at public schools. I’m not sure what that status is for public universities.
The mask requirement signs were gone at my golf course today, and employees and patrons were maskless. I was the only one with a mask, just running on covid autopilot.
The pendulum may have started to swing the other way: https://nicholaswade.medium.com/origin-of-covid-following-the-clues-6f03564c038
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A long read about why lab escape of covid-19 is the most plausible explanation of how the pandemic started. The Chinese Comunist Party has block all outside access to lab records at the Wuhan virology lab. A shocking revelation: Three researchers from the same lab were hospitalized with covid-like symptoms in late September 2019…. they were working on “gain of function” experiments, where coronaviruses with enhanced infectivity of human cells were being developed.
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The article’s author is no wild-eyed conspiracy theorist, and carefully lays out multiple lines of evidence supporting escape from a lab.
SteveF,
From your link:
So there is reason to believe that if the lab escape hypothesis correct, then Dr. Fauci bears significant responsibility. Maybe we should start referring to the Wuhan Institute of Virology as The Umbrella Corporation of Resident Evil video game and movie fame.
From SteveF’s link:
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“a crossroads of GOF research concerns; the potential to prepare for and mitigate future outbreaks must be weighed against the risk of creating more dangerous pathogens. In developing policies moving forward, it is important to consider the value of the data generated by these studies and whether these types of chimeric virus studies warrant further investigation versus the inherent risks involved.â€
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“That statement was made in 2015. From the hindsight of 2021, one can say that the value of gain-of-function studies in preventing the SARS2 epidemic was zero. The risk was catastrophic, if indeed the SARS2 virus was generated in a gain-of-function experiment.”
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That’s an understatement. The real proof is in tracking the genetic changes in the virus. Just like they can track the genealogy of the new variants, they can also do that backwards so it should be possible to find “the missing link” to either a lab or natural source. That they haven’t found a natural source and China is being rather closed about it is suspicious, but not enough for anything but speculation. The scientific and evidence free overstatements that is wasn’t derived from a lab were always hand waves it seemed, but “science” public pronouncements like that are common today. These are really just groups of activists trying to setup an initial bias.
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Now it’s interesting that this guy who claims he has worked for Nature and the NYT published this on Medium, he no doubt shopped this story and it appears nobody wanted to touch it. I have no idea why the US media seems out to protect China here, it’s either TDS since he put of this theory, or a knee jerk need to protect “science” and academia.
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Suffice it to say that if this was a lab accident then there will be hell to pay in science and academia which is why they may be unwilling to self investigate with much gusto (cops investigating cops). Personally I think the outbreak location is highly suspicious, but SARS viruses have naturally leaped to humans before.
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My guess is China may not even know the answer, but it also may desperately * not want to know the answer * either. If the Chinese authorities even suspect it might be a lab accident, we will probably never know the origin. It’s entirely possible in China to cover this type of thing up, not so easy in the US.
If there is prioritization for getting vaccines, pregnant women are generally able to jump line.
DeWitt,
I suspect Fauci is too far removed from such things to even be aware of them in anything but a very general way. His job is to parrot Democrat talking points. In any case, I think Congress will ultimately get involved and stop all funding of research than makes viruses more capable of infecting humans. (This will probably have to wait for Republican to gain control of at least one house of Congress.)
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It strikes me as about as crazy as virus research could possibly be. If it turns out the source was the Wuhan research lab, then there will be a lot of very bad consequences for those involved, as well as the entire field of virology.
Pre-pandemic story in nature about this lab.
Inside the Chinese lab poised to study world’s most dangerous pathogens
https://www.nature.com/news/inside-the-chinese-lab-poised-to-study-world-s-most-dangerous-pathogens-1.21487
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“Editors’ note, January 2020: Many stories have promoted an unverified theory that the Wuhan lab discussed in this article played a role in the coronavirus outbreak that began in December 2019. Nature knows of no evidence that this is true; scientists believe the most likely source of the coronavirus to be an animal market.”
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“But worries surround the Chinese lab, too. The SARS virus has escaped from high-level containment facilities in Beijing multiple times, notes Richard Ebright, a molecular biologist at Rutgers University in Piscataway, New Jersey. Tim Trevan, founder of CHROME Biosafety and Biosecurity Consulting in Damascus, Maryland, says that an open culture is important to keeping BSL-4 labs safe, and he questions how easy this will be in China, where society emphasizes hierarchy. “Diversity of viewpoint, flat structures where everyone feels free to speak up and openness of information are important,†he says.”
