Quote from Wyttenbach

s said: Israel states Pfizer vaccine now is worthless for the older.

You said that - they did not...

No-one says the Pfizer vaccine is worthless for any group (except you)!

Quote from THHuxleynew

The food lobby, and capitalism, where things that people like can be marketed without constraint, is the problem.

A bit showing through here!

Is it that people are too stupid to manage their own lives and the government should manage it for them?

(without constraint... who constrains... only the government.. Who sets the constraints... those in power...who is in power... only the elite if they have their way)

It seems the elite think they "know better" and should be able to dictate to the stupid people what is best for them....

at least that is the way every dictatorship and oppressive regime starts..,,, indeed, capitalism is inherently evil.

Quote from Bob#2

indeed, capitalism is inherently evil

Let he who is without sucrose cast the first stone..

Quote from Bob#2

Is it that people are too stupid to manage their own lives and the government should manage it for them?

(without constraint... who constrains... only the government.. Who sets the constraints... those in power...who is in power... only the elite if they have their way)

Bob - this is a bit OT, but I think you are too ideologically pure.

I am not suggesting anything should be dictated. But, we have regulations and taxes to make things run better. It is entirely reasonable to make the relative costs of different foodstuffs closer to what they used to be before the mass-production chemical-based food industry got its way. And this can be done via different levels of taxes. We use this as a tool in all sorts of other ways.

There are a whole load of other ways that society can nudge people to make it easier or more difficult to live in ways that cost others less (if we are healthier we are less of a burden on society). there is no coercion here. Modern technological society makes some things much cheaper than they used to be, some things more expensive. Where that differential is obviously dysfunctional we should do something about it.

One example is supermarkets and sweets. In the UK you used to find large qtys of attractive-looking sweets and chocolate situated by the checkout queues where parents and children are waiting. The choice of giving in to a child's demands for sweets is a parent's - but it is made more difficult by that arrangement.

The free market operates here to the disadvantage of us all. Specific regulations distort the market and tend to fail because people find ways round them. Tax differentials are a way to push things a bit. As are rules on advertising, even rules on packaging. The smoking lobby hated having cigarettes put into boring packets - but psychology being what it is that reduced consumption and particularly new take-up of young people not previously smoking - more than warnings on the paket.

I view all these things myself as an engineer. We want things to work well. Societies create environments in which people live and what works well overall is not necessarily got from the choices of individual people. We know for example from evolution that unfettered free markets are creative but lead to parasitism, arms races, etc. we make choices all the time about how to tune markets. For example, the choice to live in a low inflation world is just that - and it is created by massive government (central bank) intervention.

Being ideological about freedom works in a pioneer country where people are separated and the connections between people are limited and voluntary. In modern technological societies with cities and complex financial systems we have those connections whether we like it or not - and they are determined by things society - not individuals - control.

There will always be people who make better and worse choices. Like, for example, COVID and the vaccine where 30% of US citizens are making poor choices. (I'm not here including you because the calculus is different if you have had COVID).

If it is overall advantageous to bribe people with $100 to get vaccinated - then it is worth doing that. (seems a lot of money overall to me - but the financial stakes in terms of getting through this pandemic are very high too).

I don't see it as about governments controlling people, but governments choosing what framework people in a society live their lives within. You can still go live in the wilderness making no demands on the rest of society and these things don't effect you.

THH

Just to continue...

In working democracies (not entirely sure the US is that now) governments try hard to do what people overall like because they want to stay in power. It is a political decision, not one made by meritocrats, to change tax rates or introduce other types of incentive/disincentive. Not doing this is itself also a political decision. For example, money can be put into roads, infrastructure. Is that good? Maybe yes, maybe no. It gets done if governments are elected that want to do it - and generally they want to do it because they think it will be popular.

Personally I think this "rule of the majority" can go wrong. It needs to be filtered by politicians who go into politics wanting to improve the country and help fellow citizens, not just win an election ( you can't avoid that) or make money or be loved by a small segment of followers (those motivations can be avoided with the right system). There are still those politicians, even in the US, but I think your system maybe makes it harder to have such people and certainly you have had some recent glaring counterexamples. Though also recent examples of people selflessly doing what they believe is right for the country at cost to their own careers.

Quote from Fm1

Two months ago I raised the possibility of Covid building a reservoir in animals and provided 3 different studies on the subject.

You raised the possibility? Or you cited an article about it?

