outbreak! (ebola, sars, coronavirus, etc)

i didn't realize there was another country (Eritrea) besides North Korea that has not administered any vaccines

otm

Kids under five still have no vaccine.

Pfizer's was delayed in a confusing turnabout, and FDA may delay Moderna authorization because... some baffling theory about simultaneous release?

My piece on why this makes no sociological or immunological sense.https://t.co/Dru7vK1gkm pic.twitter.com/4yM8nplt3Y

— zeynep tufekci (@zeynep) April 27, 2022

The weird, five-dimensional behavioral chess-game reported by Politico about the FDA wanting to authorize kids vaccines simultaneously, later, by DELAYING one of them now misses the very obvious and painful point that this communicates that vaccines aren't important for kids. pic.twitter.com/mCHlYh6AaB

— zeynep tufekci (@zeynep) April 27, 2022

Just continuing to completely fuck up at all turns. It would almost be impressive to see so many spectacular self-inflicted failures one after the other if the real world consequences weren't so dire.

Meanwhile, increasing number of comments on local Reddit threads about the difficulty of finding PCR tests. Two years in and we still can't even nail that part down.

Interesting. They're piled up at my Target.

Sorry, to be clear, people are struggling to find appointments for actual PCR tests to supplement at home ones.

xps "weird, five-dimensional behavioral chess-game"? The concern, noted in the Politico article she's drawing on there, but not in her thread, is approving the Moderna vaccine (with results seen by many scientists as disappointing)"...leaves the FDA with the prospect of green-lighting Moderna’s vaccine, only to potentially find out several weeks later that Pfizer’s vaccine performs far better." Not the benefits of simultaneous promotion. And Moderna hasn't even filed their application yet, and hasn't said when it will be complete.

do you think we should have waited to approve pfizer for 12-15 year olds in case moderna turned out to be better?

how long should we wait to approve a vaccine in case a better one comes along?

do you think it's weird, five dimensional chess to consider, as one of many factors, that the two applications are expected be received within days of each other and that one may have great efficacy?

do you think this consideration was material to the discussion in her thread?

and, again, neither application has been submitted.

fwiw it's not a thread. it's 1500 word nyt article that i think is engaging with a complex issue in good faith.

"and, again, neither application has been submitted."

fauci is on the record about the plan here. we're not borrowing imaginary problems.

i think her point that delaying an effective vaccine for a reason like this is at least as likely to communicate that it's eh, not actually that important to get vaccinated, as it is to give people confidence.

https://arstechnica.com/science/2022/04/us-failed-miserably-at-protecting-children-from-omicron-cdc-study-finds/

"Clarke and colleagues focused on the period from December 2021 to February 2022 to understand the impact of the omicron wave. For the population as a whole, seroprevalence in the US rose from 33.5 percent to 58 percent. But the most significant increases in levels of infection were in children. Seroprevalence rose from 44 percent to 75 percent in children ages 0 to 11 and 46 percent to 74 percent in 12- to 17-year-olds."

75%. i guess you're right. at this point it hardly matters. they've all had it.

"you're right"? ok, looks like you're not looking for respectful engagement

xp, I read her piece, which also omits that important consideration.

With applications not submitted now at the end of April, and the notional delay being "until June," I'm not sure how we get to it's "not actually that important to get vaccinated."

The approval process involves the evaluation of multiple factors. To suggest that they're simply playing psychology games is not productive.

eh, i guess you're more willing to give a notoriously dsyfunctional agency with a particularly terrible record during the past two years the benefit of the doubt than i am. personally i think assuming the FDA is made up good technocrats making the best possible decision in the light of many factors is absolutely bananas, when "they're fucking up. again." is right there.

and i agree with zeynep that this particular decision is likely to backfire on their goals (or their goals according to fauci).

Starting to mentally prepare for flying to/within the US next month, in anticipation of the possibility that some nutbag has a go at my foreign self for wearing a N95. (Reading upthread that folks are chill about it helps!)