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Nature knows of no evidence that this is untrue also.
Tom Scharf,
“My guess is China may not even know the answer, but it also may desperately * not want to know the answer * either.”
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Sure, but that the records of the Wuhan lab are NOT being made available tells me they may already know the answer…. the lab was making a dangerous coronavirus variant using inadequate containment and it got out when people working in the lab got infected. If the research records actually showed the lab research was unrelated to the pandemic, I am sure the CCP would give the records to anyone who asked.
The rapid development of m-RNA vaccines (they were fully developed within 10 weeks of having the virus RNA sequence) means that future pandemics should be more quickly controlled. The manufacturing capacity now exists to turn out many millions of doses of m-RNA vaccine in a very short time. Of course, quickly having a vaccine to control a future pandemic will depend on the numskulls at the FDA not getting in the way.
SpaceX SN15 Flight Test today … in theory. They have supposedly a better landing system on this one. SpaceX won the contract for lunar landing. I guess building spaceships like Wallace and Gromit impresses NASA.
There is no proof that the Wuhan virus escaped from a lab, but there is certainly evidence that it did. It started out well adopted to humans. There were three sick lab workers in September 2019. The virus has a furin cleavage site. That site uses codons that are far more likely to have been inserted in a lab than in a bat. There is no good analog for the virus in nature.
But there is absolutely no evidence to support it having jumped from animals.
More real world data that the vaccines are working as expected.
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Fully Vaccinated Adults 65 and Older Are 94% Less Likely to Be Hospitalized with COVID-19
https://www.cdc.gov/media/releases/2021/p0428-vaccinated-adults-less-hospitalized.html
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“Both mRNA COVID-19 vaccines (Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna) authorized and recommended in the United States protect against COVID-19-related hospitalization among adults 65 years and older, according to a new CDC assessment that finds fully vaccinated adults 65 years and older were 94% less likely to be hospitalized with COVID-19 than people of the same age who were not vaccinated. People 65 and older who were partially vaccinated were 64% less likely to be hospitalized with COVID-19 than people who were not vaccinated. “
SpaceX finally has a Starship prototype still standing after a test flight. It’s a good thing their landing pad wasn’t 10 feet smaller.
Tom Scharf,
“Fully Vaccinated Adults 65 and Older Are 94% Less Likely to Be Hospitalized with COVID-19”
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Shocking, absolutely shocking I say.
And, of course, the fully vaccinated adults should be ~95% less likely to get COVID-19 in the first place. So that should mean that fully vaccinated adults are actually 99+% less likely to be hospitalized than people who haven’t been vaccinated.
DeWitt,
The CDC press release is worded in a way which makes it impossible to determine the true protection offered by the of the vaccine. They provide no link to the actual study data, so you are stuck with their crazy wording. I can’t tell if the effectiveness is actually 94% or 99%. The Israeli study indicated re-infection of those who recover is very rare, so we might hope vaccination is comparable in efficacy.
I’m not sure if this is of interest…. As of last night my wife’s brother is breathing on his own with ox support but without the ventilator. He is slowly coming out of the medically induced coma and allowed one visitor a day. Maybe he will be a Covid survivor, but it is too soon to tell.
That sounds promising, Russell. Is he still intubated? How much oxygen is he on?
Russell,
That is good news. I hope he continues to improve.
BTW, my experience is that older people who have been under anesthesia can take some time to return to normal mental function.
SteveF,DaveJR. Communication is still one-way so we don’t have details but we understand that he went from ventilator to a nose cannula with no tracheotomy. Waking up has been going on for about three days now. Still cannot talk.
Russell,
FWIW, I’m rooting for your brother in law as well. I hope you continue to keep us posted.
They wouldn’t take him off the vent if he wasn’t conscious and obeying instructions. They’d have been waking him up and setting the vent to provide just support to test how he can manage breathing on his own. I guess he passed. That he’s extubated and on a nasal cannula looks very promising. Hope it stays that way.