Anyway, I find this alarming because deer do not have direct contact with humans. They avoid us, although we can get deer ticks from them. When the disease spread to domesticated animals such as cats, lions in the zoo, and domesticated minks, I was not alarmed.

I wonder how the deer came in contact with the virus. The article says it may have been from garbage. That means the virus lives outside the body in things like garbage longer than I expected. Experts say it soon dies. Not soon enough for me.

Deer are well known for eating garbage and nosing around people's houses. We have many deer in Atlanta. They have eaten many of my wife's prize flowers lately. A public health expert in Washington, DC called deer, "rats with hooves."

Quote from JedRothwell

I wonder how the deer came in contact with the virus. The article says it may have been from garbage.

Over year ago there was paper showing that some hairy plants initially did no accumulate virus along the hairs after an increase of CoV-19 cases (first wave) they could measure COV-19 virus in large numbers far away of any population just sitting on a plant. Aerosols containing virus can be transported any distance, tens of miles.

The better question is what was the concentration the found in the deers?

Viral infection and transmission in a large, well-traced outbreak caused by the SARS-CoV-2 Delta variant

Summary

We report the first local transmission of the SARS-CoV-2 Delta variant in mainland China. All 167 infections could be traced back to the first index case. Daily sequential PCR testing of the quarantined subjects indicated that the viral loads of Delta infections, when they first become PCR+, were on average ∼1000 times greater compared to A/B lineage infections during initial epidemic wave in China in early 2020, suggesting potentially faster viral replication and greater infectiousness of Delta during early infection. We performed high-quality sequencing on samples from 126 individuals. Reliable epidemiological data meant that, for 111 transmission events, the donor and recipient cases were known. The estimated transmission bottleneck size was 1-3 virions with most minor intra-host single nucleotide variants (iSNVs) failing to transmit to the recipients. However, transmission heterogeneity of SARS-CoV-2 was also observed. The transmission of minor iSNVs resulted in at least 4 of the 30 substitutions identified in the outbreak, highlighting the contribution of intra-host variants to population level viral diversity during rapid spread. Disease control activities, such as the frequency of population testing, quarantine during pre-symptomatic infection, and level of virus genomic surveillance should be adjusted in order to account for the increasing prevalence of the Delta variant worldwide.

During the global spread of the COVID-19, genetic variants of the SARS-CoV-2 virus have emerged. Some variants have increased transmissibility or could exhibit an increased propensity for escape from host immunity, and therefore pose an increased risk to global public health1–3. An emerging genetic lineage, B.1.617, has gained global attention and has been dominant in the largest outbreak of COVID-19 in India since March 2021. One descendent lineage, B.1.617.2, which carries spike protein mutations L452R, T478K and P681R, accounts for ∼28% sequenced cases in India and has rapidly replaced other lineages to become dominant in multiple regions and countries (https://outbreak.info/)4. Lineage B.1.617.2 has been labeled a variant of concern (VOC) and given the name Delta (https://www.who.int/activities/tracking-SARS-CoV-2-variants). Data on the virological profile of the Delta VOC is urgently needed.

On May 21, 2021 the first local infection of the Delta variant in Guangzhou, Guangdong, China was identified. As of the early epidemic in China in January 20205, a suite of comprehensive interventions have been implemented to limit transmission, including population screening, active contact tracing, and centralized quarantine/isolation. However, in contrast to the limited level of onward transmission observed in Guangdong in early 20205, successive generations of virus transmission were observed in the 2021 outbreak of the Delta variant in the region. Here, we investigated epidemiological and genetic data from the well-traced outbreak in Guangdong in order to characterize the virological and transmission profiles of the Delta variant. We discuss how intervention strategies may need to be adjusted to cope with the virological properties of this emerging variant.

Perspectives on when it is good to do nothing

ScienceBasedMedicine is an interesting blog that champions a very hard-edged "sceince-based" medical approach. I tend to agree with it, but I don't always like its style - it wages war on various alternative treatments that admittedly have no evidence of efficacy but nevertheless are popular.

I tend to be a bit more generous - and allow that if people find that doing a handstand on alternate Tuesdays, as prescribed by a reverse-gravitic-therapy guru, helps their back pain we should not interfere.

SBM has just published a story (anecdote really) about a woman who was nearly killed by licensed Naturopaths, and a cocktail of GRAS vitamins and other substances. It was not, directly, the vitamins that nearly killed her. Nevertheless they contributed to difficulties in treatment.