I flew cross country a few nights ago. Maybe 40% of the people were wearing masks.

NYC subway mask compliance is dropping sadly, but depends on the line, the time of day etc.

But I think in most places, especially big cities, nobody's gonna look at you funny for wearing a mask.

I spent half of last week in Sacramento California. A pretty red urban area, wasn't a big deal, even in places where others weren't wearing.

It's all lol West Coast so I know there shouldn't be too much drama. But ya never know.

I was on planes Thursday and Monday and got not a single glance.

I've been on four flights and lots of buses/trains in the last three weeks, somewhere between 25 and 50% masking, I had an N-95 on the whole time and nobody looked at me funny, went into plenty of buildings in the US South wearing mask and really nobody cares (though in that setting people are really almost entirely not masked)

I was reading a breakdown of US covid deaths today. The USA is currently just over 997,000 deaths, and of those about 740,000 were adults 65 or older... like me. Another article I saw a couple of days ago cited a WHO estimate of about 15 million covid and covid-related deaths worldwide, but that number was near to the middle of a much wider estimated range that cited an upper limit near to 22 million and a lower limit closer to 6 million.

Happy as I am about the present low ebb of covid in the USA, it's a certainty that the global pandemic has not ended and new variants continue to appear with great frequency. Omicron is still tweaking itself.

What’s important is what we as a society have learned

Such as how to use Zoom, bake bread at home, and organize coups d'etat.

I think the lesson conservatives, democrats, and republicans have learned it all “we never should have tried. We should have started with doing nothing...”, with the conservative ending being “because it was a hoax” or a humiliation of freedom, whatever, and the democratic politician “because doing the right thing was not rewarded, you can’t point to prevented deaths in a way that inspires or convinces”

You may be right about those lessons. The politicians did what they did in 2020 only because they were able to imagine the chaos and havoc wrought by doing nothing and the resulting white hot anger (see what I did there?) that would have been directed their way. It is possible some of them recall this now, but politicians track closely with public opinion and the public has the memory span of a guppy.

To borrow an infamous phrase:

I don’t know how to put this in a half-acceptable way.

New Omicron variants are actively killing vaccinated and recently boosted 60-70 year-olds with very average comorbidites, as we speak.

It’s a bog-standard medical reality in our hospitals.

— Farid Jalali MD (@farid__jalali) May 13, 2022

I'm not sure how to respond

in our hospitals.

I don't doubt he's trying to give us information, but where are the "our hospitals" he's citing located?

I'm skeptical of all medical publications, but this article uploaded to JAMA today citing a rapid decline in the Pfizer vaccine antibody efficiency was mildly disturbing

https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle/2792295

Antibodies are not meant to stick around for a long time. T-cells are supposed to provide long term protection. The difficulty seems to be that omicron variants incubate so rapidly that T-cells can't respond quickly enough to an omicron infection to prevent disease, although the T-cell response is usually strong enough to prevent serious disease. However, the T-cell lag in response can be a major problem if you are immuno-compromised and become infected after your vaccine-boosted antibodies have waned.

To borrow an infamous phrase:

I don’t know how to put this in a half-acceptable way.

New Omicron variants are actively killing vaccinated and recently boosted 60-70 year-olds with very average comorbidites, as we speak.

It’s a bog-standard medical reality in our hospitals.
— Farid Jalali MD (@farid__jalali) May 13, 2022
― 龜, Friday, 13 May 2022 21:54 (yesterday) link

I'm not saying this isn't a concern or shouldn't be looked into, but who is this guy, where is his info from, what does "bog-standard medical reality in our hospitals" mean, and why is this the only guy I'm hearing about it from? We may very well see solid verification of this being a rising trend soon, but I'm really tired of these sorts of tweets getting treated as any kind of reliable source about anything.