Andrew Cuomo has declared that at stadiums there will be a vaccinated section with no social distancing required, and an unvaccinated section with social distancing. Her has not yet decided whether infected from nursing homes will be placed in the unvaccinated section.
MikeN,
Cuomo confirms, yet again, that he is an idiot.
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1) The yellow CDC card can be forged with about 10 minutes effort.
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2) Having had covid-19 and recovering is likely at least as protective as vaccination.
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I have a better idea: tell New Yorkers a date when mask wearing will no longer be required anywhere, and suggest those who are not yet vaccinated either 1) get vaccinated or 2) run the risk of infection if they don’t want to get vaccinated.
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Much simpler, and gives people agency instead of mindless nanny-state controls.
Mayor Muriel Bowser of DC has banned dancing at weddings and elsewhere.
MikeN,
No dancing at weddings will certainly be very popular. In fact, it may be so popular that more weddings end up being held outside Washington DC.
Another study from Israel, where hospital workers who were vaccinated were compared to their co-workers who were not vaccinated. All were routinely tested for covid infection, even absent symptomatic illness. The rate of symptomatic illness was reduced 97% for the vaccinated group compared to the unvaccinated group. In addition:
Among the vaccinated, the ratio of symptomatic to asymptomatic cases was 1:1 (half of confirmed infections asymptomatic). Among the unvaccinated that ratio was 2.77:1. So being unvaccinated made 73% of the infections symptomatic, versus only 50% among the vaccinated. 15% of all unvacinnated workers became infected.
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The study does not address the question of infectivity of asymptomatic cases.
Mark bofill. Thank you will do.
Off topic but…. For those thase following the 2021 Brood X cicada event…. an app to map the progress. Users take a picture and it posts on a US map. There are already some pictures from numerous locations. https://apps.apple.com/us/app/cicada-safari/id1446471492
SteveF,
Well, yes. Your body has to clear the virus from your system to recover from the infection. But that capability is going to go away quickly or is significantly less effective than a vaccine? Any so-called expert who says this is clearly incompetent or lying and should, in a rational world, be ignored from that time on. And we knew this before we had lots and lots of data on reinfections.
But then we have a lot of virologists that insist that SARS-CoV-2 could not possibly have escaped from the Wuhan Institute of Virology in spite of, unlike SARS and MERS, still having found no evidence that it jumped to humans from a (wild) animal host (other than humanized mice, ferrets or cell cultures at the WIV). In fact, calling it the Wuhan virus is making more and more sense.
SteveF
They all got two, right? It’s hard to untangle the effect of the first vaccine relative to the effect of time.
This is a US one
The 79% rose to 90% for the second dose.
Here’s another one from the latime article
It looks like the also have yoru quote on asymptomatic infections.
https://www.latimes.com/science/story/2021-05-06/covid-19-vaccines-prevent-coronavirus-infections-studies-say?_amp=true
lucia,
Whatever is true for vaccinated people should be even more true for people who have recovered from an infection. Of course, there is no mention of that possibility, if they even bothered to look for it.
Lucia,
“They all got two, right?”
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It was a continuing study, with vaccinations happening during the study. I imagine the people who accepted the vaccination ultimately all got two doses, but during the study there was a 3 to 4 week period between doses…. which I guess gives them enough data to estimate the influence of a single dose. BTW, the 36% reduction in risk they were describing was the chance of asymptomatic illness relative to unvaccinated coworkers, not the reduction in overall risk of infection. I did not see an estimate for the reduction in risk of symptomatic illness for one dose.
SteveF
I think this metions reduction of risk of symptomatic infection after 1 shot
Partially vaccinated is generally 1 shot of the 2 shot series.
Lucia,
You read more carefully than I did.
So 89% reduction in risk of symptomatic illness with one dose, and 36% reduction in risk of asymptomatic illness with one dose.
Yeah. It looks like if you get 1 shot of the 2 shot vaccines you will be just fine. But you might have an asymptomatic infection which means you may infect someone. It’s still not clear whether the asymptomatic can infect others or if they do, they may be less contagious. But, of course, you’re mostly a risk to the unvaccinated. We are approaching a period where most unvaccinated adults are electing not to be vaccinated. The majority of them is because they don’t want to not because they have any specific physical reason.
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That still leaves babies, kids and young people. But even many of them will likely get vaccinated in the next 6 months.