Near-fatal blood infection following naturopathic IV vitamin infusion

A recent case report details what is described as a near-fatal blood infection in a 52-year-old woman following a "naturopathic intravenous vitamin infusion…

sciencebasedmedicine.org

As well, pointing out perhaps an under-appreciated danger of dietary supplements, they say

Quote

it is important to recognize the increased use of unregulated supplements. Dietary supplements, in general, are not Food and Drug Administration-approved. . . We do not believe that our patient’s condition was a direct result of her various supplements. However, it posed a difficult challenge in the initial assessment and plan.

In sum, this patient spent two weeks in the hospital and nearly died after a naturopathic vitamin infusion which, as far as we can tell, had no medical rationale whatsoever but nevertheless was prescribed for her monthly. Her case was complicated by her voracious consumption of “anti-aging” supplements, which her physicians had to consider as a possible source of her symptoms. As I’ve argued before on SBM, naturopaths should not be licensed to practice “naturopathic medicine” and the deceptively named Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act needs to repealed and replaced with an effective regulatory framework that protects the public rather than lines the pockets of dietary supplement companies.

I appreciate this patient’s agreeing to have her case published and I am glad she is doing better. I hope she is both filing a complaint against this naturopath (or naturopaths) with the state as well as suing them for malpractice, if there is indeed such a thing in a practice that appears to have no standard of care.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Why is this not entirely OT for this thread? it can be difficult for some here to understand why "the authorities" do not jump on a cocktail of all the possibly-might-help are-not-likely-to-do-harm medicines as prophylaxis or therapy for COVID. After all, we think, it can't do any harm and if there is even 10% chance of it working we should take the stuff.

I find myself going down that road too. But, there are strong reasons not to recommend unevidenced cocktails:

• Claims that A+B wonder treatment will be adequate prophylaxis may cause risky behaviour (lack of vaccination, lack of social distancing)
• Although the cocktail elements, individually, seem pretty safe, we do not have strong evidence on the short or long-term safety issues associated with the combination. For example, Vitamin D, in large doses (say 4000IUD), appears safe, but no-one has conducted phase III safety trials to look for low level problems - if it were a vaccine it would not get regulatory approval. And two drugs that individually are safe may in combination have unexpected side effects.
• People tend to think of naturally occurring chemicals, that we take in as part of a normal diet, as being safe. That is not necessarily true, and certainly not true when they are taken in unusually high dose.
• It is important to realise here that the risks of such things are low. But on this thread there are enormous complaints about, and interest in, 1 in 1,000,000 risks from vaccines. These are more like 1 in 1000 risks.

The above perspective is why when you talk to most (not all) doctors they will be very cautious about unproven off-label treatments. Those who are sensible will discuss them with you, may with care agree to some of them on the grounds that in your specific case there really seems to be little harm and the small chance of good is real. That cannot be done on a country-wide regulatory basis. Individual patients can afford to neglect or ignore an uncertain possible 1 in 1000 risk. A conscientious doctor cannot, and will eventually see it kill one of their patients, after which they will become a meticulous follower of primum non nocere.

The neutral stance on regulatory approval for ivermectin is an example here, where to give it regulatory approval would be completely wrong.

Should ivermectin turn out to be of some small positive help in treating COVID it will then be approved, and the lack of approval now might seem to be a mistake. But, of course, it is not a mistake, it is the right decision based on current evidence, and what honest regulators would be obliged to do.

90% of this thread will disagree with the above: they should still understand its rationale and why regulators are not out to kill population because they are getting kick-backs from drug companies.

The same applies to remdesivir. When it was first agreed I thought the evidence was sketchy. But, it was just enough (and better than HCQ or ivermectin because of lack of negative evidence, good expectations (plausible anti-viral action), some very sketchy information from a positive RCT). Many here will say that RCT was fudged and I agree that is possible - it - was quite low quality - drug companies will do what they can within the law (and occasionally without the law) to make their drugs test well. In an emergency situation that will lead to imperfect decisions.

Have a look at the NICE (UK) guidelines on COVID treatment. With rationale. Remdesivir still has conditional approval for some severe COVID cases. Azithromycin is not recommended. Colchicine is recommnded only in research context. Vitamin D has some approval (not much) for all cases: And I agree that the UK guidelines are pretty minimal - increasing that to 1000 IU/day for anyone over 65 not otherwise contraindicated would not be stupid.