Also, it seems more likely that (1) COVID is on the rise overall, and (2) 90+% of the elderly are now vaccinated, so you're going to see a greater share of deaths among the vaccinated than before. As opposed to oh shit this new scariant is no joke.

Let’s not call it the new scariant

I'm skeptical of all medical publications, but this article uploaded to JAMA today

man alive, if you can’t tell that numbers are up everywhere, then i don’t know what to tell you except don’t worry, they’re not going to shut down schools again because most of society has decided to go with your blinkered, selfish perspective.

But he did acknowledge COVID "is on the rise overall" tbh

true enough, Alfred. It’s just alarming to me that someone can say as much and then in the next breath use an explicitly anti-vax term like “scariant.”

Update on North Korea's COVID-19 outbreak:

- 174,400 new suspected cases, raising the total to 525,400
- 21 new deaths, raising total to 27
- Kim Jong Un says N. Korea facing "greatest turmoil" since founding
- No one in N. Korea is vaccinated
- Nationwide lockdown

— BNO|Medriva Newsroom (@medriva) May 13, 2022

"For two years, Mr. Kim strove to keep the pandemic at bay by physical means. He tightened border controls, essentially putting the whole nation in a quarantine. Inbound travel was all but prohibited, borders were guarded with a shoot-on-sight policy, and most trade with China was suspended."

this is the future liberals want

I don't think of "scariant" as an antivax term, but I'm not the one posting unsourced, unfounded claims that there's some bleak new medical reality that the vaccine and even boosters don't protect older people from the current subvariant.

in man alive's defense (and you know I've been one of his biggest critics here), I think that tweet was irresponsible because it makes it sound like vaccines and boosters are useless (which he does expand upon and say he's not saying in further tweets, but most people read the first tweet).

and he's using anecdotal data without further extrapolation.

so I peeled back the layer a little bit further, and found out he's one of the "Zero COVID" cultists that follows the rogue's gallery of unhinged lunatics like Zoe Hyde, Anthony J Leonardi (who has come under fire for saying SARS = basically HIV), and Dr. Lisa Iannattone, a dermatologist who had the audacity to misrepresent a recent COVID study and then when the author said she was misrepresenting her conclusions, basically said he was incompetent (even though he designed the study).

I think if he had said:

"Look, vaccines and boosters greatly reduce the risk of severe outcomes, but there are still some elderly folks who are still succumbing to the disease. that's why masking and ventilation are important as well, take care of yourselves" - rather than a panic inducing tweet like the elderly are dying en masse due to failing vaccines, suggesting it's more pathogenic like Delta, which all of the real world data (sans one study with hamsters which has been an outlier) has suggested otherwise.

like, shit's bad right now, but I get why this doc's tweets provoked such a reaction.

I'm a little frustrated that all of the data analysts I used to read that talked about waves and their trajectory just quit writing about COVID altogether, so wanting an analysis of when we might peak, etc, is completely absent now. and the wastewater data the CDC publishes is useless, or in many cases out of date, and I barely know how to interpret it anyway.

Exactly, xp

xp if my "it peaks in the uk ~2 months before the US" continues to be correct, it's going to peak in the US in about a month.

I'm looking more for my individual state since it is hitting different regions at different times, but agree with your general timeline for the US as a whole.

China didn't share their vaccine with NK? Seems kind of surprising.

The North Koreans didn't want it

Pyongyang turned down an earlier offer of 3 million Covid-19 vaccine doses of China's Sinovac Biotech.

So, is anyone NOT immunocompromised or over 50 and planning to get the second booster? I'm considering it.

I think they are testing a booster (they = Moderna and probably others) which is aimed at a broader range of variants, will probably stick it out for that one.

I am flying to Italy in late August and planning to get the second booster in mid-July or so.

I am technically not immunocompromised, given my latest blood work, just on the low side of normal. I have Covid currently so think I will wait a bit, but I will definitely get a booster before the cold weather hits again in the fall.

How are you getting on with covid, table?