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In other and similar news, the vaccines seems to control variants fairly well. So with regard to this pandemic: in the US and UK, the fat lady is singing. In many other countries, the fat lady is just arriving. But we know her brilliant aria will be delivered.
Lucia,
The 7-day trailing average of covid deaths is now just above where it was in early July of last year…. I expect in a week or two it will drop to the level it was in early march of last year, at the beginning of the pandemic. It seems very unlikely there could be another significant surge in deaths, because over 75% of the most vulnerable have been fully vaccinated…. and looks like ultimately 80% in that group, and because in most places it looks like the population is well past the applicable HIT. But unfortunately, deaths are not going to approach zero for a long time, if ever… too many, and especially too many of those at risk, have refused the vaccines for that to happen.
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So while most Republican governors will lift restrictions soon, there will be a lot of blue-state governors kicking and screaming to maintain draconian restrictions indefinitely…. even when nearly all of those contracting covid and dying from covid do so because they made a personal choice to put themselves at risk. It is yet another example of utterly opposing views about the proper role and scope of government.
Walk in vaccinations are available in DuPage county now. The county recommends registering to avoid a wait, but you can just walk in. https://www.dupagehealth.org/688/COVID-19-Vaccination-Clinic-DuPage-Count
I saw Walmart with a board for walk-in vaccinations in Virginia.
Steve,
In Illinois our 7 day average is below the level this week two years ago. We are near where it was in early April last year.
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All the bad-stars would have to align for deaths to start rising again. I mean, hypothetically a killer mutant strain that totally escapes the vaccine is not impossible. But it looks like the ones we’ve seen aren’t escaping. At worst some vaccines might be slightly less effective but mostly the unvaccinated are getting the disease.
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The Wall Street Journal ran an oped by someone who suggested that Biden should recommend mask mandates be dropped by Memorial Day. Among other things no mask mandates is more likely to motivate the vaccine skeptics than yes mask mandates. I know none of the skeptics would say or admit that the possibility masks worn by others provide then partial protection when unvaccinnated. That’s true for at least some of the skeptics, but I bet it’s not universally true. At least some might suddenly notice other aren’t masked and so, perhaps, their own risk is higher.
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(As a side note, I also saw a graph showing the average new case rate in the 10 states with the highest vaccination rate and the 10 lowest. The biggest % drops was in the vaccinated state. The lowest absolute numbers were in the least vaccinated states. Jim and I discussed it and we both suspect that higher absolute vaccination rates are likely at least partly motivated by knowledge that case rates are high where you hang out. Many people will reason that if “no one” is getting sick in their State, then perhaps the risks of the vaccine outweigh the risk of the disease. I think they are still wrong, but it is true that if ‘no one’ is getting the disease near you, your chance of being exposed is small. )
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In any case, no matter the motivations of the vaccine reluctants or refusniks, there’s really very little point to any government imposed mask mandate at this point. They are a nuisance and the vulnerable who want to be protected now are protected. The young aren’t vaccinated, but at least statistically, their risk is small. They don’t want to wear masks either.
MikeN,
Yesterday I walked past a table set up for giving covid vaccinations at a Publix supermarket (they are offering either J&J or Moderna vaccines; you can choose). You need to schedule an appointment because they have only a few chairs for those waiting. But nobody was waiting and nobody came in during the time I was there (20 minutes?). The lady giving the vaccinations was reading her smartphone.
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The vaccinations are readily available and cost nothing, but lots of people are not getting them.
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My county (155,000 souls) has 20 confirmed cases per day (7 day trailing average). If you estimate there are 10 contagious people walking about in the county for each confirmed case, that means about 200 contagious out of 155,000….. 1 person in 775 (and probably less!) is contagious. The NY Times still rates the risk of infection in Martin county as “extremely high”. The daily number of confirmed cases implies a risk of ~20/155,000 = 1/7,750 per day. Hard to see that risk is “extremely high”, but it is the NY Times, so it is a political evaluation, not a factual one. I suspect lots of people look at that level of risk and are not highly motivated…. especially those under 50 years old.
In New Mexico we still have to got through the state government to get a vaccine.
I agree that from this point on, both new cases and deaths should trend steadily downward. But nothing has gone as expected with this epidemic. So we shall see.