1.1 Encourage people to follow UK government advice on taking a vitamin D supplement to maintain bone and muscle health. The advice is that:

• Adults (including women who are pregnant or breastfeeding), young people and children over 4 years should consider taking a daily supplement containing 10 micrograms (400 units; also called international units [IU]) of vitamin D between October and early March because people do not make enough vitamin D from sunlight in these months.
• Adults, young people and children over 4 years should consider taking a daily supplement containing 10 micrograms (400 units) of vitamin D throughout the year:
  • if they have little or no sunshine exposure including because they:
    • are not often outdoors, for example, if they are frail, housebound or living in a care home
    • usually wear clothes that cover up most of their skin when outdoors
    • are spending most of their time indoors because of the COVID‑19 pandemic
  • if they have dark skin, for example, if they are of African, African-Caribbean or south Asian family origin, because they may not make enough vitamin D from sunlight.
• Babies from birth to 1 year should have a daily supplement containing 8.5 micrograms (340 units) to 10 micrograms (400 units) of vitamin D throughout the year if they are:
  • breastfed
  • formula-fed and are having less than 500 ml of infant formula a day (because infant formula is already fortified with vitamin D).
• Children aged 1 year to 4 years should have a daily supplement containing 10 micrograms (400 units) of vitamin D throughout the year.
• Some people have a medical condition that means they cannot take vitamin D or should take a different amount from the general population.

1.2 Do not offer a vitamin D supplement to people solely to prevent COVID‑19, except as part of a clinical trial.

1.3 Do not offer a vitamin D supplement to people solely to treat COVID‑19, except as part of a clinical trial.

Et tu, NYT & WaPo?” Time to Blame the Messenger

“Et tu, NYT & WaPo?” Time to Blame the Messenger

Note that views expressed in this opinion article are the writer’s personal views and not necessarily those of TrialSite. By: ErinKate Stair, MD, MPH The

trialsitenews.com

Note that views expressed in this opinion article are the writer’s personal views and not necessarily those of TrialSite.

By: ErinKate Stair, MD, MPH

The White House’s war on COVID-19 “misinformation” took a major hit last week when Ben Wakana, Deputy Director of Strategic Communications & Engagement of the White House COVID-19 Response Team, lambasted the liberal-friendly New York Times and Washington Post for their tweets about COVID-19 transmission for the vaccinated versus the unvaccinated. The New York Times tweeted that an internal CDC report said that the Delta variant “may be spread by vaccinated people as easily as the unvaccinated,” to which Wakana retweeted and wrote (in ALL CAPS, MIND YOU), “Vaccinated people do not transmit the virus at the same rate as unvaccinated people and if you fail to include that context you’re doing it wrong.” The Washington Post tweeted, “Vaccinated people made up three-quarters of those infected in a massive Massachusetts covid-19 outbreak, pivotal CDC study finds,” to which Wakana retweeted and wrote, “Completely irresponsible…virtually all hospitalizations and deaths continue to be among the unvaccinated. Unreal to not put that in context.” Such a public scolding of reliable, mainstream allies, at least when it comes to the war against “misinformation” and pushing the White House messaging on COVID-19 vaccines, feels like a whole lotta dissension in the ranks. CNN also launched a conflicting zinger that led to a barrage of confusion in the Twitter comments when they wrote, “Vaccination alone won’t stop the rise of variants and in fact could push the evolution of strains that evade their protection, researchers warned. They said people need to wear masks and take other preventative steps until almost everyone is vaccinated.” Um…, what? One can almost feel the sweat sliding down the backs of fact-checkers as their fingers quiver above keyboards, while the “Disinformation Dozen” surely had a field day of I-told-you-so.

This particular COVID-19 messaging massacre started several days ago, when the CDC did an abrupt “about-facemask” and announced that fully vaccinated people should now wear masks indoors in areas with high viral transmission. Now in America, discussing face masks should come with its own trigger warning, but abrupt changes in recommendations only add to the volatility. In mid-May, the agency announced that fully vaccinated people did not have to wear masks indoors or outdoors (in most settings) because real-world data showed the vaccines were effective against the variants and reduced transmission. In February of 2021, the CDC recommended that everyone continue to wear a well-fitted mask or even two masks, which predictably played into the hands of mask doubters who flooded the internet with jokes about wearing three, ten, “why stop at two?” face masks. I remember thinking that it seemed painfully out-of-touch to try to sell two masks, when you couldn’t get a bunch of people to even wear one. Health professionals hoped that May’s easing of restrictions for the fully vaccinated would encourage hesitant folks to get the shot. Messaging was positive, hopeful, and altruistic: Get vaccinated, so you can go back to doing the things you love; take the shot to help protect your loved ones and stop the spread; get vaccinated so we can get back to pre-pandemic times. For a short while, the messages seemed to work. Vaccination rates picked up, although they slowed again in early June.