At the golf tournament in NC this week the fans are almost totally maskless. Not wearing masks is a bit of its own contagion, it’s odd how social dynamics work sometimes. A majority change seems to happen pretty quickly one way or the other at a tipping point. My grocery store still requires masks and it was still at 100% compliance.
Even though I think it doesn’t really matter, I find Biden’s waiving of patents rather annoying. Moderna waived their patents from the beginning (although the fine print here probably matters) and nobody took them up on it. I doubt this will have any impact one way or the other for at least a year. It’s mostly political virtue signaling. The EU, of all people, are pushing back.
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Still it annoys me. Does this give China permission to just clone Pfizer/Moderna vaccines and the related technology to mass produce these vaccines? It would seem so.
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This type of behavior also makes me wonder what would have happened over the last year if Biden would have been in charge. Biden and company seem almost obsessed with virtue signaling (Paris Accord, Iran Agreement, Covax, etc.) and I question whether Operation Warp Speed would have ever happened. Instead we might have been part of a “grand international coalition of other virtue signalers who plodded their way to an equitable solution for the global community”. They would still be having meetings today.
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Big Pharma saved the day here and the legacy media just can’t find it in themselves to reward them both verbally and endorse financial rewards. If this was an Ayn Rand novel Big Pharma would just shut down production today and say they will start shipping again for twice the price when the US gets that silly patent waiver idea out of their heads.
Tom Scharf,
Reality, as it usually does, will overrun those who cling to foolish rules…. in this case, insisting on masks at golf tournaments where that can’t be rationally justified.
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WRT supermarkets; the only way masking rules in retail establishments like supermarkets ends is the same way it ended for spectators at golf tournaments: enough people simply refuse to wear a mask that the store managers have no choice but to let it go. I mean, they can confront and tell one person to leave the store, but they can’t do that with 20 at the same time. Besides, loud confrontations with angry customers becomes a losing proposition when the local authorities have no legal way to enforce mask rules (as in Florida). Sure, the supermarkets could put bouncers at the door to keep the unmasked from entering, but are they going to hire 20 bouncers patrolling the store to throw out the maskless? I very much doubt that. It will end as soon as 2% of the people refuse to wear a mask, not before.
“I question whether Operation Warp Speed would have ever happened.”
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Very unlikely. The left wants to stop pandemics the same way China does: lock people up. Technological solutions are at best tolerated, and at worst unwelcome. Social engineering is always embraced.
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And it is not just covid. There are multiple potential and technically feasible ways to mitigate warming from GHGs should that warming become a real problem. But the left is adamantly opposed to even studying those options! They want social engineering, not engineering.
Masklessness is still steasily increasing at my local walmart, but it clearly hasn’t reached critical mass, yet. It’s time I helped out.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/pfizer-biontech-ask-fda-for-full-approval-of-covid-19-vaccine-11620415712
Six months of data, not two years. They have six months of data now which shows greater than 90% effectiveness up to six months. Of course, the FDA could take up to 60 days to accept the application and up to ten months to conduct a review before issuing a decision.
That’s
DeWitt,
“Of course, the FDA could take up to 60 days to accept the application and up to ten months to conduct a review before issuing a decision.”
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As soon as possible, bureaucrats will return to their obstructive normal pose. Final approval of a vaccine that hundreds of millions have received will be delayed indefinitely. They are idiots, of course. This is obvious.
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Imagine for a moment that the FDA did not exist. Pfizer and Moderna would have offered their vaccines to people 10 months ago. Hundreds of thousands now dead would not have died. The pandemic would long ago have subsided, at least in places where people have the wealth to purchase the vaccines. The FDA is wholly and completely complicit in causing untold thousands of deaths for no good reason. IMO, the FDA serves no useful purpose in 2021, indeed, has served no useful purpose for decades, and needs to disappear. The FDA is a constant and destructive impediment to good health care.
SteveF ” IMO, the FDA serves no useful purpose in 2021, indeed, has served no useful purpose for decades, and needs to disappear.’-
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A bit harsh.
Regulations are needed to draw a line in the sand over certain actions.
People drawing the lines always want to draw more and people who oppose them rub them out.
I am all for some sort of checking that vaccines and medications will not be snake oil and dangerous.
Your beef is with a over regulated and bloated bureaucracy.
By all means trim it down.