The CDC’s latest change in mask guidelines was rooted in data that shows the Delta variant is highly contagious and can be transmitted by both the unvaccinated and the vaccinated. A COVID-19 outbreak investigation in Barnstable County, Massachusetts, revealed that 469 people, with a median age of 40, were diagnosed with COVID-19. 74% of them were fully vaccinated, and of those, 79% reported having symptoms, including cough, headache, sore throat, muscle aches, and fever. Five cases were hospitalized, four being fully vaccinated and one unvaccinated. Two of the fully-vaccinated, hospitalized cases had underlying conditions, and the 1 unvaccinated case had multiple underlying conditions. An unexpected finding was that specimens from the unvaccinated and vaccinated cases revealed similar viral loads. The good news is that no one died.

The media reported this investigation in myriad ways, sparking controversy, confusion, and episodes like the White House COVID-19 official attacking the New York Times and Washington Post. Experts took to social media with varying takes on the outbreak and subsequent change in mask guidelines. Some calmly stated that Delta was a gamechanger. Others, with a palpable desperation in their words, insisted that the vaccines were preventing serious illness and death and therefore working as expected, even though this is somewhat misleading for those who know that the primary endpoint of the vaccine trials was prevention of symptomatic COVID-19, and a secondary, albeit critical, endpoint was the prevention of severe illness and death. Fully vaccinated people were confused by what the news meant for their ability to spread COVID-19 to their loved ones, their risk of developing Long COVID after experiencing even mild breakthrough symptoms, and they were also irritated that after only 2 months, face masks were back. As someone said to me, “How the heck is that a success story?” Those dead set against the vaccine used the news to propagate the myth that the vaccines are useless, which, of course, is not the case. Currently, the unvaccinated are bearing the brunt of hospitalizations and deaths, though the prospect of playing cat-and-mouse with new variants puts into question the quest for herd immunity. But in general, and understandably so, there was a universal grumbling from people who are frustrated with mixed signals and playing Hokey Pokey with their face masks.

I think a lot of this turmoil could be avoided if people were better at communicating uncertainty, a should-be obvious central theme of a pandemic caused by a new virus. If uncertain answers are the honest ones, then don’t replace them with specific ones, whether it’s to build confidence, for ease of policy implementation, or external or ego-fueled pressure to be an omniscient expert, because people will feel played when the specific answers are undone by the uncertain ones. Just like a salesperson shouldn’t blame the customers for his/her inability to sell stuff, don’t blame the people for their anger. Don’t blame them for their confusion. Don’t blame them for their lack of trust. Don’t blame Joe Schmoe when he throws his mask in the garbage after you tell him he has to “sometimes” wear it again, after 2 months of not wearing it, and give him a hot spots map so he can figure out the areas with “high viral transmission.” This is a case where you should, indeed, blame the messenger.

Quote from Fm1

I think a lot of this turmoil could be avoided if people were better at communicating uncertainty, a should-be obvious central theme of a pandemic caused by a new virus. If uncertain answers are the honest ones, then don’t replace them with specific ones, whether it’s to build confidence, for ease of policy implementation, or external or ego-fueled pressure to be an omniscient expert, because people will feel played when the specific answers are undone by the uncertain ones. Just like a salesperson shouldn’t blame the customers for his/her inability to sell stuff, don’t blame the people for their anger. Don’t blame them for their confusion. Don’t blame them for their lack of trust. Don’t blame Joe Schmoe when he throws his mask in the garbage after you tell him he has to “sometimes” wear it again, after 2 months of not wearing it, and give him a hot spots map so he can figure out the areas with “high viral transmission.” This is a case where you should, indeed, blame the messenger.

In a lot of medical science all messaging is uncertain.

Thus a doctor will do an operation which is 70% likely to save you, 30% likely to kill you. If - half-way through - he discovers he was wrong and needs to abort it you maybe don't like having a hole cut in your chest. It was still the right decision.

Now in public messaging if a government says on balance it is more likely to save lives if you wear a mask, but we cannot be certain will that help? Nope. For messages to be interpreted as "do this" they need to be presented in a definite fashion. Something like: the scientific evidence is that masks reduce COVID spread. Uncertainty can still be conveyed - but not in the headlines and sound bites which are all most people see. Governments that do not do this are slated for indecision and mixed messaging.

That CDC report was badly messaged. What they meant to say is that delta is so infectious, even though you are vaccinated, you can still transmit the disease. The evidence that vaccination reduces transmission is compelling. How do you then translate that into public advice about masks? The rationale for vaccinated need not wear masks is that it encourages people to get vaccinated and they constitute much less of a transmission risk (especially vaccinated to vaccinated).

The problem was that then most people in many areas went without masks, and the people who were not vaccinated then also went without masks - it is embarrassing to declare to the world you are not vaccinated when half the country will then treat you as a black death carrier.

So that messaging was wrong - but not because of wrong treatment of uncertain science as TSN with its the science-laundered anti-vax messaging tells us.

Quote from JedRothwell

Anyway, I find this alarming because deer do not have direct contact with humans. They avoid us, although we can get deer ticks from them. When the disease spread to domesticated animals such as cats, lions in the zoo, and domesticated minks, I was not alarmed.

Anyway - we will have no problem social distancing from deer

In Defense of the Common Anti-Vaxxer | History of Vaccines

As someone who works in public health, few issues catch my attention like the issue of vaccine denialism. I have had the opportunity to investigate outbreaks…

www.historyofvaccines.org

Before COVID, but still relevant...

In Defense of the Common Anti-Vaxxer

October 25, 2018 Rene F. Najer

As someone who works in public health, few issues catch my attention like the issue of vaccine denialism. I have had the opportunity to investigate outbreaks of vaccine-preventable diseases and seen some very interesting and even heartbreaking cases. Why someone would take the chance to have their child sick – or even permanently disabled – by a vaccine-preventable disease is beyond me. As a father, I want to protect my child from any and all harms, and few harms are as scary as the disability from polio, the scarring from chickenpox, or the brain injury from measles.

And don’t get me started on the true risk of death from influenza.

On the other hand, I started to understand vaccine-hesitant parents when I became a parent. Just like I want to protect my child from vaccine-preventable diseases, I also worried about the dangers in her environment. My wife and I were very diligent about not letting her put everything in her mouth. When the exterminator came to our home to deal with an ant infestation, I quizzed them on the insecticide they were using. I researched the insecticides' ingredients. And I even opted for something more “natural” in dealing with the ants first. (When that didn’t work, we went with the recommended non-toxic insecticide.)

Just like we were hesitant about that insecticide to deal with a problem at home, I came to see how some parents could be hesitant about vaccines. Not only that, but a large swath of the population in the United States has not seen a case of measles – or even chickenpox now – so the dangers posed by these diseases is not visible to them. In fact, there has not been a case of polio in the United States for as long as I’ve been alive.

When you combine the desire to protect your offspring with the invisibility of vaccine-preventable diseases because vaccines have been successful in preventing them from coming back en masse, you get people who are hesitant about vaccines. Some of them are hesitant to the point of outright opposing vaccines, and I understand that.

These are the “common” anti-vaccine people, the people who are misinformed and are going on their gut instinct of protecting their child. These are not the people with medical degrees or scientific background who’ve turned against medicine and science and deny the science behind how vaccines work. These are also not the people who make money writing books and giving lectures about the perceived dangers of vaccines.

I further understand their hesitancies and fears when I see how difficult it is to understand risks and probabilities when humans are all about basing our decisions on past experiences more than on making calculations. Just look at how many of us have gone to buy a lottery ticket, especially when the jackpot soars. There is a better chance that we will become an astronaut, but we still think that we’ll be billionaires come morning.

When I was researching the ingredients of insecticides to use during the ant infestation, I had the benefit of being a scientist when sorting between the good and the bad information online. Other people don’t have that benefit. They go online, do a Google search, look at the most popular results based on an algorithm, and get led astray by celebrities or by people and organizations with titles that sound official. Before too long, their fears are confirmed, and they are scared away from vaccinating their children.

Add up enough of these parents and we get some of the problems we’re seeing across the country. We see the Arizona Department of Health backing off from teaching kids about vaccines. We see outbreaks of measles in communities with high rates of unvaccinated children. And we see pseudo-political organizations pressuring candidates to deny or de-fund science.