ATTP had a discussion on
“Mike Hulme, Professor Human Geography at the University of Cambridge, has an article called Climates Multiple:Three Baselines, Two Tolerances, One Normal. A discussion of the recent World Meteorological Organisation decision to re-define the present day climate as the period 1991-2020, replacing the period 1961-1990.
Making the baseline period more recent makes the anomaly values actually go down. The change in baseline has caused the world to suddenly become 0.5oC cooler. Changing the baseline does not change how much we’ve warmed, how fast we’ve warmed by emitting GHG into the atmosphere.” [abridged and altered].
This transmitted over into UAH doing the same with their troposphere results meaning we now have the world in temporary negative change. -0.05 C.
I doubt it will last but it is nice for the first time in 5 years to have an argument.
Well done WMO as the temporary change is much more than -0.50 C.
angech,
“Your beef is with a over regulated and bloated bureaucracy.
By all means trim it down.”
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My beef is a structure which kills people by blocking progress. Inspecting meat processing plants is not a substantive issue, nor is making sure snake oil is not offered for sale (which the FDA always fails to do, BTW. Snake oil is constantly advertised and sold in the USAo). The issue is a structure and procedures which slows approval of new treatments to a standstill and this kills people.
… and after 18 months of a pandemic the WHO and CDC now appear to admit that aerosols are a primary vector for virus transmission. Zeynep takes the scientific community to task for taking so long to figure this out at the NYT (long article summarizing the evidence).
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/07/opinion/coronavirus-airborne-transmission.html
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The evidence here is still primarily observational and anecdotal, but the pendulum appears to be swinging towards aerosols. I find the whole situation completely unacceptable as early challenge trials with healthy young volunteers could have definitively established the most likely transmission paths. As I have opined many times, medical ethics seems pretty unethical in the grand scheme if one is concerned about global body counts amid uncertainty for a new virus. That this still is not even up for debate baffles me.
Medical regulation is not a bad thing, half the software on my phone barely works at all. If the same people who wrote the remote start software for my car also did heart bypass machines, then the patients would die 75% of the time because “bypass failed to initiate” or the machine rebooted 3 times mysteriously. We need protection from incompetence.
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What is true is that the structure and culture at the FDA is not well tuned for a global pandemic that required a quick and smart response. They, like innumerable other government organizations, don’t do “unprecedented” very good. The vaccine rollout was the same. Bumbling buffoons that eventually got their act together.
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What I still don’t really know is if the FDA had approved vaccines early whether it would have made any real difference because mass production has ultimately been the bottleneck.
Tom Scharf,
“What I still don’t really know is if the FDA had approved vaccines early whether it would have made any real difference because mass production has ultimately been the bottleneck.”
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I think it would have made a difference in the 2020 election outcome.
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WRT comparing cell phone apps to medications: Just make the pharmacompanies legally liable for misrepresentation of performance.
Tom Scharf (Comment #202075): “As I have opined many times, medical ethics seems pretty unethical in the grand scheme if one is concerned about global body counts amid uncertainty for a new virus.”
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Tom Scharf (Comment #202076): “What is true is that the structure and culture at the FDA is not well tuned for a global pandemic that required a quick and smart response.”
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Two sides of the same coin, I think.
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It seems that there are no protocols for treating Wuhan virus patients. I am not talking about some final, official protocol; I am talking about protocols published by places like Harvard Med School, the Mayo Clinic, etc. saying something like “This is what we see as best practice given the current state of knowledge”. It makes sense that such protocols might be varied, contradictory, and changing. What does not make sense it that there are no such protocols.
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No protocols for how to keep your patient out of the hospital. No protocols for when to admit a patient. No protocols for when to start this or that treatment. No protocols for when to use supplemental oxygen or mechanical ventilation. Nothing. That does not seem reasonable.
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Disclaimer: I am not a doctor and I have not researched this. So it could well be that my limited information is not correct. But I have seen this claim made by a doctor on national TV.
SteveF (Comment #202077): “Just make the pharmacompanies legally liable for misrepresentation of performance.”
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I don’t see how you can do that since the efficacy of medications are typically based on statistical evidence. Make it too hard to sue, and we will be back to the days when nobody could trust most medications, a.k.a snake oil. Make it too easy to sue, and development of new medications will stop and a lot of chemists will be desperately looking for new careers.