When it comes to protecting their children, no one wants to do more than a parent. After all, children are quite literally our future because we’ll fade away and they’ll be the ones to carry on our work and carry with them our memories. As a result, we are very protective, skeptical of anything that could hurt them. Some of us have the benefit of knowing and understanding scientific principles of toxicology, immunology, epidemiology, and biostatistics. Others among us understand that experts truly are experts, and that celebrities are not the best source of information. Yet there is a growing segment of the population that is misinformed and coaxed into making harmful decisions for their children without knowing it.

This is where the History of Vaccines website comes in. We have a wide variety of informational resources to show that vaccines have been around long enough for us to know that work and that they save lives. We know this not just by hearing about it in historical items but also from the scientific observations made on them. If you haven’t already, take a look at some of our image galleries (or follow us on Instagram) or the very informative timeline. Finally, if you have concerns about vaccination, please seek the advice of a licensed healthcare provider who will be able to talk to you about your medical history and take everything into context when advising you on vaccines.

Truly depressing. Anti-vax dominance in 10 years.

The same corrosive system-dynamic effects of social networks will (IMHO) be likely to boost post-Truth political views and other ideologies profoundly antithetical to modern democracy and civil society.

The online competition between pro- and anti-vaccination views - Nature

Insights into the interactions between pro- and anti-vaccination clusters on Facebook can enable policies and approaches that attempt to interrupt the shift to…

www.nature.com

The online competition between pro- and anti-vaccination views

Distrust in scientific expertise^{1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11,12,13,14} is dangerous. Opposition to vaccination with a future vaccine against SARS-CoV-2, the causal agent of COVID-19, for example, could amplify outbreaks^2,3,4, as happened for measles in 2019^5,6. Homemade remedies^7,8 and falsehoods are being shared widely on the Internet, as well as dismissals of expert advice^9,10,11. There is a lack of understanding about how this distrust evolves at the system level^13,14. Here we provide a map of the contention surrounding vaccines that has emerged from the global pool of around three billion Facebook users. Its core reveals a multi-sided landscape of unprecedented intricacy that involves nearly 100 million individuals partitioned into highly dynamic, interconnected clusters across cities, countries, continents and languages. Although smaller in overall size, anti-vaccination clusters manage to become highly entangled with undecided clusters in the main online network, whereas pro-vaccination clusters are more peripheral. Our theoretical framework reproduces the recent explosive growth in anti-vaccination views, and predicts that these views will dominate in a decade. Insights provided by this framework can inform new policies and approaches to interrupt this shift to negative views. Our results challenge the conventional thinking about undecided individuals in issues of contention surrounding health, shed light on other issues of contention such as climate change¹¹, and highlight the key role of network cluster dynamics in multi-species ecologies¹⁵.

First, although anti-vaccination clusters are smaller numerically (that is, have a minority total size, Fig. 1d) and have ideologically fringe opinions, anti-vaccination clusters have become central in terms of the positioning within the network (Fig. 1a). Specifically, whereas pro-vaccination clusters are confined to the smallest two of the three network patches (Fig. 2a), anti-vaccination clusters dominate the main network patch in which they are heavily entangled with a very large presence of undecided clusters (more than 50 million undecided individuals). This means that the pro-vaccination clusters in the smaller network patches may remain ignorant of the main conflict and have the wrong impression that they are winning.

Second, instead of the undecided population being passively persuaded by the anti- or pro-vaccination populations, undecided individuals are highly active: the undecided clusters have the highest growth of new out-links (Fig. 1a), followed by anti-vaccination clusters. Moreover, it is the undecided clusters who are entangled with the anti-vaccination clusters in the main network patch that tend to show this high out-link growth. These findings challenge our current thinking that undecided individuals are a passive background population in the battle for ‘hearts and minds’.

Third, anti-vaccination individuals form more than twice as many clusters compared with pro-vaccination individuals by having a much smaller average cluster size. This means that the anti-vaccination population provides a larger number of sites for engagement than the pro-vaccination population. This enables anti-vaccination clusters to entangle themselves in the network in a way that pro-vaccination clusters cannot. As a result, many anti-vaccination clusters manage to increase their network centrality (Fig. 2b) more than pro-vaccination clusters despite the media ambience that was against anti-vaccination views during 2019, and manage to reach better across the entire network (Fig. 2a).

Fourth, our qualitative analysis of cluster content shows that anti-vaccination clusters offer a wide range of potentially attractive narratives that blend topics such as safety concerns, conspiracy theories and alternative health and medicine, and also now the cause and cure of the COVID-19 virus. This diversity in the anti-vaccination narratives is consistent with other reports in the literature⁴. By contrast, pro-vaccination views are far more monothematic. Using aggregation mathematics and a multi-agent model, we have reproduced the ability of anti-vaccination support to form into an array of many smaller-sized clusters, each with its own nuanced opinion, from a population of individuals with diverse characteristics (Fig. 3b and Supplementary Information).

Pushing back – tackling the anti-vax movement

www.bma.org.uk

Meanwhile, anti-vaxxers have been gaining ground. The CCDH estimates that the biggest English-language anti-vaxxers’ social media accounts enjoy a global following of 59.2 million people, ‘enough to compromise a future vaccine’s ability to contain the disease’. The top 147 accounts increased their following by about 19 per cent in 2019-20.

The anti-vaxx movement is a broad church. CCDH defines four main groups: ‘hate actors’ (eg purveyors of racism), ‘economically-motivated actors’ (eg those selling products), ‘fringe political actors’ (eg those wanting to undermine governments or science) and ‘misinformed citizens’.

The Lancet

COVID-19, cults, and the anti-vax movement

Lessons from studying cults (which are less pejoratively called new religious movements, describing movements that emerged in the late 20th century) can inform approaches to the anti-vax movement. A cult has come to mean a non-conforming ideology, or a religion that is disliked, with beliefs that are unacceptable to mainstream society. Just as cults are grouped together as sinister, bad, or wrong, the discourse surrounding anti-vaxxers in both academic and popular circles can be dismissive and derogatory. The pejorative label and negative attitudes towards cults promote an us-and-them viewpoint, creating martyrs^{2, 3} and extending the length of time that members hold the new beliefs, thus encouraging further involvement in the movement and radicalisation.⁴

Learning from these consequences, a more constructive perspective could view the anti-vax movement as a religious phenomenon, involving a whole spectrum of ideas, and focus on the essential need to understand the beliefs that are involved to avoid further marginalisation. Hence, implying that anti-vaxxers are beyond the reach of community engagement activities could result in increased anti-vax activities. We suggest a more inclusive approach, where the same inquisitive dialogue and contextual understanding that was suggested for vaccine hesitancy should be extended to members of the anti-vax movement.

I agree - let us have inquisitive dialogue and contextual understanding here

(Only I think that might annoy some prolific contributors to this thread)

CDC leaked PowerPoint

Same thing: but text not video. It is a good video - though I always prefer the slides.

Delta COVID changes the pandemic struggle: a leaked CDC document and what it means for higher ed

Last night and this morning I worked hard on climate change and higher education, writing up two book chapters and a blog post.  But I’m not going to blog…

bryanalexander.org

slides

I call this, here, the Wyttenbach Effect.

Does it mean the vaccine is now less effective? Nope - except as shown on next slide it is obviously less good against delta! It is related to changing vaccination demographics.

(There probably will also be some decline in vaccine efficacy over time because immunity does not last forever, but the demographic changes far outweigh that).

These are really useful well-researched slides got from careful research.

Israel has consistently had lower estimates that other places, possible reasons:

• UK has long gap between doses which appears to improve efficacy
• Other countries vaccinated later, so the most vulnerable, vaccinated first, have received vaccine more recently than in Israel.

The UK 12 week gap seems to have been stunningly vindicated. By luck more than anything else. One dose was good enough to protect against alpha quite well - by the time delta came along those at risk had two doses, and were more recently vaccinated than would be the case with 3 week gap.

Note that confirmed infection is a very variable benchmark. It depends on the quantity of testing, and so can vary quite widely. As with case rates it can potentially underestimate infections a large amount.

Quote from THHuxleynew

Anyway - we will have no problem social distancing from deer

Being from a very rural area in the mid-west, I have different information.

I am sure not so much in the UK, but in the US, over 6 million deer are harvested annually. Practically speaking, ALL are processed for food. Having been deer hunting almost my entire life, I fully know what is invovled...immediately after taking a deer, one "field dresses" it. Certainly not distancing!

https://www.reference.com/pets…utomobiles%20every%20year.

So no, there could very well be a problem.... however, this is another "framework" the government should use to "nudge" evil guns from law abiding citizens! All for the greater good.... as many would applaud!.....