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The idea that you could set the balance just right is a fantasy.
MikeM
I think it makes perfect sense there are no protocols for a new virus. Protocols or rules can’t be established until we know that there is some particular set of practices that works consistently.
Mike M. and lucia,
It’s my understanding that it’s the CDC and/or NIH’s responsibility to keep track of and publish best clinical practices. I think they dropped the ball on this early on, but they may have somewhat caught up now.
https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/hcp/clinical-care.html
The biggest problem in my experience is not successful companies like Pfizer who can afford to do proper engineering, it is the startups and poorly run companies that are always near failure with one crisis after another (i.e. most small companies). The financial desperation leads to poor decision making and taking chances. When the choice is between a liability risk and bankruptcy then they will take a risk on liability to survive.
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Take Emergent in Baltimore that is sitting on a bunch of potentially tainted vaccine doses, if the FDA wasn’t ordering them to not ship then they probably would ship. This might be a good thing as these vaccines might be perfectly OK and the FDA is being overly cautious. However what my experiences is with some companies is that the desperate CEO’s at these type of companies under financial pressure want the product shipped, period. They absolve themselves of responsibility by deliberately not asking too many hard questions, leaving no paper trail on efficacy questions, making it clear with a wink and a nod that nobody should have any paper trail. “Just tell me everything is OK, la la la la!”.
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What the FDA does for good and bad is legally requires a formal paper trail on everything, and having no paper trail will get you shut down. That system can still be “worked” by experts, but it is almost easier to just do the paperwork.
lucia (Comment #202080): “Protocols or rules can’t be established until we know that there is some particular set of practices that works consistently.”
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I don’t think that is true at all. Protocols are different from rules. A protocol is a “plan for a course of medical treatment”. I don’t think that most doctors can be expected to keep up to date on the medical literature. They rely on intermediaries, like CDC or the Mayo clinic. The should be publishing protocols based on best current knowledge, even if that knowledge is uncertain.
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Probably 90% of medicine lacks a “particular set of practices that works consistently”.
Specific medical product categories have some very specific requirements, here’s how you must test and and validate an EKG, etc. Here’s specific electrical tests that must be performed on all devices attached to a patient.
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However what the FDA is mostly doing is making sure you have “proper” bureaucracy in place. You have product requirements, you do a hazards analysis, you write product specs, you have design reviews, you write test procedures traceable to your requirements. You take customer safety complaints VERY seriously. They almost don’t care about your specific procedures, but they very much care that you follow your own procedures. An FDA audit is basically show me your procedures and prove you are following them.
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It makes medical products more expensive, and creates a large barrier to entry in the market because of the expertise required across the board. Silicon valley doesn’t do medical much, and when they try it their way, Theranos can happen. We would likely have more innovation without this, but society has deemed this product category too important for a wild west approach. Similar to airlines and the FAA.
Mike,
My googleing defines protocol like this
As defined the “protocol” can’t exist before the appropriate nursing interventions are identified. So it’s not surprising if they don’t exist when a disease is brand-spanking new. They can’t.
The link Dewitt provided seems to be publishing recommended treatments under a large number of situtaions. (Out patient, in patient, when yada, yada occurs.)
So it seems you are incorrect that “protocols” don’t exist. Perhaps they took longer to exist than you might have liked. But that they may not have spring into existence instantly would hardly be surprising. It’s true that doctors can’t be following the literature as it comes out. It is equally true that the CDC and NIH personnel also need to wait for data to be reported and to have time to read it, sift it and figure out which course of actions make for effective management of patient care problems. Creating a protocol out of thin air is not useful to doctors or patients.
If you have not already seen it, this is a very good essay: https://unherd.com/2021/05/how-science-has-been-corrupted/
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“Some Vaccine Side Effects May Mean Previous Infection” Maybe this is why I had a rough time of it.
swollen lymph nodes, check…also fever, fatigue, muscle pain and joint pain , check, check, check, and check. I didn’t think I had had a case of Covid, but it’s possible that I did.
https://www.webmd.com/vaccines/covid-19-vaccine/news/20210430/some-vaccine-side-effects-may-mean-previous-infection
As some expected, Federal civil rights charges have been filed against Chauvin and the other three police involved the the Floyd killing. Civil rights charges are far more severe than the state murder and accessory charges, and carry sentences up to life without possibility of parole as well as the death penalty. It will be interesting to see if the Biden administration asks for the death penalty; my bet: they will. In any case, Chauvin is unlikely to ever leave prison except in a body bag.
Russell,
The study said all those symptoms also can happen with people who have not had covid, just less frequently. One weakness of the study is that the people involved knew if they they had covid before the vaccination, so their self reporting of side effects could be biased by that knowledge. The results are in conflict with the results of the double-blind Moderna study, where patients did not know if they had received the vaccine or not. In that study, people who had covid before vaccination reported fewer side effects.
Not disclosed at the Chauvin trial: in 2017 Chauvin was disciplined for striking a 14 YO black suspect in the head with his flashlight, then pinning the boy with a knee to the neck for 14 minutes, as the boy cried out “I can’t breathe!”. That 2017 episode is now part of the Federal civil rights charges against Chauvin….. which is why I think the Biden administration will ask for the death penalty for Chauvin.
SteveF,
Wow! And that info about Chauvin’s past didn’t seem to circulate around the intertubes before the trial. I’d heard he’d been disciplined, but not for what!
2nd degree murder etc….. 12.5 to 40 years
9 counts of felony tax fraud.. 5 to 15 years
Federal civil rights charges.. 15 years to execution
Chauvin is toast; he is 45 years old and will die in prison.
I suspect Chauvin is mystified by all of this. Others are not.
I googled the story on the 14 year old. That discipline also only occurred because of the video evidence that made it clear Chauvin’s description of the arrest in the official write up was highly misleading. He was brutal with the 14 year old and rightly disciplined.
Lucia,
The mystery is how someone like Chauvin could ever remain on the police force after the 2017 episode. It was only one of 18 complaints of excessive force, and it showed exactly the kind of cruel sociopathic behavior that took place with Floyd.
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I am not at all surprised sociopaths get into police work (the people I knew who became cops were scary, and should clearly never have been cops). But I am surprised that after proving just how sick in the head he is, not to mention utterly dishonest, Chauvin remained on the force. Had he been fired in 2017, the country would have been spared billions of dollars in physical damage, not to mention socially destructive riots. And Floyd would probably still be alive.
I don’t see the other officers being convicted of any crime with heavy penalties here, and if they are then I think it is just trial by public opinion and not justified. I don’t know all the details, but they seem more like bystanders. They may have had a moral duty to stop Chauvin but they can all probably say they didn’t really know he was in fatal distress.
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This type of “part of the crime” law is used routinely against perps though. If you are engaging in a felony with other where a death occurs, everyone involved in the crime gets charged with murder, even the getaway driver. I think most of the reason this exists is to make things simpler for prosecutors when they know somebody in the group shot the clerk, but can’t prove who was the trigger man. This gives them huge leverage for finding out who it was.
The media likes to play all this out as if it is some grand social reckoning, but I think what has really changed is the ubiquitous access to video recording. I’m sure cops are rather weary of every citizen encounter being recorded by a bunch of bystanders. There is no doubt that it is rooting out some bad behavior though, that’s all for the good.
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What we don’t get is a balanced view of citizens and protesters behaving badly (unless it is a Trump riot, ha ha) that would even out the story for what cops have to put up with. It went so far as all the popular cop shows being hounded off the air. Everyone wants a simple 6 second narrative nowadays.
Tom Scharf,
While Minnesota law allows “accessories” to be punished as if the were perpetrators, I agree that in this case that is very unlikely. Heck, one of them was still in training. So I will be very surprised if they get anything like Chauvin’s sentence….. but they will almost certainly be convicted. If they have among them half a brain, they will plea to lesser charges and accept something under 10 years (on probabtion in 6 years). The trainee might even just get probation and move away to obscurity after that is done.
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The wild card is Federal civil rights charges, which will be completely separate from the State charges, and which will mean they are transferred from state to federal prison, not to the street after serving their time. I think Chauvin is at real risk of execution (liberals are always against execution unless it is someone they don’t like), but the others really were relative by-standers, so anything more than a few years in Federal prison seems to me unlikely.
I’ve opened a new thread and am going to close this one. Go to:
http://rankexploits.com/musings/2021/booster-vaccines/